Bush after heart surgery: ‘Get regular checkups’

If the famously fitness-minded George W. Bush can develop an artery blockage prompting heart surgery, those of us whose main form of exercise is jumping to conclusions are surely toast.

The former president's office announced early Tuesday that he had undergone successful heart surgery after his annual physical examination detected the problem. Doctors implanted a stent to open the blockage, and Bush, 67, is due to spend the night in the hospital.

"President Bush is in high spirits, eager to return home tomorrow and resume his normal schedule on Thursday," spokesman Freddy Ford said in a statement. "He is grateful to the skilled medical professionals who have cared for him. He thanks his family, friends, and fellow citizens for their prayers and well wishes. And he encourages us all to get our regular check-ups."

Good advice, of course, but as someone who covered Dubya's two White House terms and remembers his rigorous exercise routines (running, then mountain biking when his knees couldn't take the abuse), this is a little depressing. He out-biked reporters decades his junior, and before that outran aides barely into their 20s. This is a guy who managed to avoid — not block, or catch, but duck — two shoes hurled at him by a reporter in Iraq in 2008 from just a few feet away.

Plus, I'm programmed now. I hear "heart" and "stent" and I think "Vice President Dick Cheney."

But about that "regular checkups" thing: Bush never shied away from sending that kind of public health message while in office. He fought like H, E, double-hockey-sticks for the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. He ramped up U.S. aid to Africa to fight malaria. He had a couple of colonoscopies in office (June 2002 and July 2007), after which the White House highlighted the importance of preventive care "surveillance."

And then, of course, there was the tongue-in-cheek advice he gave reporters after a January 2002 incident in which he choked on a pretzel, fell and sustained a cut to his cheek.

"My mother always said when you're eating pretzels, chew before you swallow. Listen to your mother," Bush said.

And get regular checkups.

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