Taylor Swift made lots of headlines announcing her new album on the “New Heights” podcast last week and also revealed something personal about her dad.
Swift said her dad, Scott Swift, recently underwent quintuple bypass surgery after learning about multiple blockages in his heart.
“My dad had an interesting summer,” Swift said. “He actually had a quintuple bypass surgery. And that’s a really intense surgery.”
Bypass surgery uses veins or arteries from other parts of the body to go around blocked arteries and restore blood flow to the heart. Taylor’s dad needed five.
The singer said her father had “perfect” EKGs at his annual physicals, but a stress test revealed the blockages.
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“So, he’s been telling all his friends, you need to get the stress test because that’s what’s actually preventative,” Swift said.
The test she’s referring to is a “myocardial perfusion imaging test,” which is also known as a resting stress test.
It uses radioactive tracers to produce pictures of a patient’s heart to check blood flow to the muscle.
“We have a camera that kind of looks like a mini CT scan, but it’s not super closed in, it’s open and breathable, and it takes a picture of your heart just at rest,” Dr. Isla McClelland, cardiologist at OSU Wexner Medical Center, said.
McClelland said the patient is then tested for stress during exercise, and afterward, to see how their heart rate recovers -- then there’s another round of pictures.
“We mainly use it in patients who are having symptoms that are concerning for blockages in those arteries that feed the heart muscle or the coronary arteries,” said McClelland. “Sometimes we will use them in patients who aren’t having symptoms, but who have high-risk, medical problems that kind of put them at risk for coronary blockages.”
If blockages are found earlier, they may be treatable with stents and less invasive procedures.
In the podcast, Swift said her father is doing “incredibly well” after his surgery.
Taylor also shared that her mom “got a new knee” recently, joking that it was the “summer of upgrades.”