Day: July 5, 2014

I thought it was a vision when this beautiful, charismatic, high-style woman walked confidently into my hospital room, introduced herself as my cardiac surgeon and told me she would be cracking my chest open in a couple of days. “It’s pretty routine, really,” she said, “I do it every day. The really creative stuff is the aorta, those surgeries were quite creative and exciting.”

Dr. Adanna Akujuo almost never stopped smiling, she had a permanent twinkle in her eyes, and the poise of a movie star. I will be honest and say she was absolutely nothing like the generally grim and businesslike and somewhat irritable male doctors I had encountered for the past several days. I was enchanted. I think I had a crush on my cardiac surgeon. Maria said she understood.

I did not expect my surgeon to be a woman, I did not expect my surgeon to be from Nigeria, then to Albany via Manhattan. She was as comfortable with herself as almost any professional I had met, she exuded both confidence and humanity. She combined the necessary arrogance of the surgeon with the empathy and sensitivity and intuition of women, or so it seemed to me. She knew I was disappointed about not being able to use my camera for months, so she took a photo of my heart. I do not think the other surgeons would have done that. The men were different – serious, generally humorless, competent, reserved.

Did it trouble me that my surgery, my life,  was in the hands of a female?

No, I must say that that did not occur to me. But it did bother some people. Two of the other men in the ward asked me if I was comfortable with a “woman cutting me open,” and late at night, one of the ward nurses came in and told me Dr. Akujuno had a great reputation and was very well regarded. But as she pulled down my sheets and bedtime, she surprised me by saying with some feeling that “personally, I would want a man operating on me.” I was surprised, it was not a professional thing for a nurse to say to a patient about to undergo bypass surgery done by a woman. I had no doubts. Strong women may yet save the world, as they have saved me.

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We live in a world of warnings and alarms, I do not intend to add my voice or words to them. I will not become an anti-smoking advocate or badger people to get EKG’s or take daily walks. There are so many warnings and alarms in our world – we need health care, IRA’s, retirement, tests and procedures, pills and other things – that many people live their lives in a new kind of cultural slavery, working and living only for money and security, giving up life in order to feel safe. My blog and my writing will not be a source of more alarms and scolding, that is one of the many scourges on Facebook. People are afraid to put photos up of dogs in cars for fear of being accused of boiling them to death.

If people decide to check their hearts out because of something I wrote, all the better, but boundaries are important in our world and so is  free choice and will.

This is my story, we all have to tell our own story and live with it. I respect yours, I ask you to respect mine. I am not here to tell you what to do, I am not here to be told what to do.

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I am returning to life in small ways, day by day, step by step. The radical thing about open heart surgery is that they stop your heart and shut down the reset of your body as well with anesthesia. It is common and generally safe procedure, but such a thing is loaded with risks – clots, strokes, aftershocks, side-effects. Most of your body ceases to function, your lungs collapse, your bowels are paralyzed, you sweat at strange moments, you can’t use anything but your legs to stand up, you cannot dress or bathe yourself. If I don’t move around, my lungs fill with fluid, I am wracked with painful coughing. My stomach has felt for days like I have been eating bricks and sand.

The surgeons care about your heart and once they know it’s okay they send you home, where  you are own you own and some of the real healing begins. You have to wait for the body to catch up. Some of this is emotional. Seeing Simon, seeing Red, not living in fluorescent lighting with sick and dying people, writing on my blog, being at home.

I believe Bedlam Farm has always been a healing place, for me, for the animals. In a small town, you always feel you matter, you do not feel alone. A friend came to mow the lawn without being asked. Another friend stocked the refrigerator with food. Another went to Saratoga to buy me loose fitting pants and shirts – my body is laced with stitches, wounds and (to me) dreadful scars. Another has volunteered to run errands, drive me to good walking places, sit with me when Maria has to work or go out, give me a massage, bring me food.

