"How Do You Mend a Broken Heart?" Part Two: Ablation

"Damn, there's a lot of y'all people up in here." 

That's what I noticed first, the size of the team. Nurses and techs and anesthetists and people staring at screens and one big hulking dude whose main job, I assume, was to muscle me off the table and back onto the gurney when the time came. And that was just in the operating room, before the electrophysiologist made his appearance.

I arrived via Lyft at around 6;00 AM. Registration went smoothly. They accepted a comically small payment on a bill that will be around for many years, as will I. A lady with terrific looking hair (everybody I met had such great hair,) walked me to the room that would be my home-base for the day. Another strip down. Another robe. Another pair of those fuzzy socks with the rubber stripes on the bottom. A tiny lady with great hair came in and took my vitals. Put on stickers for an EKG. Fitted me with a disposable blood pressure cuff. Then, in a voice that was just perky enough, "OK, Mr. Johnson. I'm going to shave your groin, now." I knew this part was coming and I had been dreading it, not out of modesty, but because I knew how brutally itchy this site was going to be in a few days. She covered Little Bob with a towel, which I thought was a kind touch, and used an electric shaver on my thighs, groins, and lower belly. As she finished up, the nurse who would be looking after me all day, whose real name was Barbie, came around the curtain with a toss of her hair and a stack of papers to review. We went over my list of drugs and my medical history. She told me how good Dr Ross was and how I was going to do great.

Then the great man himself made his appearance. We had met once in his office, the day he scared the shit out of me by describing all the things that could go wrong during the surgery. I remember how his face fell when I told him I had a fiter installed into my inferior vena cava after my blood clot during cancer treatment, 12 years ago. The IVC filter could pose a real problem. If they couldn't get their equipment around it, they would have to stop and try again later by opening my chest. The possibility haunted me all week. By Thursday night, I was twisted up in knots only a drunken boy scout could have tied. A friend posted this on Facebook for me:

     Yes, it's scary as hell to think about what they're doing, but so is the thought of a potentially lethal arrhythmia that stops you dead in your tracks when you least expect it. 
     It’s good that you have an “easily” curable problem that should be a thing of the past after you awaken from the nightmare that exists before tomorrow at 6:00AM. Go to sleep and rest well tonight, knowing that you have the blessing of making a choice.
     Cruel as these words may sound, they’re not meant to be. My prayers will include you tonight, Bob.

I'm not sure what Mike imagined might sound cruel in his words, but they gave me just the courage I needed. I had a choice. I could choose life, something so many other people I've loved and lost did not have the chance to do. I really was blessed.

So I was feeling relatively peaceful on Friday morning as a young anesthetist with a bald scalp and an African accent as comforting as warm sorghum talked me through the procedure for the hundredth time. He checked out the site of my cancer surgery and my throat to make sure there would be no trouble intubating me. He gave me a long list of drugs they would pump into me to let me sleep and keep me from being nauseous after. He also warned me that I would be flat on my back for four hours after leaving surgery so the incisions on my groin could have a chance to close up a little bit. (That was where they would be inserting the catheters that would carry all the cameras and sensors and magic wands that would do the work inside my heart. Hence the shave.) 

I'm sure I had lots of other visitors, but the last one I remember was a young woman whose name escapes me, but whose form reminded me why so many boys harbor fantasies about nurses. She was wearing a surgical gown and head cover, but I'm sure underneath it, her hair was perfect. She disconnected me from the monitors and rolled me down the hall, then asked the question I had been fearing most of all.

"Have you ever had a Foley before?" For you surgical virgins out there, a Foley catheter is a tube that the run up into your urethra so you can pee into a bag while you are unconscious. Mercifully, they don't put it in till you are asleep. But you will never be as awake in your life as you are when they remove it. 

But I am ahead of myself. As we rolled down the hall, through the hundredth set of automated doors, I was feeling a little flirty toward my shapely Florence Nightingale, and joked that I felt like the title sequence of Get Smart. No response. "That doesn't mean a thing to you, does it?" 'I've heard of it,' she replied sweetly, "but I never saw that movie." God  love her. My shoes are older than she is.

