The Surgery - Part Deux

I didn't really think it was bad at the time, but everyone who I've told this little piece of information to totally freaks out.  

After Andrew kissed me goodbye when I was going to the cath lab to have my heart operated on, he went home. 

Now, don't go thinking he's a giant butt wipe or anything. 

The doctor told Andrew that I'd be in surgery for a minimum of two hours, and that for an hour after I was done, I could not have visitors.  We knew I wasn't going to die or anything, and we live 15 minutes from the hospital I was at, so he went home.  He had breakfast, puttered around for a while, and went back.  He was at the hospital for over an hour before they let him back to see me.  So it's not that bad.

He did tell me that if I had died, he had already planned to use my life insurance money to buy a pimped out VW bus and take the kids on a vacation to Alaska.  And he would have, too.  But I don't think that was his first choice of outcomes.

Anyway - part one of the heart surgery can be found here.  On to part two.

I get wheeled into the cath lab, and the staff transfers me to a metal table that has a weird blue blanket thing on it that looks like a bowling alley when there are those bumper thingies in the gutters.  Except my bumpers were flowing with hot air to keep me warm during the surgery.  That plus the warm blankets they piled on top of me made me pretty sure I was going to pee myself.  I didn't really care though because it took them about twenty seconds to start pumping my IV full of drugs that made me quite sleepy and also removed any sense of the possibility of impending death.  I didn't care what they did to me.  La, la, la. I'm still not sure if I peed or not.  It's entirely possible.

I was at a university hospital, so while my doctor was in the room during the surgery, a fellow actually performed the closure.  Scary, no?  Again, I didn't care.

The most painful part of the ordeal was when they stuck needles in my groin to numb my legs so they could insert the catheters into my femoral arteries.  I remember the needle going in and my back jumping off the table a little bit.  Then a nurse said that she was going to give me another dose of drugs and that was the last thing I felt until she had her fist shoved into my groin to stem the flow of blood after they pulled the catheters out.

I was awake for parts of the procedure.  I remember watching the catheter in my heart on one of the six or so TV screens.  I thought it was kind of weird that there was a foreign object moving around inside my heart and I couldn't feel it.  

Another time I woke up and heard my doctor say to the fellow, "You see that flap there at the top of the atrium?  What is that?"  And the fellow thought and thought - but I knew right away what it was.  I tried to say "Atrial septal aneurism", but it wouldn't come out of my mouth.  The fellow got it not long after.  If it had been Jeopardy, I totally would have kicked his butt.

Then the thing was over and I made small talk with the nurse who was applying pressure to my arteries.  We talked about kids and homeschooling and cool places to go in Portland...  And then they lifted me ever so gently back onto my bed, I prayed that my tampon wouldn't fail me just yet, and we went back to recovery where my prayer went unanswered.

Stay tuned for Part 3 - The Inconvenience of a Room With No Toilet