My nurse was stunned when I called O’Hearn’s, my independent pharmacy in a panic as we were packing up and told her I needed some prescriptions urgently, I was coming home and I wanted to deal with Bridget, my pharmacist rather than a big chain. I had Bridget’s home number, I left a message. My cell phone rang five minutes later and it was Bridget: “what’s going on?” She got on the phone with Maria, gave us her home address, told us to stop by on our way home and she would have everything waiting in the morning before 9 a.m. We dropped the prescriptions off.  The nurse said she couldn’t believe there still was an independent pharmacy left anywhere near Albany or that the pharmacist had responded so quickly. My town is like that.

When Maria went, Bridget walked her through all of the overwhelming instructions, pills, side-effects. She passed on advice about bowel movements, scars, sores. She called me later to ask if everything was okay.

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There are big things connected to heart surgery – things relating to lifestyle, health, awareness, spirit. But there are the small things of healing. High tech American medicine knows a lot about dealing with the heart. It doesn’t care much about the small things.

Today, for the first time in days, I began to come alive. Maria stood me in the shower and gave me a bath. I felt clean and human. We eat outside in the Adirondack chairs, I close my eyes and feel the wind, the breath of life, the gardens are strong and full. We love to watch the sheep and donkeys.  She cleaned and dressed my stitches and wounds – it is hard for me to look at them. She gets tired sometimes,and we both stop and sleep. I think it is much more exhausting to be her than me. I am meditating, reading, thinking, reflecting. I am healing.

My bowels came to life after various treatments and  remedies. I figured out how to safely clean myself after going to the bathroom. I am working on ways to get my pants on without help. There are large steps to being a human, there are small ones, they are equally important. It is my goal to be at my desk and back at work on Monday, writing another chapter on my “Talking To Animals” book, there is nothing that is more healing to me that writing. I lost a couple of weeks of my life, I’m not ceding any more. In a couple of weeks I have a whole round of follow-up visits to make, and I am signing up with a diabetes clinic in Albany, one of the best in the country, coming under their care. Their doctors managed my diabetes during the surgery, they are impressive.  I have a piece to write about the New York Carriage Horses, I have never forgotten them or their drivers, their torment and persecution continues in New York City.

This is, to me, the heart of recovering, the process of rebirth and renewal. My work is of the heart, my writing, my photography, my life. A health heart is the engine that drives the enterprise, I see that quite clearly now. I came very close to losing my life, I am finding it again.

“TRUE. nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why WILL you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them…Hearken! and observe how healthily, how calmly, I can tell you the whole story.”

– Edgar Allen Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart.

This morning, as soon as I opened my eyes, I woke up Maria and we both walked hand in hand together on Macmillan Road, the same walk that I could not finish a week-and-a-half ago, that nearly brought me to my knees and began this extraordinary and unexpected chapter in my life.  I went to the doctor, was given an EKG, ended up in am ambulance rushing to the Albany Medical Center. Apart from losing my tonsils when I was four, it was my first visit ever to a hospital as a patient.

My male cardiologist, tired of yet another man who hadn’t had his heart checked in several decades, looked me in the eye and said. “Here’s the good news. You are not dead.” I was, he said, just one more walk away. I thought I had been catapulted into space.

According to my new fitbitflex wrist monitor, Maria and I took 4,065 steps this morning, we went 1.94 miles, perhaps the best walk of my life, true journey of recovery. This has been the most extraordinary experience of discovery and recovery, of pain and healing, love and connection. The richest tapestry imaginable.

I thought I was dreaming when my drop-dead gorgeous cardiac surgeon, Dr. Adanna C. Akujuo, walked into my room in her four-inch spiked heels. The nurses all said she provoked great shoe envy, even I felt it. She was raised in Nigeria, trained in New York City and had the poise and charisma of a movie star. We clicked right away until she told me I could not use my big new camera for at least three months or lift any other thing over five pounds. There was a lot of steel and wire in my chest now, she said, and it needed time to heal.  She would break open my sternum, she said, and if it didn’t heal, I would know what it felt like to be in Hell. I asked her if I could bring a camera into the operating room, and she said no, but she did take some photos of my heart – she told her assistants that she knew I would love it (I do).

