Doug Anderson is a friend and a poet who read from his new book “Horse Medicine” at the open house this weekend. He is also a photographer and he came out into the pasture to shoot the herding demonstration with Red and Fate. Fate marched the sheep right into his lap and they happily grazed right around him. I’m glad the pony stayed back.
Our back porch is a humble porch, perhaps made all the more so because we have never sat on it. It is a mirror of our lives in many ways, it reflects the seasons. We have gussied it up. We put two rockers there, but the barn cats took them over, Flo alternates between them but spends much of her time there. Maria has tended to the garden and we put planters and hanging tubs full of flowers out there. I took my “Books” sign from the other Bedlam Farm and brought it her. The “Books” sign replaced my “Worms” sign because so many people stopped by to ask how much the worms cost, no one has ever stopped by ask how much the books costs.
I asked Red and Fate to get up on the porch to dress the photo up, I am teaching Fate the meaning of “Photoshoot,” a command all of my dogs know, they sit right down and preen for the camera. The new thing on the porch is the “Parking” sign which Tyler put up under the “Books” sign.
Tyler decided to make some signs for the Open House this past weekend, he had a “parking” sign and a “handicapped” sign. Tyler is enterprising, he doesn’t just do the job, he always thinks of ways to do the job better. I loved his parking signs, down with painted slats of wood and magic markers. I asked him to put it up on the porch, and he was happy to do it. New dog, new sign, off to a good summer.
Fate did very well in our herding lesson this morning, yet I had the sense we were both tired after the Open House, our hearts were not in it as much as usual. Maria reminded me why, I think. A year ago on this date, I was in the coronary care unit of the Albany Medical Center waiting for my open heart surgery, scheduled for three days later.
Three days earlier, I could hardly cross the street while walking Frieda, I went to see my nurse practitioner and ended up discovering my heart had been seriously damaged. At that open house, just a few days earlier, my friends were concerned over how gray and tired I seemed. So, finally, was I. I remember the ambulance ride from Glens Falls to Albany, Maria following behind us on the New York Thruway. It was a desolate ride, I did feel hopeless and lost, I kept waving to her through the rear windows of the ambulance, the medic kept telling me she couldn’t see me.
I never felt more alone than in that ambulance on that drive to Albany, it seemed as if I had been taken out of my life and pulled to the other side of the world.
At this Open House, everyone told me how bad I looked last year and how much better I seemed this year. It was just about a year ago that my broken heart was giving out, and the doctors told me I was a walk or two away from dying. The good news, says the emergency room doctor, is that I was not dead. That was an idea to ponder, it filled me with wonder and challenged me to consider my remaining time.
My days and nights in the hospital were filled with new routines, with tests, blood drawings, X-rays, earnest conversations with nurses, aides, surgeons and clerks with forms to sign. My sense of the hospital was that it was a vast chaos system that came together brilliantly at certain times and for certain reasons. Everyone seemed to want to know something about me, or take something from me. Some wanted blood, others to recharged my heart monitor, prick my fingers, feel my pulse, sign forms agreeing to die if it was necessary. I kept signing forms saying I understood what was happening, the truth is I understood little or nothing of what was happening.
I had decided to trust the process rather than hear about it for hours.
This kind of thing, after all, is what Western medicine is supposed to do best.
At night Maria, the most loving spirit I had known, would crawl into bed with me for a bit, and only then could I sleep at all, the curtains kept being pulled back, the nurses came out of the darkness, smiled at us, told us to stay put, they got the blood and heartbeat and pulse that they needed. We waited to be interrupted, people with gurneys and wheelchairs would show up, strap me in, give me more forms to sign and me me through miles of darkened corridors for more tests – my heart, veins, bones.
Maria may never know what her presence did for me, how it grounded me and made me understand why I needed to be healthy and wished to be healthy.
Every night a man I came to call the Death Counselor came to sit by my bedside when I was alone, it was usually around 3 a.m., Maria was back at her hotel. If she was there, he would melt away and come back later. He told me what the risks were, how I might die or be impaired, how much pain I was likely to be in and for how long.
Curiously, I was never afraid of my surgery, was never afraid of being so close to death, I have no sorrow or traumatic memories about it, I do not see it as something to lament, it is not a struggle story for me. I knew it was a good thing for me, I knew it was necessary, I was grateful it was something the medical world seemed to know how to fix. I had just found Maria, I was not eager to say goodbye or to leave her with my messes or all those animals. I was home and working several days after the operation, I started my Recovery Journal, and I’m not sure anything – except Maria’s loving care of me – helped me recover more steadily and quickly than my blog.
And my recovery has been stellar. Months of rehab, walking, exercising at my gym, eating well, resting. The doctors say it takes a year to recovery from open heart surgery, and a year is up. I am officially recovered. People have stopped asking me how I am, they just tell me I look good. Not yet, but close. I still have work to do, I will always have work to do.
The surgery was a great gift to me, if you can call having your heart stopped and rebuilt a gift. I came to finally understand my responsibility to my body. I came to terms with the Byzantine and troubling ways of American health care. I am proud of learning how to manage my own care, find the nurses who would speak to me like a human, avoid the inevitably male doctors who could not. I accepted the reality of medications that cause me pain in my legs, cause weight gain, sometimes dizziness and fatigue. Life is a trade-off, so is heart disease.