Once in the surgery, there was nothing but action al around me. People were focused and professional, like I imagine the team that gets an astronaut strapped into the capsule before lift off. One guy seemed to be the morale officer and we just sort of joked back and forth as he shaved my chest to place more stickers. A voice over my shoulder warned me, "OK, Mr. Johnson, I'm going to give you something now that may make you feel tingly or you may taste metal. It won't last long." She lowered an oxygen mask over my face. I felt someone arrange my left arm beside the gurney. "What do you know," I thought, "that tastes like..."

Then I woke up."You're done," Barbie said. "You did great." Dr Ross came in and told me that everything went according to plan. The IVC filter barely slowed them down. He'd see me in a week. I realized that he wasn't wearing a mask. I had never seen his face before. He had a goatee.

For the next four hours, it was just me and Barbie. She brought me ice water. Ordered lunch for me: Fruit salad and an indigestible grilled cheese sandwich. She brought me more blankets when I got cold, and more water when I got dry and I was so grateful for her kindness that I forgot to notice her hair. 

Speaking of hair... The time finally came for her to remove the dressings and take out the single stitch that held each incision closed. "Oh dear," she said. They've stuck tape right into your pubic hair. I'm sorry. This is really going to hurt. Better to just get it over with. RRRIIIIPPP! 

You know the sound a puppy makes when you accidentally step on it's tail? Yeah. I made that sound. I'm pretty sure my eyes watered a little bit, too. Oh, did I mention that I have two legs? RRRIIIIPPP!!!

St. Joseph's Hospital has a delicate silver crucifix hanging in every patient room, and I was glad to have Jesus so close by so I could beg for a quick and painless death. It may have been the Fentanyl, but I'm pretty sure he was laughing at me. I mean, it wasn't like i was nailed to the wall or something.

Barbie snipped the stitches and pulled them away. She replaced them with two, more carefully placed dressings. Then came the awful moment.

"You're going to take it out now, aren't you?"

"Yep."

"I hate this part."

"It isn't fun."

She held Little Bob tenderly in her gloved hand and began to slide the catheter out. I don't know why they would make them out of salty barbed wire, but that is the only explanation for the way that jagged fire hose felt as she pulled twelve feet of it through the tenderest part of my tenderest part.

This time, Jesus was definitely laughing.

"I'm pretty sure I'm still peeing."

"No, you're not. But I'll get you a urinal, just in case."

After that, everything happened pretty fast. A nurse at the desk outside my room threatened to chew her leg off if they didn't let her go home soon. A young nurse in scrubs and hair styled to the same salt and pepper ponytail as my own leaned over the counter and whispered something about someone, probably the funny old man in room seven who kept cussing out Jesus for laughing at him. Barbie brought me lots of papers to sign, one of which was a paper warning me not to sign any legal papers for the next 24 hours. I got dressed. Ordered a car. Salt and Pepper girl escorted me to the door to wait for my Lyft driver.

"Do you all get your hair done at the same place? Everybody here has such great hair."

"Wow, thanks," she glowed. "That's really funny."

Just then, and I swear this is true, a big-bellied fellow in a bright orange safety vest and hard hat came out of the door and approached us from behind.

"I just wanted to tell you," hand to God, this is what he said, "I really like your hair. It's very striking."

She laughed a laugh that made me notice how good the spring air smelled as she replied, "That's what he just said!"

Big belly looked at me with a smirk and an eye roll. "We're idiots."

As he walked away I noticed that his own ponytail could use a little touch up with a brush. I was back in the outside world.

I don't remember the ride home. Or dinner. Sophie the cat and I curled up and slept all the sleep I had missed the night before. 

Today?

Today, I have started to itch on my legs, my crotch, and my chest. It's just about time to remove the dressings from my groin. 

I have a sore throat from the breathing tube. And a foggy head from what I can best figure was four hours of surgery under anesthesia.

And hell's fire it hurts to pee. 

But at least I have a choice now. Lots of them. I'll raise a glass of cranberry juice and try to make some better ones.

Peace, y'all.

Pennsy