I’m sorry if the photos are hard for some people to take but they are beautiful to me and I want to share them. They show one of my two major new arteries. I had open heart surgery, a double bypass, which means two arteries were shut down, one 100 per cent, one 90 per cent. They were removed and two arteries were taken from my legs and attached to my heart.  My heart had created a few new small ones to keep me alive, and Dr. Akujuou says my heart is in good shape, it suffered little damage from my lack of care.

The night before my surgery I apologized to my heart for neglecting it, I had a long talk with my body about our future together. A time of rebirth and renewal I thought, a new chance, a miraculous gift from the fates, a great adventure to the other side of the world. Maria and I had much fun in the hospital, walking around, meeting people, loving each other in the purest and most meaningful way. She is truly an angel sent to teach me the meaning of love.

For reasons I do not understand, I was not afraid before the surgery, I slept well and easily, more comfortably than usual. I know this surgery is one of the most commonly practiced in the United States, and the Albany Medical Center is one of the best places to have it done. Some people urged me to go to New York City, but that didn’t feel right to me. I was where I belonged.

I was curiously at peace with it, I had accepted the surgery and was ready to heal my heart and live a healthier life. I love walking, I want to do it until I leave the world. My nurse in the ICU told me that when I woke up at 4:20 a.m., my first words were “let’s take a walk,” and we did, and many more. Yesterday, three days out of surgery, I did 20 laps around the ICU and the resident cardiologists threw me out of the hospital and sent me directly home. The nurses could not remember that ever happening before, they were nervous about it, I was not.

From the first, I sensed that walking and moving were the key to my healing, I was focused on healing, not beating myself up for my tell-tale heart.

I don’t understand many things about this experience, it’s soon and I’m too close to it, I want to share my journey of healing and discovery. Although the surgery is common, it is also brutal and I have a long, often painful and complex recovery. I do not underestimate it and I don’t want to trivialize it. It was not a walk in the park. I have never imagined such pain, which comes and goes with every breath.

I see that many people on social media are relating their own heart experiences or those of their fathers, brothers, uncles and cousins. Social media promote the idea that we all share the same things, but the heart, like the brain, is the most personal of things, the most individualistic. My doctor is not your doctor, my heart is not your heart, my vessels not your uncle’s, my spirit my own, my healing is very personal. as is yours. No one’s heart surgery is like anyone else’s. I learned that within hours of entering the hospital. I was touched and shaken by the people around me, mostly men, some younger, most older, and the degree of depression, exhaustion and surrender was palpable. Few people want to walk.

I was surrounded  by people who just didn’t want to deal with their hearts, and I was chagrined to find that I was one of them. Self-awareness is not just about spirituality, it can be much more mundane.

I see that I am different from most people, for better, for worse. That has caused me trouble and sorrow and sometimes, joy and comfort.  I learned once more the poisonous and toxic effects of old people talk – at our age, as we get older, when you are our age, don’t ever get old.This talked convinced me that I was simply getting old and could no longer walk up a hill. That’s the rationale I used to keep from getting my heart checked – I had been losing strength for years, the doctors said my heart had been struggling for a long time, and I just thought I was getting old. Yuk. It nearly cost me my life.

I was reminded once more to never speak poorly of my life or my work, they might be listening.

The doctors now say I can walk as much as I want, my heart has the fuel to sustain my ambitions for life again. I don’t intend to waste one joyous drop. There were many memorable moments, and I will share some of them in the next few days, but one that keeps coming back to me is when Dr. Akujuou turned to Maria  and said that my  brain was about to be re-oxygenated.

“My God,” said Maria.