Nick vs. The Impacted Turd

This is part two of Nick's open heart surgery adventures. Look at that manly scar! Now you know why they call guys who have undergone the bypass as belonging to "the zipper club." All I know is that Nick's personal account of heart surgery presents a different picture of the hospital experience than is presented on the Sutter Memorial website.
Nick: That just blew me away. And I immediately started mourning. I think what I was morning was loss of control of my body. The fact that I couldn’t eat any better or walk any more or take a Rolaid or some sort of mind-altering drug. This was something that was now out of my control. I started to cry. Quite softly. But not out of pity or anger or anything like that. It was more, like I said, mourning. I’ve done all the right things. I shouldn’t be hearing this. So, after a little while, I composed myself. This all took place within an hour. The surgeon came in. He’s probably 45 years old. He said, “I’m going to do your bypass. I’m going to take good care of you. So don’t worry. He said, “Look. This is all about genetics. I can see that you’ve taken good care of yourself. It’s about your family history.” And I continued to hear that throughout my whole say in the hospital, from the nurses and from other doctor who came in. And the surgeon told my brother – he said, “Look. You need to get checked.” So he said he’s going to do the procedure and that we’d do it the next day. And then they rolled me to a room. Then people started coming in to visit, once more and more people heard. Dave came. One thing I did learn from this whole thing is, you know what? Visiting people in the hospital is a great thing to do. I will definitely make more time to do that. Because it just made the time pass. So they left. At 10 p.m., they started the prep. I took a shower. They shaved more – basically everything.
Q: For you, that must have been an intensive procedure. Did the fly in a specialist from the Gillette Corporation?
Nick: I think she was from Fiji.
Q: Oooooooh. That’s erotic.
Nick: Anyway, all this is happening. I got there at 5:30. I didn’t get to sleep until about 11.
Q: Did you sleep?
Nick: Yeah, I did. I slept pretty well. Except that my roommate needed to have an impacted turd physically removed from his colon. He’s about 75. He got constipated. I thought to myself, “Oh, great. Look what I have to look forward to..”
Q: All the more reason to rock now.
Nick: Rock now. Because you may suffer from impacted turds later. When they actually did it, he kind did that Little Richard “Whoooooooooo!” He was brave about it. But he let out a couple of “Oooooooohs.”
Q: That’s a juicy detail. And this is what the Geezer Rock blog is all about.
Nick: I finally got to sleep. The next morning, my family started coming in. I didn’t want it to be a big, dramatic thing, but they came. They wheeled me in to pre-op. The anesthesiologist comes in and says, “This is what’s going to happen. My family in there, sitting off to the side. And I’m thinking, it’s almost like I’m in a coffin and they’re mourners. So finally, my family goes off into the waiting room and they roll me in. The only thing that I can really remember from here until I woke up was this light that almost look like the bottom of a spaceship. You know how in the movies where you see the spaceship coming down? It was like one of those. I don’t remember anything after that. I was out. The next thing I remember was the nurse saying “Oh, yeah, go in there, he’s sleeping. Wake up, Mr. Ciani. Your family’s here.” I’m groggy. I want to wake up. I open my eyes kind of to say, “I got through that. I’m here.”
Q: Then you go to intensive care for a couple of days.
Nick: They have you medicated on a lot of things. I’m in and out the whole time. Friends are coming in the whole time. The television is playing with no sound. I’m just seeing these loops of…storyboards. One after another. The nurses are monitoring all your vital functions all the time. Especially the first day. They’re checking your catheter. They’re checking this and they’re checking that. It seemed like constantly. People are there. Lots of people. But at night, intensive care gets very strange. Eight-thirty, nine o’clock and night, all the patients are there, quiet. But the people at intensive care, the people who work there are…partying. It didn’t bother me. A lot of banter. “Who wants dinner?” They’re playing cards out there. My door was open. It was really healing. There’s life going on. So you’re not focused on what’s going on with you. So all that’s going on. Then, this guy, who ultimately becomes my roommate later on, Mr. Peabody (not his real name), who is 83 years old and has dementia. I hear them telling him, “Mr. Peabody, where are you going?” And Mr. Peabody says, “I don’t know.” And they tell him, “Go back to bed.” Now, I can’t even lift my head up off the pillow. And Mr. Peabody, who’s had the same procedure that I had, is getting ready to go somewhere. So, you know, I’m making mental notes of this. And with every shift change, nurses are briefing each other about their patients. All this is going on outside my door. So every chart they’re reading, I know start to think they’re talking about me. And so, it’s been a day or so now. I can’t even stand up and walk to the bathroom. You don’t know how many days have gone by. The next night, the same thing. Mr. Peabody is getting up and he’s ready to go somewhere. He doesn’t know where he’s going. But he’s got to get up and go somewhere. The next day, they sent him on. I got pretty upset. I didn’t know how many days I had been there. And it seemed like people were getting out of the intensive care and I wasn’t. I wasn’t getting out of bed. And here’s Mr. Peabody, he’s about ready to go tap dancing.
©2007 Edward Dean Chance. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.