I started this blog just over a year ago, as I was waiting for some planned heart surgery. But my heart couldn’t wait for the doctors.
A year ago today, my aortic root tore and I was rushed into hospital for an emergency, and life saving, operation.
I can remember everything before the operation, and was lucid and alert throughout.
I’d spent the morning with my parents, having a pot of tea and an apple turnover at a cafe.
I came home and was interwebbing. I felt something inside me break, a sudden chest throb, and realised I was having difficulty breathing. I knew immediately something was wrong, very, very wrong.
I also decided I was going to survive. I knew that this was serious, and made a commitment to do whatever I needed to to get through. I closed the computer down (after clearing internet history, naturally …) I found the will that I’d made a couple of weeks earlier, and put it in a safe place. I opened my front door and left it on the latch so that, whatever happened, someone could get access.
I phoned my parents. ‘Something’s happened. I need an ambulance’ I told them. No questions, they said they’d be right round and arrived minutes later. Sometimes I think how fortunate I was they were in, and that they answered. As soon as they arrived, they called an ambulance and between breaths I explained my postcode and what was happening. I lay on the bed gasping for air as my parents looked on helplessly.
The medics arrived and had easy access as the door I’d left open remained so. They got an update about my waiting for an operation, took blood pressure, pulse, started giving me oxygen through a mask, and then went to get ‘ a cot’ bed to take me down to the ambulance. All of a sudden, I needed to be sick and despite my breathlessness rushed into the bedroom. No way was I going to be sick on my silk bedclothes. I was on out of hours cover for my work, so as they were taking me away I was telling my parents what to say to work and who to contact in order to transfer cover. On the way down the one flight of stairs I bumped into Waterbed John, my neighbour. We exchanged pleasantries and I was taken to the ambulance. My Dad made arrangements to follow the bus while my mum travelled with me in the ambulance.
Part of me was excited. It was a proper ‘Casualty’ type scenario – the flashing lights and siren went on, and I was jolted from side to side as the ambulance ran through red lights en route to the emergency ward.
We arrived, and I was carried through straight into A&E as doctors ran around fussing. I heard them ring the surgeon, and the ambulance crew stayed to hold my drip up for me. The surgeon arrived, and I was told they would perform an emergency operation and I saw him lead my parents off down a corridor for a very serious chat, with lots of heads nodding and occasional glances over at me. I’d only met the surgeon once before, and hadn’t liked him – well, in truth, I hadn’t liked the information he’d had to give me about the surgery, and I blamed him for it. I didn’t want my life to be in his hands.
I was still vomiting, and kept apologising to the nursing staff for being sick into a cardboard container. I joked that I’d been planning to get my hair cut before the operation and didn’t feel I looked so good at the moment. Vanity, always vanity. They joked that my bleached hair might turn pink with the anaesthetic – apparently it does, sometimes. I said I’d always wanted pink hair.
The anaesthetist popped in – a crazy haired eccentric who, I think, was Spanish, but looked and sounded like he should be nowhere near a hospital, except strapped in a bed. However, he was delightfully calm and mad and funny, and when he stuck tubes all over me in preparation for surgery, I had real trust in him.
Strangely, he didn’t put me under before taking me into the operating room. So I went in and it was like one of those ultra bright alien probe dream scenarios you see in X-Files, all bleached light and shadows. Except that there was a line-up of very young surgeons next to the table, who I said hello to, and asked them to do their best before shaking their hands. All very cordial. They (rather clumsily) lifted me onto the table and then my slightly mad anaesthetist friend really did put me under. I remember telling myself to allow the surgeons to do their work, and committing to survival.
The rest is all third hand. Something about a 13 hour operation, enormous loss of blood, an induced coma, my father phoning family in Ireland for a ‘Family Blood Blessing’. A dark time for my family, as the odds weren’t in my favour apparently.
I woke up and my first words were a demanding ‘I want a smoothie’ before I drifted off into a hallucinatory recovery full of imagined Chinese nurses, ribbons, hippopotamuses, malevolent caretakers and Ali Baba.
I’ve done a lot of thinking in last 12 months, much of which is contained within the pages of this blog in a fairly haphazard sort of fashion. I’ve been back to work, and back off absent again, and returned last week. It all feels different this time around, and I’ aware that recovery isn’t just about the physical stufff – it’s about soul and confidence and identity and vulnerability and feelings.
It’s been an opportunity to learn much. or re-learn. I recently blogged on gratitudes.
Today, it’s enough just to still be here to fart around.
The View From A Fridge is fine. Just fine.
View From A Fridge 