It’s been a week since I went under the knife and had my
heart surgery. I haven’t felt up to
typing this all up much before today. It’s
been a rough run of it. But I wanted to
give you all a “lessons learned” from my experience, just to give you some
insight as to what this whole thing was like and what it ended up doing to me, so
far.
Whatever Lifestyle
Decisions You’re Making that aren’t “Heart Wise” Aren’t Fucking Worth it
I know, you like eating metric shit-tons of bacon. Smoking cigars and chewing tobacco is fucking
awesome. And cheese, man, don’t even get
me started on cheese. I fucking LOVE
cheese.
But you know which of those things above is worth going
through what I just went through, even if it means you’re denied them for the
rest of your life?
None of them. Not a
fucking one.
Now, I want to clarify, the problem that I just had fixed
was not caused by bad lifestyle choices and bad habits on my part. This was a hereditary thing that is common in
my family, and I drew the short straw, gene-wise. It wasn’t clogged arteries that caused my
issue, it was crossed up wiring in my heart.
But you know what didn’t help any of that? You know what probably served to make it all
worse? The fact that I’m
overweight. The doctors made it a point
to tell me that my weight did not cause this issue, but they also said that it
sure as fuck didn’t help anything. They also
made it a point that in order to have a better chance of not having to do this
again, that I needed to lose weight.
So you know what I’m going to do?
I’m going to fucking lose weight, because there are more
things I’ve learned as I went through all of this, and they all add up to make
a guy certain that he doesn’t want to do this again. Things like…
It’s Gonna do More
than Just Hurt; It’s Gonna Suck in Ways that You Haven’t Even Imagined Yet
Do me a favor. It’s a
pretty simple thing that I’m asking, in the grand scheme of things, and it’s something
so simple, even a baby could do it. All
I’m asking is for you to lie perfectly still for 6 hours.
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| "I got this!" |
Seems pretty easy, right?
I mean, lay still for 6 hours?
You probably do that every night and don’t even know any better.
Let me disabuse you of that notion right now. If you ever want to fucking torture yourself
beyond the capacity for description, do a minor amount of damage to your groin
area by shoving a couple of big ass needles in there, and then lay still for 6
hours.
By hour three, you’ll be begging them to let you move. You won’t even care that moving could set you
to hemorrhaging blood like some bad “Evil Dead” remake.
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| So worth it! |
That’s what I had to do after my surgery. No painkillers besides Ibuprofen, and lay
completely still for 6 hours. No
movement of the legs was tolerated. I
know that this sounds easy, because last week, before it happened to me, it
sounded pretty easy to me, too. But it
wasn’t easy. It sucked a metric ass-ton
of donkey balls, and want all of you to
understand that you are bringing yourself closer to that ass-ton of donkey
balls with every bad decision you make.
| "Come closer! CLOSER!" |
As I sit here typing this, a full week after my procedure,
my catheter sites are still black as the ace of spades, from halfway down my
thigh, up to my waist, and radiating around my hip. They hurt like crazy, and are in exactly the
right spot for my three year old daughter to be constantly hitting them in some
way or another, accidentally. My
blackened, painful groin is right at arm height for her, and my tender, aching
lap is her favorite place to jump into when I’m sitting on the couch. God bless her, she feels bad and apologizes
every time, but she forgets five minutes later.
They Can Never “Fix”
You, They Can Just Try to Make the Problem Bearable
In the case of clogged arteries and heart-attacks, most
people know that the installation of a stint, or in more extreme cases, the
completion of a full-on bypass surgery, is not a “fix” to the problem, but
rather more of a “bubble-gum and bailing twine” type repair that will hold for
as long as it will hold, and not a second longer. Once it stops holding, you have another heart
attack, with the complete panoply of consequences and risks associated with
that.
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| Up to and including... |
In my case, cardio-ablation procedures only have a 75%
success rate. One in four will either
have to try again, or accept that the surgery failed and seek other means of
control. I pray to God I’m not one of
them. But even more disheartening is
that, over time, the success rate falls to 50%.
Half of all people who have an ablation have to have another one.
I fear this so mightily that I cannot even put words to
it. I do not want to go through this
again. It was awful.
You Are the #1
Predictor of Whether You Will Succeed or Not
In the face of all of this, many people refuse to change
their lifestyle. They won’t change their
diet, they won’t start exercising, and they refuse to take the precautions
necessary to fix their issue. I can
understand having bad habits BEFORE your first heart attack, for sure. We are great at “whistling past the graveyard”
and assuming nothing bad will ever happen to us. That’s why STDs even exist – we take risks
and figure that getting Chlamydia is something that happens to other people, not to us.
| "That hooker told me she was clean!" |
So we eat bacon to the point of fetishizing it, and joke
about how the only aerobic exercise we get is when we watch particularly scary part of a movie, and I get
it. We assume that people that have
heart attacks aren’t us – we’re good people, we eat responsibly, we don’t drown
our fried eggs in butter every morning, so why should we worry?
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| "Sir, your deep-fried butter is ready!" |
But what I DON’T get is the guy who knows damn good and well
that his lifestyle has fucked up his heart, but good, and refuses to do something
about it. He can no longer delude
himself into believing that it will never happen to him. It
already has!
The Fear You Will
Feel, Laying on That Table Before the Surgery, Should be Enough
Mrs. Goober is pregnant again. She’s eleven weeks along now, and the baby is
healthy so far. We thank God for the
blessing, but as I was laying on the table in the OR, waiting for my
anti-anxiety meds and the anesthetic, that baby, and my little girl, and Mrs.
Goober were all I could think about.
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| I can't really come up with anything funny or sarcastic to say about that. Here's a picture of a kitten. |
1 in 500. That’s how
many people go into the OR on average, expecting to get an ablation and end up
getting dead. They end up not being able
to watch their second child be born, to watch both their children grow up into
adulthood, and to be there for the woman they loved, to support her in raising
their kids.
I did not want to miss that.
I did not want my children to face the inevitable trials of being raised
by a single mother, without the influence of their father. I couldn’t bear the thought.
My eyes were tearing up, laying there on that table, and when
the anesthetist gave me the first shot, and I felt the drugs spreading like
acid through my veins, all I could think was to look him in the eye, and plead
with him to “do good work.” Those were
my last utterances before I fell asleep.
I don’t know if he understood me, but it doesn’t matter. It could have just as easily been the last
thoughts that went through my head at all, ever, and that wouldn’t have
mattered to anyone in that room, outside of having a bad day at work.
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| "Stupid fucking patients are always dying and ruining my day" |
It was damn scary, and it should have been.
In my case, my problem is not my doing, but if I’m making it
worse by being overweight, then I’m fixing to lose some weight, right now. Doc says I need to get down to 250 to be
where I need to be. That means I’ve got
60 pounds to lose.
And every time I feel like my diet sucks and I want to eat
something, I’ll just think about laying for 6 hours on that table, unable to
move, and I’m sure it will pass.
