Not being able to put it off any longer, I finally submitted to their evil machinations once again. Make no mistake, open-heart is no picnic. In fact it's the most painful thing I've ever been through in my entire life. It's a lot different from a bypass, so don't let anyone tell you the two are the same. In a bypass they take veins out of your leg and make new arteries to repair blockages around your heart. It's serious, dangerous, and painful as hell. The number of bypasses depends on your condition. The more you have, the longer it takes, and the hairier the operation. In open-heart you graduate to the next level. They do the same thing to you that they do in a bypass, namely saw your breastbone in half and spread your ribs apart like a frying chicken about to be gutted. But then they get nasty. With open-heart they stop your heart then cut it open, holding it apart with yet another set of retractors as they worked feverishly to repair the damage. That's because the clock's ticking. The longer your heart is stopped, the harder it is to re-start it. In my case they had to cut out what was left of my damaged valve and replace it with a new "bovine" valve. They have a life span of 20 years-plus instead of the old 5 to 7 years the standard pig valve has. The cardiac center I had this done at is rated number three in the nation. I expected things to go as well as possible, though my risk factor was understandably high because of the extensive damage. I couldn't have been more wrong. Start to finish, the entire ordeal was a nightmare straight out of Hell itself...
I can suffer pain. I've had a lot of it in my life. I've been hurt so many times I can no longer keep track of it. And as I said, I've been through open-heart before and knew what to expect. I knew it was going to be bad. But what I went through the first time around couldn't come close to the horror and agony those bastards put me through this time. It was literally off the scale of human suffering and it changed me forever. No man or animal should ever have to live through that under any circumstances. And although the majority of the medical personnel involved were caring, professional people, there was a small cadre of demons incarnate that ensured my stay there would be.. unforgettable...The first inkling I got that something was wrong was when I woke up in ICU and discovered that the operation hadn't taken place! That's right. They had connected all the lines, shaved me, knocked me out, laid me out on the operating table..then stopped cold and shipped me to ICU! I was mystified to say the least and demanded an explanation from my attending nurse. She was strangely silent and sent for a physician's assistant, who took his sweet ass time in getting around to me. Actually, I got more truth out of my sister who had been there waiting for word of me, than I did from the glib, smooth talking PA. Turns out that just before they went to work I went into a severe cardiac episode because all my potassium was strangely vanishing out of my system and they couldn't figure out why, let alone stop it. Potassium is critical for heart function. Too little and your heart stops, too much and you have a heart attack. For some reason my levels were near zero! No matter how much of it they pumped into me intravenously, it didn't help. I just kept losing it. I found this very, very suspicious considering I'd never had a problem like that before in my entire life, and it just happened to choose that exact moment to vanish? Right.. And if you believe that was a simply coincidence, I bet you voted for Obama too...
The cardiac team kept calling my surgeon who was sipping coffee in the doctor's lounge, waiting for them to stabilize me and call him to come in and do his thing (typical Prima donna). They were constantly calling him in desperation, trying to get him to give them some advice on how to get my levels back up. In a fit of frustration this orifice says, "Well what do you expect? He's near death! If he dies, he dies. There's nothing I can do." Then he went back to his latte'... Finally they got my pulse stable and shipped me to ICU. My sister was livid. She'd been told this by an RN she happened to know who was working the floor. I lay in my bed and boiled helplessly, deciding not to rock the boat, considering my predicament at the time. Sis stayed there two days and nights, keeping an eye on these clowns and getting all the information she could pry loose. I had several aunts and uncles who also kept vigil and were in and out constantly, so I always had someone in the waiting room in case of an emergency. The next morning rolled around and they wheeled me into the operating theater. I guess they call it that because it's quite a show for the interns and other assorted ghouls who choose to view the proceedings. Personally I'd find it disgusting. But then I'm normal...It was only a few days later that I found out the truth about what happened next. None of the medical staff would tell me squat, and it took my relatives and a lot of prying, threatening and digging to get to the bottom of it all. It turns out that as soon as they put the mask on my face and knocked me out, I started fighting them like a crazy man, trying to get loose and pull that damned respirator out of my throat. They had apparently just jammed that evil thing down my gullet when I went off on them. It took the entire team of doctors, nurses, and a couple of orderlies to sit on me and hold me down so they could restrain my arms, legs, and head with heavy straps. I have no memory of that part because of the particular drugs they gave me. Much later I found out that all victims of their operations are first given a knockout drug, then another drug to erase your memory of the ordeal. Yep. This is a fact, boys and girls. They do this to cover their collective asses in case things go south and you remember the hell they put you through. If you don't remember, you don't sue. Next, they administer a derivative of curare, a South American poison used by the native tribesmen to cover the tips of their blow gun darts. When a poisoned dart hits a monkey or bird in the tall trees, it instantly becomes paralyzed and falls to the jungle floor. It does the same thing to a human and makes things a lot easier for the cardiac team. It prevents their patients from involuntary movement and jerks which could cause a life threatening slip of the scalpel. A good idea, right? Sure. That is, if you don't wake up during the surgery..like I did...
