It was like a dream.
Up until the moment I came-to in the intensive care unit at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, memories and images of the moments leading up to my surgery were like shards of shattered glass.
After a sleepless Sunday night and an unpleasant shower with some foul-smelling surgical soap (a requirement), my parents and I made the somber 25-minute drive along deserted early morning freeways to the hospital, where I was herded through various pre-op paperwork and procedures.
I finally donned a surgical gown and booties, then handed over all of my personal belongings and was wheeled into a ward where I was shaved from neck to toe.
The man assigned to take care of me had a special gift; it didn't take long before I was laughing along with him, almost completely reassured that everything was going to be fine. As uncomfortable as I was with him shaving my nether regions, he knew exactly what to say...I realized I wasn't the first person to be uneasy with that type of scenario.
When the staff discovered that I worked for the Chargers, conversation shifted to the state of the team and what had recently been going wrong. I had to laugh: There I was about to have my chest cracked open and I was living up to my role as the ultimate public relations professional, dispelling any doubts and reassuring these fans that all would be worked out.
After a brief, tearful goodbye to my sister and parents, I was wheeled by gurney into the freezing-cold operating room. It was so bitterly cold in there that I half-expected to see my breath. With nothing but a thin hospital gown covering me, I began to shiver slightly. In the OR I was greeted by several different specialists (not sure if they were doctors) and tables upon tables of frightening surgical instruments, which immediately drew my attention as they glinted in the brilliant lights that seemed to come from every direction. And just as my imagination began to run wild, some drugs were slipped into my IV and I was gone. I remember the anaesthesiologist and I talking about stand-up paddle boarding - a sport I had recently been learning - and that was it.
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| WIKIMEDIA COMMONS PHOTO |
Anyone who has ever been under anaesthesia will probably tell you the same thing: The time between your last recollection before falling asleep and the time you wake up seems like a split second. It's almost as if no time passed at all.
Hazily, I can remember someone calling my name. But when I woke up, what greeted me was a breathing tube. My throat was on fire, partly from that damned tube and partly from having had nothing to drink since 10 p.m. the night before. I wasn't even allowed to have a small cup of water before the surgery. I remember pointing to the tube and grunting. I hoped that whoever was there interpreted it as I intended: "Get this damned thing out of my throat! Now, if not sooner!"
Well, nurses had other plans, and the tube stayed in there awhile longer. Luckily I was so out of it that I don't remember much. After that brief memory, I recall asking for a cup of water, only to receive ice chips instead. "We can't have you getting sick and throwing up with your chest the way it is," the nurse told me. Finally, after what seemed like hours, I was given a full cup of water. And it was the greatest gift I'd ever received. I would have paid $1 million for that cup of water.
After speaking to my parents later, they said that the surgery was all over about 1 p.m., so all of the drama with the breathing tube and ice chips had gone down sometime Monday afternoon. But in the state I was in, I had no recollection of time. I started coming around and realizing where I was sometime that night, when this amazing nurse came around about every 15 minutes and gave me water and morphine. I must have drank 30 gallons of water, I was so thirsty. I was mostly pain-free until sometime during the night, two nurses moved me around in bed. And then it hit me like a ton of bricks. I was given dose after dose of morphine and God knows what else until I was comfortable again. I would fall into a deep, drug-induced slumber and wake up thinking I had slept for 24 hours only to discover ten minutes had passed. Amid frantic nurses and doctors rushing around and machines beeping from what seemed like every corner, I spent my first night in the hospital in controlled chaos.
Sometime early Tuesday morning, the nurse told me they were going to get me out of bed to take an X-ray. It didn't seem like a big deal at the time, but as soon as my head was up, everything began to go white and fuzzy while they lifted me and put me in a chair next to the bed. It took a few minutes of foot exercises and breathing to feel normal again. A couple of hours later, I was eating fruit and watching television. I even walked to the end of the ward with some help. I couldn't believe how well I felt. "Hell, if that was the worst of it, this isn't going to be bad at all," I thought to myself.
But then I was moved to my own room on the sixth floor. The idea sounded great; I couldn't wait to get away from the incessant beeping that was coming from all directions and people poking their heads into my room every 20 seconds. The ICU is craziness 24 hours a day and almost impossible to get any rest.
The wheelchair ride was pleasant; I hadn't been out of bed for hours, so seeing the sunlight and something other than the same four walls was a nice change. But when they got me out of the chair and into my bed, the pain began and didn't go away until the next day. And I'm not talking about a little bit of pain. I'm talking about full-on, concentration-busting, earth-shattering pain. It felt as if someone had used my damned chest for batting practice. My new nurse was very nice and she tried to help me, but nothing seemed to work. I laid there in bed and tried to think of other things.
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| Hospital pain scale. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS PHOTO |
My parents came to visit later that afternoon, but I was in so much pain and I don't even remember the half of it. After they left and the night nurse came on, things got even worse.
