How does Monday sound for your surgery?

I was a little sore and dragged out the day after the Heart

Catheterization. This would have been somewhere around the middle of

November.

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I can't remember the exact sequence of events but within a week my Cardiologist had called and made an appointment for me to hear the results of the test. The results: four blockages in the arteries around my heart. His recommendation was a bypass operation, as soon as possible.

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He would still have to present my case to the surgical department heads and establish what priority my situation was, in order to get an admission date.

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He phoned a few days later to tell me that they had accepted my case and would admit me at the first possible opening. This brings us to mid-December.

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On Friday, December 19th I attended a pre-admission clinic which would prepare me should an opening occur. It was an all day thing involving lots of blood tests, consultations with all of the departments that are involved with an open heart surgery and meeting the fellow who would actually be performing the surgery.

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What nice people! I don't mind admitting I was very uncomfortable and stressed at the thought of what I was about to undergo. But, everyone I met or consulted with was calm, reassuring and most of all compassionate.

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There was even a guy in the waiting room that had undergone the same operation. He was waiting for me between appointments and told me about his experience. He left me with his card so that I could call him if I had any questions before or after the surgery. That was the first time I had ever heard the term "Zipper Club".

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Back to my story, I was attending this pre-admission clinic to be ready for whenever an opening occurred. I figured it might be at least a month or more, based upon the way our health care system is portrayed on the news and in the papers.

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Well the reality is much different I can assure you. At about three o'clock that afternoon as I was waiting to speak to the anesthetist, the nurse who was coordinating my visit said to me,

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"How does Monday sound for your surgery?"

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The rest of the day went by in a blur. It was Friday, by Monday morning I would be starting down a path to an unknown destination.

You have to shave my what?

The Heart Catheterization took place in a special lab at the Cardio Clinic. I was admitted and had to wait my turn. So there I was lying in a bed, wearing a Johnny Shirt and trying to pretend this was all a bad dream when the nurse came to chat. It wasn’t long before she produced a razor and proceeded to shave my groin. This was shaping up to be a bad day.

Bless her heart though; she also gave me a mild sedative.

In a very relaxed state I was wheeled into the lab. It looked like the bridge of the Star Ship Enterprise only more so. There was a team of doctors, nurses and technicians clustered around the monitors. I was given a shot of painkiller to numb the area around my groin and could feel some work being done there but couldn’t really see anything but a huge television monitor.

What they were doing was placing a little tube into the artery in my leg. Through that tube they fed a catheter along the vein and up into my heart.

Periodically they would inject dye through the catheter to illuminate the path of the blood flow. That first burst of dye was the most amazing sensation I have ever felt.

Being fully conscious I could watch the monitor and the progress of the dye through my veins. Every now and then they would stop and discuss what they were looking at in hushed voices.

The whole experience was surreal. It made me think of the descriptions one hears from people who claim to have experienced alien abductions. They describe shadowy labs and shadowy figures with strange instruments. It was all very dream-like.

Hmmm, maybe I wasn’t as fully conscious as I think I was.

The whole point of the Cardiac Catheterization is to allow the physician to see the coronary arteries and examine the function of the heart and the heart valves. The surgeon can then plan his treatment based upon what he sees.

I came out of the lab to a recovery room. A doctor stood there chatting with me while applying pressure to my groin in order to stop the bleeding from the artery. That took about ten minutes and then a dressing was applied.

After another twenty minutes I was taken by ambulance to another hospital across town to recover for six more hours before being allowed to go home.

During the six hours after a Cardiac Catheterization you cannot move around at all. The heart must not be stressed and the wound where the catheter was inserted has to have a chance to heal.

The worst part of that was; I had to pee about three hours into it. My choices were to hold it until I could move around or another type of catheter. I chose to hold it.