But I'm getting ahead of myself.. I was out cold but still fighting them, and yet these boobs didn't have the sense to know that the human body takes over and fights even if you're out cold..if you're suffocating! But after giving me a massive dose of curare, I stopped fighting and they resumed their work regardless of my distress, which the idiot anesthesiologist never thought to check into. He was an elderly gook with the brains of a bowl of fried rice. Much later I discovered the reason why I went berserker on them. This moron had set my respirator to supply enough air for the lungs of a five-year-old! I was able to only take a tiny, tiny breath of air and exhale the same tiny amount, always leaving me on the very brink of suffocation. But this boob didn't check the settings, not even once during the entire nine-hour operation! Oh, but the fun just starts at this point. Hell, we haven't even opened the curtain on this danse macabre..I was out cold as they opened me up like a can of soup. Then they hooked me up to a heart\lung machine, cooled and stopped my heart, and I was clinically dead for over 7 hours. What I experienced during that time I won't discuss here. It would take far too much time and effort, and some of it is quite personal. Suffice it to say that few would believe it, and leave it at that. Besides, it has little bearing on my experience with these ghouls...
They then cut open my heart and removed my damaged valve and installed the new one. After that they did a bypass on the right ventricle artery because the leakage from the damaged valve had blocked it over time. Then they began to close. After my heart was put back together they attempted to re-start it.. and failed. Realizing they now had a new problem, they began working feverishly to bring me back to the land of the living. They made a bunch of sincere efforts to get me going again, all to no avail. I had been dead too long. I had been on the table for nine hours, and most of that as a corpse. Blood had actually started to pool and settle in my butt, just like it does in a corpse at a crime scene, making a large black area under the skin. They were all but ready to pull the sheet over me and wheel me to the fridge, when after one last try I rallied. They were pretty surprised according to one of the nurses there. After that they began to close me up, sewing me back together. They never bother to do all this until they know you've survived because after all, the coroner is just going to undo the stitches anyway during the post mortem.Things were going along just fine for them, and perhaps they would have for me as well except for the horrific fact that during the tail end of the procedure I woke up!!! I now know why this happened as well. It was because of the same damned reason I fought them so hard in the beginning. I needed air! Even after all this time that dumb-assed chink still hadn't discovered his error and fixed it. That left me strangling for air again when they re-started me on the respirator. I strongly suspect that it was also the reason why they had such a hard time reviving me as well, though I'm mystified as to why the oxygen levels in my blood didn't raise some red flags long before that. So here I was, spread-eagled on the operating table, strapped down from head to toe and totally and completely paralyzed. On top of this I was struggling violently for air, which was still being given to me in insanely tiny doses. It was hell on earth. To make matters worse I couldn't even move an eyelash. Nothing. Not a finger, an eyeball, a toe, nothing! I frantically sent signals to every part of my body only to get no response whatsoever. It was one of the most frightening experiences of my life. Then I started to feel them work on me...
I'm not going to go into what I experienced because there are too many of you out there that just wouldn't be able to handle it. All I'm going to say is that it changed me forever. That's because during the entire last hour of the operation I felt everything!!! Everything had worn off except the curare!!! I couldn't bat an eye, or make a sound, or scream, or move a muscle, but only lay there like a stone statue and go through it. I leave the rest to your imaginations...After the operation I was wheeled into ICU. I was hooked up to a monstrous battery of IV lines, manifolds, valves, bags and machines that made me look like a prop out of a science fiction movie. But I still couldn't move a muscle. It was there, in that dark recovery room that I was to meet two of the most evil, sadistic women I've ever known...
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