Clinton scheduled to have follow-up heart surgery

NEW YORK -- Former President Clinton will undergo a medical procedure this week to remove an unusual buildup of fluid and scar tissue from his chest, six months after he underwent quadruple bypass surgery, his office said Tuesday. \n"I feel fine," Clinton said in Washington.\nThe low-risk procedure will occur Thursday at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center. Clinton will remain hospitalized for three to 10 days and is expected to make a "full functional recovery," doctors said.\nClinton, who planned to play a golf tournament for tsunami relief in Florida Wednesday with former President George H.W. Bush, said doctors discovered the condition during a recent X-ray. He called the surgery a "routine sort of deal."\n"I feel fine," Clinton told reporters after a visit to the Oval Office with the former president. "And we're going to go play golf tomorrow."\nIn an interview with Associated Press Television News, Clinton said he knew he would have to have the surgery before he left with his predecessor last month to tour the tsunami-ravaged areas of Asia. Doctors told him he couldn't fly after the surgery, so he decided to schedule the surgery after he returned.\nThe procedure, known as a decortication, will remove scar tissue that has developed as a result of fluid buildup and inflammation, causing compression and collapse of the lower lobe of the left lung, doctors said. The surgery will be performed either through a small incision or with a video-assisted thoracoscope inserted between ribs.\nClinton's problem is a relatively rare complication in which inflammation of the heart's lining develops and fluid builds around it or in the lungs, said John LaRosa, president of the State University of New York Health Science Center in Brooklyn. It doesn't signal anything ominous about the former president's outlook, he said.\n"It is unusual" for it to develop so long after the operation, said Valentin Fuster, a cardiologist at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York and a former American Heart Association president.\nAllen Schwartz, chief of the hospital's division of cardiology, said Clinton passed a full physical before leaving on a trip to Asia last month to survey tsunami damage. He also scored in the 95th percentile for his age in a stress test, Schwartz said.\nClinton, 58, had been quite active since his Sept. 6 heart surgery in New York, presiding over the opening of his presidential library in Little Rock, Ark., and more recently joining the first President Bush for a public relations campaign to help raise private funds for the victims of the Asian tsunami.\nFormer President Bush said he had trouble keeping up with Clinton in Asia.\n"You should have seen him going, town to town, country to country, Energizer Bunny here. He killed me," Bush said.\nClinton underwent quadruple coronary artery bypass surgery after suffering chest pains and shortness of breath.\nIn bypass surgery, doctors remove one or more blood vessels from elsewhere in the body and attach them to arteries serving the heart, detouring blood around blockages. The vessel typically comes from elsewhere in the chest, although doctors sometimes take one from an arm, a leg or the stomach.\nClinton previously blamed his blockage in part on genetics but also said he "may have done some damage in those years when I was too careless about what I ate"