Jordan Zakarin

Ah, Memories

Don’t think I’m not aware of how fucking boring this blog as gotten. I know. But in my defense, it’s been an uphill battle to keep it from reaching the lows of boredom and monotony that my actual, convalescing life has reached. Write what you know, but don’t kill your audience.

I was thinking back on it, and realized that, beyond the uplifting knowledge that I’m slowly mending, there’s a lot more I can do here. Like bring the experience to detailed life for you internet voyeurs, looking for a dirty thrill. And because I was largely otherwise occupied at the hospital, I didn’t quite fulfill that potential.

So here goes.

A Ghost of Christmas Past style overview of my hospital stay, with some detailed highlights along the way. I may be repeating a few things, but fuck you, I’m recovering from heart surgery, cut me a damn break.

The first two days I can glaze over, because they were uneventful, pre-surgery days. The highlight was hearing from some friends, over the phone and online. Already, sad.

Nerves were high, and as I said then, I was tricked quite easily into thinking I was ill, already a helpless patient. A gown, an IV and a medicine pole, along with a slight limp after leg heart mapping, can do that to you. I had to keep reminding myself that, if I wanted, I could throw the damn pole over my head, because I was still able bodied and healthy.

Of course, that didn’t last long.

I’m woken up early, after a few hours interrupted sleep, the day of the surgery. Forced to get on a gurney, again while able bodied, perpetuating the myth. I was taken down to anesthesia, where a guy with a horrible cold told me he’d be standing over me the entire time while my body was ripped open. He kept sniffling and sneezing. Good start.

I’m wheeled into the operating room. I see a lot of stainless steel and sharp things. I think about how they’re going to slice through layers of skin and bone and muscle and nerves in my chest, and then be used to keep me open for six hours. It was unreal to think about. They then knock me out.

I wake up, around 8pm, in terrible pain but more concerned with the tube down my throat, breathing for me. Feels like I’m choking. I knew it was going to be there, because I remembered it from last time. I hated it last time, and before surgery, implored them to take it out as soon as possible, as soon as I ask.

Doctors think they know everything, so they say they have to make sure I can breathe on my own. I can give them the finger and bite ravenously on the tube, which I hope proves to them I can also breathe. Finally, they acquiesce, though removing the tube was like pulling a gigantic rubber hose from your lungs all through your throat. Actually, that’s exactly what it was.

I could breathe, and now the next concern was pain. I was still pretty out of it, so I could function like a human being. Actually, it didn’t hurt that bad, all things considered. Context, of course. I had been prepared for this, so while the rest of you’d be screaming, I was steeled away.

Then the nurse comes in, and says oops, the chest tube switch was turned off, so there was no suction. She flips it back on. Over a period of about 30 seconds, the pain builds and builds until I’m on the fucking ceiling. Three tubes, inserted in my chest, are stuck between my lungs, vibrating and rattling my insides as they remove blood and fluids. Breathing, which I had so eagerly proven I could do, was now the most painful thing in the world.

This was, perhaps, the worst night of my life. I have a terrible nurse, who tells me she won’t listen to my complaints, regardless of how many knives are cutting through my chest. No pain medication seems to help. When it comes to medicine, I’m like a goddamn horse — it takes extraordinary doses to take effect.

I’m given a morphine button, which becomes active every six minutes. I can’t count for shit, I’ve lost track of all time in the ICU, where the only windows look out on a nurses station intent on ignoring me. My mom, clearly rattled by the sight of a son that may or may not be turning into a mutant, keeps losing track of the six minutes. The doctors occasionally administer boluses of pain killers, which quell the pain for about three minutes at a time.

I wake up the next morning, after a few hours of terrible sleep, feeling not as bad. For about ten minutes. I was all alone, as I was allowed no visitors for hours at a time. I stared out at the nurses station, so often ignored. It seemed like they were always “changing shifts”, which meant no one got help. I would call out, please, help me, but rarely a response. People would say ask YOUR nurse, but I never knew who that was.

