first, my, shall i say, heartfelt thanks to richard fernandez for seeing something in my post, and printing and linking it.

i have gotten a good deal of traffic at my little shop, (whose circulation is nornally in the 10′s, laughing), so i appreciate very much what richard has done.

second, i have enjoyed this comment thread very, very much. i read at the experiences of others, and marvel, especially the next preceding post from fred, no. 24, and those other comments talking of the effects of pain killing drugs.

they are a mixed blessing, aren’t they?

my surgeons were good. my recovery proves this, i think. my nursing care was “sketchy,” to say the least. the hospital i was in utilizes “c.n.a.’s” to a very great extent, and they simply cannot match the skills of an older r.n. young nurses do not have the nursing skills of older hands, it is just that simply. nor are they as attentive.

but, i have enjoyed this thread tremendously, and i hope that it has been of some service. it has been to me, as i have taken to heart many of the things said in here.

I just sent a thank you card to the surgeon and his team (he is himself a Canadian expat who left a hospital in Toronto to found the program at CMC and is very critical of socialized medicine). He wrote me back and said the thank you card made his day.

Mom was in, all totaled, both hospitals for over a month. She’s home now and recovering nicely. She gets visiting PT and OT care, along with some nursing. In fact, this past week both the surgeon and nurse discharged her. Dad still has to manage her and he’s in charge of her medications.

The shock of seeing one’s mother in the bloated condition after this surgery cannot be adequately expressed. A week later, she was coming out of the fog and was hallucinating and saying things that made no sense at all.

She says she remembers nothing from the time the ambulance got her into the ER at Exeter, NH hospital back on April 20th. She was under morphine a lot of the time. It’s amazing that for most of the better part of three weeks she remembers not one of us visiting her and being in her room.

Under socialized medicine she would not have been given this second chance at life. She would have been given the morphine drip and this past Mother’s Day would have been a very gloomy one for all of us.

Oh, and I forgot to add that right after surgery they could not bring her back. She had flatlined. A very large blood clot had traveled up from her leg and went into her heart. They were able to find it, had to open her up again, and got it out. They were then able to bring her back. I think about the timing of this. If this clot had moved before surgery she’d be dead. If it happened hours after surgery, she’d be dead. We were most fortunate. During that long day I often left the waiting room and my family to spend time in the chapel. Many Hail Mary’s, both in English and French. Irony of ironies, the hospital is only a few blocks away from the French neighborhood my wife’s dad grew up in (he died in Feb. ’05). I thought of Ted a lot and asked him if he had any pull in the heavenly domains.

That was the worst part. Freaking brilliant surgeon. (First transplant in GA (BSEE from U of Mo Rolla Maybe better if it were BSME, But who cares) Good RN’s Good LPN’s, not an awful experience. But the pump head was awful. Took me 3 weeks to get where I could breathe and think right.

I think a lot of the people here are “in the zone”; go see a Doc who will look at the pump and the piping my pump’s fine the pipes are a problem.

Marcus,
Perhaps more would recover if they had waited to embalm. We still seem to have a shaky idea of what life is, and when it ends. Some survive when others die for no reason. Or is there now a rush for organs, so who cares if you cut a few corners? Or if you are the Chinese government.

A variation on that story is the Japanese whose puffer fish is a little too toxic, but not toxic enough. They come back too on the embalming table or in the refrigerator.

He came to in the morgue just before they were going to embalm him. He tells a very interesting story of what he saw, who he saw, and what he was told.

My chief experience with pain is gall stones. That was enough. My father had several major heart surgeries. Still survives at 93. Since his first heart attack was when he was 17 years younger than I am now, clearly we are doing some things right with statin drugs. Major heart surgeries may be put off for years with the drug treatments.

Some amazing things. I had recurrent serious internal bleeding for 5 years. The surgeon wanted to explore, slice open the belly, and poke around to find the bleeding. With months long recovery. I was saved from slicing by a camera invented by Israelis. A “pill camera”, swallowed, that took thousands of pictures as it tumbled along my intestinal tract. They found an area of inflammation, said it was a thing called Crohn’s disease. Now take pills to reduce inflammation. Have not bled in 4 years.

So it may be our era of thousands of heart bypasses is just a phase, until we find a much better way, medication, or nano tech. Soon the “primitive” camera i swallowed, (they didn’t want it back), will be replaced with one with wings and a laser to cut whatever they find. A modern version of Asimov’s “Incredible Journey”

We live in interesting times.

The first time I was 10 or 11 years old and had my appendix removed. The anesthetist had to reinsert the IV and then usual schtick about counting back from 100, I can only remember I did not get too far. Then the next thing was coming back to. The biggest thing I remember about that was Jonestown — I remember having to stay inside for recess and reading the news mags about the recent disaster that was Jonestown.

About five or six years ago I underwent a wisdom tooth removal and being somewhat on the old side & have four teeth to get out I went to an oral surgeon and they put me under a general. Again same sorta deal, I had some music (somewhat ironically, the last song I recall hearing was “Lay A Garland” not really a song one may want to hear “Lay a garland on my hearse of the dismal yew…”) I brought in and and 100, 99, 98, 9….., then I came too and knowing it was over (what else would explain all the cr@p in my mouth) but it seeming so quick so I joked “When are we going to start”, needless to say I was unable to say that with the proper tone so as to convey my knowledge it was done. Oh well.

The distinct recollection I got was that there is a profound difference from sleep and general. Even when one is deep asleep one has a sense of time. When one awakes in the middle of the night one can get close to knowing what time it is, but one has none of that when under a general. It seem a blink to me when I last went under that general though my mother tells me it was more like 45 minutes.

I shudder when I hear those stories of things going awry under general and I’m not talking about death but the occasional story of the patient being paralyzed but not being rendered unconscious by the anesthetic. So, they feel what is happening to them but are completely powerless to stop it.