Open Heart Surgery:Life after your heart stops

November 19th, we learned that the main artery to the front of my husband’s heart was 100% blocked. This blockage had happened slowly enough that capillary growth in the heart had attempted to supplement the missing blood flow. The heart muscle was not damaged, yet something needed to be done, and soon.

This is where the angels come in.

One of the best surgeons in Oregon in one of the top cardiothoracic hospitals was available and willing to do the by-pass surgery the day before Thanksgiving. This is a daunting surgery with a long three month recovery. Yet, it’s winter on the farm, so there is much less demand for my husband’s help. Plus I had taken time off for the holidays and was available to support him. And so it happened.

To do the surgery, the surgery team must stop the heart. Don was on a heart lung machine for a few hours. In other words, he died so that he could live. Talk about a story for the Christmas holiday! Recovery has been challenging, and he gets stronger every day.

What we’ve learned so far from this experience:

Gratitude is the antidote to fear. The synchronicities that led to this event were so amazing that we were able to focus (most of the time) on how deeply grateful we were to learn of the blockage before he had a serious, heart-damaging, potentially fatal attack. Plus he had first class medical care and a renown expert surgeon available to him, and health insurance (thank you Medicare!) to mitigate the enormous cost, not to mention the timing of the event. Whenever the fear would threaten to take hold, we were able (most of the time) to turn to gratitude. It was strong medicine and calmed both us in the face of a scary life-altering surgery.

Anesthesia sucks but what we do without it. In order to stabilize patients after such a brutal and invasive (yet necessary) surgery, they are kept under anesthesia for about six hours or so after the surgery while in the ICU. That’s a heavy dose of the stuff. Don is still experiencing brain fog and is still clearing the anesthesia out of his system. It’s frustrating to feel like he left his brain in the operating room, yet try to imagine this surgery without anesthesia!

The body remembers even if the mind doesn’t. It took Don more than twos weeks after the surgery to start to feel a bit more like himself. This wasn’t only the disorienting time recovering in the hospital, the pain meds and weakness, his heart (and the leg they took the vein from to provide the by-pass artery) remembered the surgery even though he couldn’t. He’s still adjusting to having a newly remodeled heart and leg. These parts of him are still learning who they are together with the rest of his body. He won't feel like his "old" self. He's building a new physical sense of self. We don't realize how much our felt sense of self is grounded in our experience of our bodies until something changes.

Unconscious movement habits are tricky. Don has to be very protective of his sternum. This means not reaching or moving in certain ways. Those automatic movements and response patterns are hard to shake, yet the consequences of moving the wrong way are serious. Having to become aware of automatic habits like reaching for a dish overhead is taxing and takes effort. The best approach came from a nurse: he’s to think of himself as a T-Rex dinosaur with little tiny arms in front of his body. Talk about a change in body image! "T-Rex" is our new code word for "would you get the dish from the top shelf."

Ideas aren’t reality and both are necessary. So much of what we do is based in memory and automatic unconscious patterns rather than on the sensory data available to our brains in the present. If you had to think before you made any movement or spoke, imagine how life would go (slowly!). The surgeon was using concepts of how the body works to guide the procedure yet adjusted the plan based on what he actually found in Don’s heart. The nurse who was most helpful to Don was able to extrapolate from a previous experience to identify a complication Don had while still in the hospital by putting together actual observations with a concept of what those observations could mean. The combination of concepts combined with actual observations is powerful. It takes both to be effective.

Often our ideas get in the way of effective actions or behavior, particularly in relationships where we gradually automate each other based on our expectations and memories, rather than being fully present with each other. Part of the reason for creating the Essential Skills for Couples was to connect useful concepts with practical action and skills to boost your relationship satisfaction and mastery.