Finally, I leave the ICU, chest tubes and all. They won’t remove those for another day, so I won’t breathe for another day. They jostle me around in my bed as they move me down the hall, forgetting I was a fucking day out of heart surgery. Apparently old people don’t complain as much, and they were used to working with old people. That’s because all their nerve endings are dead, and they can’t feel what I’m feeling. So it’s okay to bang their beds into door frames and laugh.

The next day is awful. My lungs are still buzzing. My nurse (a grumpy guy named John who made some bad career decisions) keeps warning me about overdosing on pain medication, though a physician’s assistant tells me I’m not even sniffing that territory.

Some physical therapists come to work with me. Sorry, I don’t want to move, but they insist. I lift my legs to make them happy. They operated on my chest, thanks for the leg therapy.

My nurse that night, Aimee, is a dream. Unlike everyone else, she doesn’t take 45 minutes to get two tiny pain pills. Somehow, being tiny and Asian must make you able to cut through all the “red tape” everyone else seemed to get stuck in. Not that there wasn’t administrative protocol, or other patients to see, but I was in a small wing, and the extreme amount of time everyone else took seemed like overkill. I can wait in line, but patience only goes so far when your chest is sporting a new battle axe wound.

Another day with John, another speech about the danger of not feeling like knives are stabbing your lungs at all times. But finally, they agree to take the chest tubes out, because they are satisfied an air bubble has been removed from near my lungs.

First, metal wires implanted in my chest must be removed. A tiny little surgeon’s assistant comes by, promising me this didn’t really hurt and they didnt really give any medication to numb the area beforehand. Then she digs into my skin and unraveled and pulled out sharp metal wire from the middle of my chest, as I scream and ask her if she hates humanity.

She lets me rest for a few minutes, and then comes back for the chest tubes. She tells me to breathe out hard as she pulled them out. Maybe because she needs momentum to yank large hoses from deep inside my sternum, which must be how the Devil removes souls from humans (if that’s what he does, I don’t know). Not to make light of sexual assault, but I feel chestally raped.

I can breathe a little easier, but at that point, staying in the same position for so long had my back all frozen up. And now I could concentrate on it. I’ve never known what it really meant to have a back “go out”, but if it was what I experienced that day and night, I have new found respect for middle aged cripples everywhere.

Now free to move (so much that I could), I jostle around in bed, unable to get comfortable, no matter how high I lifted the back of hospital bed. By that evening, I set my sights on the chair next to my bed, where I can better support myself and sit up straight and have my legs move more freely.

Defying the pain in the way one does when they’re in a hospital and has to fend for his or herself, I get out of bed and slumped into the chair. Not much better, but a tiny bit, maybe. Until moving activates my extremely low blood pressure, which, coupled with withdrawal from morphine I had taken earlier in the day, has my head spinning like a heroin addict on a carousel. And it lasts all fucking night.

My cousin Ken comes to see me, and I think I scare the newlywed out of having children, the sight of me spinning and unshaven and moaning and my fresh scar at this point easily poking through whatever gown or shirt or whatever I’m wearing.

My own parents, of course just trying to help in that dedicated way they kept vigilantly for all those terrible days, keep trying to force me to eat muffins. I look at a carrot muffin and nearly vomit what surely would have been just bile and blood. Just so you know.

That night is torture — my nurse, Roy, doesn’t usually work at my hospital. He’s subbing from another one, downtown. So they put him in the heart surgery unit. Barely see him all night, as I imagine he’s wandering the halls looking for the medicine I beg him for.

I begin walking around Saturday, back still killing me. The surgeon comes by at just the right time, and, seeing me on my feet, unattached to any monitors (I had pulled off the last one I was supposed to be on), clears me to go home.

Then I wait a few hours while they dealt with an old guy’s heart attack. I do my best to be patient,really, and even act understanding.

Then I drive home along the potholed roads leading out from New York, my chest a victim of the New Jersey Highway Department’s budget shortfall.

Fun, right?

Notes

  1. jordansheartsucks posted this
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