"THIS WOULD BE FUN IF IT DIDN'T HURT SO BAD"

Blog number forty the four                                                        Sep. 28, 2006

So I'm walking down an alley and I feel a dull ache running down my left arm.  I get so pissed!  I raise my right fist to the sky and shout, "Kill me, you bastard!"  I am furious.

Months later I'm talking to a friend that I hadn't seen in a few weeks and he tells me he had a bypass and when he got the pains, he knew right away what it was and he told me he got very angry.  Now I'm wondering if that isn't a normal reaction, to get angry at a serious defect in the operation of the organs of the only body we can use at the moment.

I tell the Doc and he gives me an electrocardiogram and a prescription for nitro pills.  He tells me to sit down and rest if I ever get another chest pain and if that doesn't work after a few minutes, to take one of the nitro pills, If that doesn't work, take another one and if that doesn't work, call 911.

I have a few more pains over the next few days, and, still angry about it, instead of resting, I do pushups.  Surprisingly, this seems to help.  I tell the doctor this and he says not to do that.  Now I'm torn.  Obey the doctor or go with what seems right.  I go with the doctor.  Mistake?  I dunno. I might have been on the verge of a major medical discovery, engendering me fame, fortune, and a spot on Oprah.  Oh well...

One night, lying in bed, I have a chest pain.  I take a pill, since I am already resting.  That doesn't work, so I take another.  That doesn't work either.  Next day I go to the doctor. (calling 911 seems silly).  He has me take some tests, tells me he is going to do an angioplasty.  He tells me he is going to give me a drug that will enable me to obey instructions and that he will tell me when he is about to inject the dye and that I will feel it as a warmth running throughout my body. 

Starting the angioplasty, I am lying on a bed.  The doctor and his aide are fiddling with the machine.  I lift my head to see what they are doing.  This is all new to me and I am curious. He brusquely tells me to keep my head down.  This surprises me, because what harm is there in my watching their preparations?  He is an India Indian, so I think maybe it is a culture thing.  He has always been kind and understanding before.  Maybe he thinks I will be upset by what I see.  Maybe something else.  I don't ask.  I don't want to be yelled at again.

So the thing starts and he tells me to roll over.  I have been in a deep sleep up to this time, but I am immediately conscious when he tells me to roll over and immediately unconscious.  The next thing I am conscious of is that he tells me he is going to inject the dye and I will feel the warmth he talked about.  And I do.

This is a strange experience and I wonder if the drug given me was sodium phenothol, the so-called "truth drug."  If I had been asked any question I would have answered honestly with the thought of, "Why not?"

The test convinces the doctor that I will have to have a bypass.  I say, "Damn!" because I had kind of thought I could have just had the balloon spread the clogged arteries and I wouldn't have to have the surgery.  When I said, "Damn," he kind of looked at me intently and asked if I didn't want the surgery.  I said, "No, no.  I want the surgery."  I don't know how he read that I was refusing the surgery from my single, "Damn."

I wake up lying in a bed in a room with several other patients who must have also had the same procedure.  We all have a clamp holding down our opened femoral artery until the blood coagulated enough to release it.  I was in very much torment.  I felt very much that I would like to run up and down stairs with forty pounds of weights on each leg.  But I wasn't allowed to move.  They didn't want the clamped artery to start spewing my life's juice, you see.  One guy had to be carted out for repair because he couldn't hold his blood in.

A nurse finally talked to me and told me I could bend the other leg and this helped, but not much.

If I have to have that procedure done again, I'm going to tell the doctor how much I suffered and ask if maybe I could be kept under until I got my clamp off.  Probably not, but it doesn't hurt to ask.

I raised my head to look around once and my doctor yelled at me to keep my head down.  What IS it with this guy anyhow?

The night before the surgery, I am lying in bed after eating a supper. (eating supper before morning surgery?)  A guy comes in and starts shaving my chest and one of my legs.  We chat while he does this and then I start getting severe razor burns with every stroke of the razor.  The chatting stops.  I never complain, but he must have seen spots of blood appearing wherever he shaved.  It was like he was using a very dull razor.  I told my son about this later and he, having worked in hospitals, said that he never heard of them using an old fashioned razor. They always use an electric razor. 

Kinda reminds me of when I went to the emergency room for a cracked rib.  I was in severe pain and I don't know if it was a doctor or a nurse, butt he said he was giving me a shot of morphine. I went to x-ray under excruciating pain, almost passing out from it and when I got back to my bed, I asked the same guy if I could have more morphine because the first one wasn't enough.  So he gave me another shot and that did nothing either.

I told my hospital-experienced son about this experience and he said that the first shot should have put me in a very nice place.  We both decided I had not been given morphine, and he said if they tell you they are giving you something, they have to give you that -- no placebos.  I reported the incident to Patients Assistance and a doctor (at least he said he was a doctor) called me and told me they were looking into it, and I never heard anything after that.  I think somebody was stealing my morphine.

So the next morning, after my shave, I'm being wheeled down to the operating room.  Nobody except for the shaving guy ever talked to me about anything.  I would have liked to have talked to somebody 'cause I felt pretty much alone and helpless.

Next Blog, I'll talk about my stay in the hospital.  I promise.