My heart valve job has been scheduled for 22 March 2011. I’ll most likely be admitted to the Nasseff Heart Center on 21 March 2011 and down the hall to United Hospital for dialysis and tests. The surgery is scheduled for 7:30AM on 22 March 2011. That’d be after the surgeon returns from a relaxing Caribbean vacation. Seriously. So set your clocks and calendars. Send all the good thoughts, energy, and light you can spare between about 7:30AM-Noon. I’ll be counting on it.
My mom’s birthday is 20 March 1933. If she hadn’t died at 42, she’d be 78 the day before I go in. I consider that to be an excellent omen.
One thing that’s nagging at the edges of my awareness is how much information I’ve been given about what’s going on with my body and how little information I’ve received about what to expect, exactly. Will it hurt? Well, of course. But how badly and for how long? How long before I can eat real food? I get the eight-week recovery, but what does that mean? Am I going to be bed-ridden for the entire eight weeks or just not able to do anything strenuous with my upper body. And just what the hell happens during the actual surgery? It sounds absolutely barbaric. Thanks to the Google, I found relevant information from the Texas Heart Institute.
What’s especially disturbing is that all of the material I’ve received is intended for a general heart failure patient, one who’s 85 years old, with cholesterol around 300 (mine’s under 100) and coronary artery disease (my arteries are calcified, but only on the outside). I don’t add salt to my food and never have; when I get a big four-color publication that goes on for pages and pages about the evils of salt, I feel like someone’s not paying attention.
When a “scheduler” working for 16 clinics calls me to schedule a pre-surgery appointment with my primary-care physician and asks me if this is for the “nodules in my lungs,” again, I feel like someone’s not paying attention. Nobody told me about the nodules in my lungs, by the way. I’ve since found out, surreptitiously from a trusted source, that they’re nothing to worry about. My primary-care physician is intelligent, attentive, alert, and treats me like a human being.
Madeline Drexler, writing for the New York Times, reports that patients can size up whether or not a healthcare professional cares about them, personally, in a few seconds. I thought it was just me. Rubbing up as close and often as I do to the US healthcare system, I can size up any healthcare professional—a nurse, an aide, or a surgeon—in less than 30 seconds. I’ve learned to just ignore the bad ones; they eventually wander away before they do any harm. I try to engage the good ones as much as possible.
I’m going to spend the time between now and 22 March getting my head straight about the valve job. I know that optimism helps a great deal and that I’ve become more and more curmudgeonly with each additional health condition that’s been piled on in the last 11 years. It doesn’t help that I was never a doe-eyed Pollyana to begin with, although I find myself to be quite sympathetic and empathetic with others. The first step will be to slowly wean myself off news. I’m a news junky and this will be exceptionally difficult. Next up is a constant, healthy serving of the music I love the most: Everything from the Duane-era Allman Brothers to 1970s Grateful Dead to Lowell George-era Little Feat to Van Morrison and Warren Zevon and a whole lot more are queued up on the iPhone and iPad, ready to go. What else?
0 responses. Comments closed for this article.