"On a scale of one to ten, what is your pain level?" she asked me.
"It's a frickin' 12," I'd replied through gritted teeth. "Please do something."
I don't like pain. But I can also deal with it...when it's manageable. Despite my fairly high pain tolerance, this was anything but manageable. Never before had I experienced anything like it. I was told that younger, healthier people like myself usually experienced the most pain from open heart surgery, simply because there are more active nerves and more muscle to cut through when the chest incision is made. Well, they weren't lying.
I laid in bed in agony for much of the night. About every 20 minutes, this nurse and her assistant (I think she was an intern) asked me to describe the pain. And when I would tell them it was unbearable, they would just stare at me for a few moments and finally say, "Wow. I don't know what to do." Then they would disappear for 30 minutes or more and return with no solution.
I was getting really agitated. I expected pain...just nothing like this. And here was this nurse telling me she didn't know what to do. It was infuriating. They gave me a variety of different drugs. Nothing helped. And I got the same blank stares each time. It was the longest, most unpleasant night of my life. About 3 a.m., they gave me an Ambien. I fell asleep, but it felt as if I were paralyzed.
The pain continued until the next morning when it finally came down a little bit. After a small breakfast, I got back into bed and I slept. When I woke up, things were remarkably better. I was still in pain, but it was a pain I could live with. I took about four naps that day and slept through most of the night.
That day (Wednesday) and Thursday went by in a haze. I was briefly entertained by visits from several friends and from the surgeon, who also added that the diseased valve he replaced was rather odd-looking. "I've never seen anything like it," he'd told me. Another doctor who assisted with the surgery later told me, "It looked like some kind of alien". But it was a never-ending series of naps, television, short walks around the ward and rounds of medications and checks of my vital signs. That's one thing about being in the hospital: It's impossible to get any substantial rest, because there is always someone poking and prodding you. You'll be hard-pressed to go more than 20 minutes without someone coming into your room, flushing out your IV's, measuring your urine, taking your temperature. It's insanity. Thinking about it later, however, I realized how uneasy I would have been anywhere else; if something happened, I knew I was well taken care of, and that kind of reassurance is comforting.
Sometime Wednesday (I think), nurses also removed the rather cumbersome drainage tube that had been inserted into my abdomen. The tube was about an inch and a half in diameter and was my nemesis for about 48 hours: Attached to a box that looked somewhat like a briefcase, that damned thing had to be lifted and moved each time I moved. And the tube itself was unpleasant to look at, with a pinkish liquid filtering through it, fluid draining from my body. Calling it disgusting just doesn't do it justice.
I was told that I would feel much better when the tube was removed, but that it would also be extremely uncomfortable to get it out. Well, they were right. After just a few hours in the hospital, I learned just how chock-full of euphemism hospital staff really are. There should be a dictionary explaining their terminology for us laymen: Slight discomfort = excruciating pain. A brief pulling sensation = mind-altering, intense, searing pain. And when they tell you to take a deep breath, that's when you really need to brace yourself. It was several days before I could bring myself to even look at my chest incision...so I had no clue what that tube looked like when it was attached to me. But when they pulled it out, I had about three seconds of gut-wrenching pain and panic. Breathing made no difference. And when it was finally out, I had two more jagged holes in my body to add to the collection.
That collection - as near as I can now recall - included the 23-inch long gash along my sternum, which began at my neck and continued down to just above my abdomen, a gigantic IV in my left wrist, the two painful holes in my abdomen that looked as if I'd been shot with a .357 Magnum, another massive IV in my right wrist, one in my right bicep, two holes in the middle of my chest where wires extended into my heart (a pacemaker/heart monitor, I think), a fourth IV in my neck and finally, a wire that was inserted into the base of my neck and (or so I was told, or so I interpreted) snaked down into my heart. Everywhere you looked, there was something. And each of the IV's had to constantly be flushed out with saline by a nurse to keep them clear.
Dr. Brewster, who had performed the surgery, told me Thursday that I would likely be able to go home the next day. When Friday came along, so began a rather intense morning of removing all of the wires and IV's. None of them, however, hurt more than the pacemaker wires sutured into my chest. Two nurses came in and told me to start breathing. That's when I knew I was in big trouble. Following that procedure, I was told to stay in bed and not move for an hour and a half. And when they removed the IV and wire from my neck, the nurse had to stand over me with a finger on the hole for a full 10 minutes to prevent any bleeding. Another hour of bed rest followed that one. And when they finally removed the last IV, it was a geat feeling: No more flushing, no more pulling..."No More!!" -Jack Rebney, "Winnebago Man".
*For those of you who don't know what Winnebago Man is, follow this link and enjoy a good laugh (warning: it's extremely vulgar):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSWUWPx2VeQ&noredirect=1
Coming home Friday evening was...well, that's a whole other story, one that I don't have the energy to tell right now. But stay tuned.
THIS SAGA WILL BE CONTINUED...
