I’ve skipped writing for two months — I’ve been a little stressed.
Back in October I was starting a series of tests to see how bad my coronary arteries had gotten. I had been getting short of breath a lot, and would actually feel some chest pain if I tried to exercise through the shortness of breath.
On the 23rd I found myself at Kaiser Oakland with a catheter threaded from my groin to my heart for an angiogram that would reveal just what shape the blood vessels in my heart were. If they were bad, but not too bad, they would put a stent or stents in there to open up the arteries and I could go home the next morning.
For this procedure they gave me fentanyl (I think). The thing about this drug is that it eliminates pain but you can still hear what is going on. Very strange — you are there, but not there.
So I could hear the doctor pefectly when he said, “We’re going to have to close him up; there are too many blockages, I can’t stent them all.”
And I remember thinking, “Sh*t, that means I’ll be getting a heart bypass operation.”
One thing I will say about the Kaiser health system is they don’t lollygag about when they think you need something. They summoned an ambulance and I went from the Oakland surgical ward to the San Francisco surgical ward and early the next morning I was on the table.
Before slicing into me, Dr. Brian Scott Cain dropped by for a visit. “You are an excellent candidate,” he said, trying to reassure me that I would survive the day. “I’ve done about 3,000 of these” he said. “I do about five a week.”
I had a mental vision of the good doctor putting a ham sandwich in his lunchbox and going off to work to carve up another ailing heart.
Coming out of anesthetic is an amazing experience. I had never been “out” before. My brain clicked on a moment before I opened my eyes. Everything was totally black and I was bereft of any mental context. I’m not sure I even knew who I was.
When I opened my eyes I recognized my son, who was sitting by my bed with his hand touching my head. Oddly, he and everything else were in black-and-white, like an old movie, at least for a few moments. “You are at Kaiser hospital,” he said, “you just had heart surgery.”
It took me a moment to consider that. “Luther is an honest young man,” I thought to myself. “He wouldn’t lie, so I guess that is what happened.”
I’m not sure how they figured out that I had suffered a mild stroke while the operation was going on. I know they did a CAT scan on my head. And the next day they determined that the peripheral vision on my left side was slightly affected. My brain was not alerting me to things that were in front of me, low and to the left. If someone would point out the object, I could see it, but I didn’t notice it unprompted.
Thankfully, and I am deeply, totally grateful for this, my vision cleared up in a day or three. But by then I was a “stroke victim” and destined for four more days in the hospital followed by six more at Kaiser’s rehab facility in Vallejo.
There I began to discover just how fortunate I really was. A lot of patients in Vallejo were stroke people, and some of them were in pretty sad shape. I actually was coddled more than I really needed to be, seen by various different kinds of therapists, prodded and tested and guided in walking, stair climbing, ramp walking, doing word games and number puzzles. And always looking down and to the left.
A heart operation requires one’s sternum be split and wired shut. I asked my (other) cardiologist if I would be setting off airport alarms. “No,” she said. “There is some wire in there but it is too fine to register on the TSA machine. Plus a lot of the bone is held together by sort of high-tech zip ties.”
I got a long list of things to do and not to do. One was not to pick up anything weighing more than five pounds for about eight weeks. Thus (and here is some bluegrass content at last) my banjo was off-limits. It took a month before I even got my small guitar out.
Happily, my fingers still worked, although I was a bit out of practice. About two weeks ago I finally pulled my five-string out and picked “Clinch Mountain Backstep” and some other tunes. Left hand: check. Right hand: check. Good to go!
I had been told not to drive a car for a while. That meant life was boring for me and tedious for my dear wife, who had to drive me to something like ten follow-up appointments. But eventually an ophthalmologist checked my peripheral vision, an optometrist made me some new glasses, and I was back on the road.
On Saturday, 13 weeks after surgery, I’ll be playing a gig in San Francisco.
I feel like I’ve spent time in a dark place, but spring is coming, my chest is almost totally healed, and my gratitude for a pretty perfect recovery is overflowing.
And a shout-out to my wife, who was always there, my family, who visited and brought food to the hospital, and later to my home, and friends who did the same, and a large number of get-well cards and Facebook messages. Thank you and bless you all. I never felt alone.
