John J. Hohn, Writer
Coronary bypass surgery has been around for more than 50 years. Yet to the patient, most of whom experience the procedure only once, undergoing the operation can give rise to anxiety. The survival rate is actually very high. Less than 5 percent mortality in the first thirty days and less than 8 percent in the twelve months following. Survival rates increase slightly with age and depend in large part upon the general health of the patient going into the operation.
I can’t say that I was anxious at first. Astonished would be more to the point. I thought that with my diet and aerobic workouts, I was invulnerable. As reality settled in, my feelings changed. If I was anxious at all, I feared pain. I’ve never liked pain. I’ve avoided it all of my life. I hoped that the repairs to my ticker could be performed using the newer less invasive techniques. The thought of sawing through my sternum and spreading rib cage to access to the chest bordered on terrifying for me.
I had been on a been on a blood thinner (clopidogrel) since I had three stents inserted into my coronary arteries almost five years earlier. Consequently, I was hospitalized on a monitor (my left descending artery was 90% blocked) for four days before the operation. During that time, my blood was checked every four hours to see if the effects of the blood thinner had worn off and it was safe to operate. The frequent blood tests were a serious annoyance. My guess is even the janitor on the floor knew that it would take at least 48 hours for the effect of the blood thinner to wear off in a six-foot-two-inch male weighing 210 pounds. But no! Every hour hours, beginning right after admission. Forget what would be reasonable. It helps run up the lab bill, after all. The markup on lab procedures is probably several hundred times. But the wait gave me plenty of time to stew about my chances and my future.
When it came to not surviving, I knew only that I did not want to leave. That sounds a bit silly, but dying didn’t really bother me. I embraced my mortality years ago. Most writers do. It’s all but forced upon them. I didn’t want to leave my wife and children. I wanted to hang around and enjoy loving them and time with them. I didn’t want them to grieve. As a consolation to myself, I decided quite calmly that I had lived a good life. It was certainly exciting, perhaps more at times than I would have wished. But I was completely comfortable with the realization that I was not an evil man. A fool, yes! But evil, no. I never deliberated set out to hurt anyone or deprive anyone of anything he or she needed. I made a few mistakes. Some of them quite serious. (Don’t ask.) But mistakes are not as important as how one recovers from them. I felt, all in all, if I was on the threshold of departure from this life, I could make my good-byes with a degree of satisfaction that my life was a successful one, especially given then last 35 years, or roughly half.
Lights out . . .
For a man who lives by his imagination, I had no idea what I was going to experience. My last hospitalization for surgery was minor when I had the stents implanted as I mention earlier. This time, I was rolled into the operating room, a huge, overwhelming gray and white space. Several humans were milling about in light green surgical suits. I had to scrunch a little to get onto the operating table.
Coronary Bypass Surgery Illustration
Then. blam! Lights out. I am guessing that the anesthesia for coronary bypass surgery takes the patient about as far under as one dare go. I jokingly said that the anesthesiologist has a “death meter” that must be watched as the needle hovers precariously above zero. After all, my heart was going to be stopped. A machine was going to breathe for me. So. I ceased to exist as I know myself. I would like to write that it was pleasant, but it wasn’t! It wasn’t anything. I continued to exist with no awareness of myself and life around me. If death is like that, I’m thinking it’s not to be feared.
Waking up, however, is another matter. My wife and stepson were at my bedside side with the anesthesiologist and a nurse. Apparently, I struggled and thrashed around for a couple of hours or more. I’d give thumbs up and nodded when asked, but I do not remember anything. At one point, in the darkness, I heard my wife’s dear voice, “John? Why are you here?”
“To know, to love and to serve God,” I responded with great pride that the answer felt so right and came to me so readily. (Never underestimate the power of early catechism lessons.) It was a response that I respect to this day and one that I still question because I really want the answer to be an honest one. As it stands, it may be something learned and recited by rote. On the other hand, I felt an innocence flow through me in making the reply. I felt like a babe being lifted dripping naked from the bath. My response was mumbled. Nobody understood what I tried to say. The borderline between consciousness and stupor bends and sways at this point in overcoming the anesthesia. Taking it seriously, I do love God. I intend to serve God in all that I do. (I can’t imagine deliberately undertaking to not serve God.) The heart of the matter for me is knowing or striving to know God. Lots of pretend, sometimes ludicrous knowledge clutters the path.
Suddenly, I am aware. Alive! The people in the room appear as silhouettes. “I love you guys,” I proclaimed in my joy at being awake. The fact that I only knew two people present concerned me not in the least. I was in a recovery room in the intensive care unit (ICU). I was comfortable but groggy, drifting in and out of consciousness, so much so that I remember very little of the day.
Extremely Depleting . . .
When the next day rolled around, I was more myself. I was immediately challenged to stand up which was a struggle. I began to realize how much the body gives up enduring major surgery. It is extremely depleting. The nurse was impressed with my leg strength, given my age. Why not? I had been working out regularly for 40 years, but I felt horribly weak. Later, when I was asked to walk,
Intravenous Insert = I Needed Two.
every step required effort. I tired very quickly. The heck with my heart – what had been done to the rest of my body? Apparently, experience proves that patients who get back on their feet immediately, recover much faster, and thus the effort to get one out of bed and strolling about even if it requires assistance.
All of my systems were coming back onto line. I could not get to the bathroom on my own, but I had a bottle. I hacked up a lifetime-best slug of sputum from my lungs. “Oh good!” my nurse exclaimed when I told her about it. “Everything’s working.” My appetite returned. I had not eaten for two days. I ordered lunch, but before it arrived, I was told that I was doing so well that I was going to be moved out of ICU into a coronary care area. The lunch was directed to my new room The nurses in ICU, however, did not want me to be transferred until they had two working intravenous inserts (IV’s) established.
My arms looked like the no-man’s land of a World War I battlefield. Blood had been taken from the back of my hands up to my elbow on both arms. My fatty arms. I don’t have rope veins on the surface al a gym rats everywhere. They could not find a place to insert the new IV. I kept telling them to try above my elbow. But no, they’d rather not. Finally a doctor was called and she found a place using a sonogram locator. Guess where. Above my elbow. Lunch hour was long gone. It was 4:00 pm.
Locating the right place for the IV took so long that my lunch was returned to the kitchen. I was starving. I told the nurse on the floor to which I was transferred that I needed something eat. She insisted on completing a questionnaire on a monitor in the room that repeated all the questions I had been asked every day for six days. What good, I thought, was a system if it didn’t retain the answers from one day to the next? When the nurse left saying nothing about my lunch, I called my wife and asked her to bring me a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich from home. We live five minutes from the hospital. It seemed the only way. I really did not, as I feared, experience much physical pain. The only pain I experienced during for my entire stay was hunger in the face of indifference toward it and multiple attempts at inserting an IV. But there is more to my story . . .
To be Continued . . .
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