My cardiologist says my heart is doing “wonderfully,” he doesn’t need to see me for a year.
Last year was devoted to recovering, this year will be dedicated to recovering from recovering. I am writing more productively and clearly than ever, and am bristling with energy. I am taking on new and old subjects, including training a border collie to herd sheep, a venture that has me moving and moving. We have a pony. The surgery brought Maria and I even closer together, and yesterday, even though I could hardly express it, the surgery made my heart swell with emotion and meaning at the open house. People kept telling me they were lucky to be there, but I was the one who was lucky to be there.
I told my late friend Paul Moshimer that I didn’t know why I was spared, and didn’t take that last walk, he said I had work to do. He is right. I have a lot of work still to do. We have to rebuild our financial life after years of hemorraging money to keep the first Bedlam Farm from going to pieces and into foreclosure.
I have some more work to do on my body and my own idea of health.
What do I remember from a year ago?
– Sitting in a darkened room in the hospital off a hallway with Maria as the sun was coming up, we were laughing and joking about the tests and the nurses, only a few of them in my ward poke any English and there were some wonderfully mangled gems of communication between us. A nurse came into the visiting room – I was in my wheelchair shrouded in beeping monitors and tubes, Maria across from me – and the nurse said she had never seen anyone have so much fun before open heart surgery. I might get up and dance in the operating room, I said.
It was fun, in a curious way. I guess it depends on how you live in the world.
– I remember sitting alone in my room the night before the surgery. I was debating what to say to Maria before I went into the operating room, in case I never made it out. My Death Counselor advised me to do that. Just before the surgery, she came into my room and sat and held my hand, and I looked into her eyes and saw that no words were necessary, we didn’t need words, we both understood what the real world gives us and takes away. We just kissed and I said, “see you later.”
– The patients I had met who had the surgery said the worst part would be waking up with all of those tubes sticking out me, in my throat, my chest, my neck. I would, they said, look like a machine, only part human. Don’t look in the mirror, they said. I saw that there were no mirrors in the rooms.
– I remember waking up and choking on something in my throat, feeling so numb and yet hurting and tired, I was barely able to move and when I did, I felt all of those tubes and things. I tapped my hands against my side to let the nurses know I was alive and awake, and they said be patient, we will be with you soon, and in a few minutes, the tube came out of my throat, and I coughed and opened my eyes and saw the bright lights, and some of the things sticking out of me, a nurse came and took my hand, and asked me my name and date of birth and she was spinning up and down.
The nurse told me I was alive and the surgery had gone well, and I needed to take it easy and learn how to breathe again, my heart had been stopped. Maria had been to see me, and gone to the hotel to rest and would be back shortly. Did I understand? Did I want anything? And I could instantly feel my new hart, feel the breath in my lungs, the warmth in my legs and hangs, the energy in my soul. It was a miraculous thing, I could feel the flush in my cheeks. Hello, new heart, I said, we will have a good time together.
“Yes,” I said to the nurse when I could, startled at the gargling sound that was my voice. “Let’s take a walk.” The nurse didn’t believe me and made me repeat the request, and then she brought in another nurse, an older woman. “Hey, I said, I want to take a walk.” And so they conferred and said it was unusual and they agreed, and they stood me up. I shudder to think what I must have looked like, still attached to all of those machines and tubes, but with a nurse on either arm, I walked two laps around the intensive care unit, nodded to patient after patient in beds all around me, their own machines humming and beeping.
I did take my walk, and then another and another.
Three days later, I did 20 laps around that room and the cardiologist on duty said, “send him home. He doesn’t need to be here.”
I did take my walk, and I am walking still.
– On the morning of the first day of my recovery, and after my walk, I fell asleep and when I woke up, i saw Maria and my daughter Emma peering around the corner taking their first look at me since I woke up. They were both smiling, a look of relief on their faces. I smiled back. The recovery was underway.
– The day after we got home, I got up and went back to the hill I couldn’t walk up just a few days earlier. Red was beside me, and he seemed to be walking interference, getting ahead of me, then circling back to walk alongside of me. Maria was on the other side of me, waiting to catch me if I fell. It hurt a bit, but I went sailing over that hill and knew that my new heart was strong and I promised to care for it and get to know it again.
I took one pain killer that morning, and then did not take another. Tylenol worked fine.
– I was not supposed to drive or lift a camera for weeks. I was fine not driving, but the camera thing really bugged me. I asked the surgeon three times if I could use my camera, she was adamant. My chest could pop open, I needed to be careful. I decided to the only thing to do was to lie and cheat. On the third day home, I picked up my camera, and took it outside to take a photo of a rose. I put it up on my blog. In the text, I said it had been taken the previous year. Maria was suspicious, but she could prove nothing. I lied to her too.
I was reborn, I thought, I will be okay.
So I am okay. I’ve been to the other side and back. Sometime during the time of the surgery, after my heart had been stopped, I felt as if I had been transported to another place. Blue lights, beautiful skies, dogs running in open fields, Maria and I sitting in a meadow by a crystalline stream, a city glowing on a hill above us. And maybe I was.
I didn’t know it at the time, but my friend Paul was right. I have work to do, people to love, books to write, open houses to plan, photos to take. And a strong new heart with which to do it all. Every morning, I charge up that hill and blow a kiss to the Gods. For all of our sorrows and laments, our failures and struggles, we still live in a world where miracles happen all time, if we are open them.
