recovery

I am home, back in Reno with a big ole scar down the middle of my chest and a new list of pills to take.  This will I think be the final post in the Heart Surgery Odyssey series.

The basic outline of my post-op recovery overseas was to be a week in the hospital, then another week at a local hotel.   Dr Cicek however kindly offered to let me remain at the hospital the whole time.   The tradeoff was that I would experience a lot less of the real Istanbul, but on the other hand, I tire so quickly that I wouldn’t realistically experience much more than a three block radius from my hotel anyway, and I would be saving $160-ish a day!   So I went for it.  As I found out when I got home, even small things like sleeping on a regular horizontal bed are kind of hard when you are used to being tilted up on those cool configurable hospital beds, so I think it was the right decision – I’d rather be uncomfortable in my own home!

Every day they would remove more and more apparatii (apparatuses ?) from me.  The neck thingie that let them pump drugs directly to my heart through the carotid artery was unstitched and removed first day. I also had a little complex of wires buried in my tummy that had two different monitoring boxes attached.  This made things like walking down to the cafe a little cumbersome, carrying these boxes around.  The larger one came out after two days and the little pocket model after four days.   Then followed a kind of a hazy week where all I did was read, fiddle around on the laptop (reading political blogs and downloading audio of shows I like (the connection speed was too crappy to download video)), have coffee in the courtyard and sleep, sleep, sleep.

My second post-op Wednesday turns out to be media day, where a camera crew filmed an interview with me and Dr C about my experience.  I hope I gave them their money’s worth, because my experience really was good, if “good” is appropriate for such a basically awful thing.

Oct 09 – I have gone viral!  That interview has made it to YouTube, at the link above.

I also recently discovered that I have my own page on the hospital website: John Freeman is from Rino/Nevada! It’s entertaining, more or less a transcription of the YouTube interview. :)

On one of those recovery days I got a post-op echo-cardiogram (the fun one), which confirmed that Dr C had done a great job, and my valve was functioning “perfectly”.  He was very pleased, as of course was I.

Then the Friday before I left, they treated me to another day with Erhan the driver.  We went to a very cool restaurant overlooking the Bosporus, where we started the day with coffee and dessert.  We went to a Turkish shopping mall and ate Turkish mall food (pretty good actually), and finally to a strait-side fancy district called Bebek (“baby” in Turkish) where Erhan chilled and I took a short walk along the water and looked at the yachts and water scenery.   Istanbul is to my limited experience, very much a first-world European type city, like Lisbon or Paris, rather than third-worldy, like say Mexico City.  People seem to love hanging out in cafes above all else, and I could see spending a lot of time here.

Rest all weekend.

the last day

Monday is my final day in Turkey.  I have my final interview with Dr Cicek.  He described in pretty great detail what he did in there.  My impression is that bypass surgery is not very technically interesting – cut out a piece of vein from over there and sew it over here, anybody from the “heart surgery tech institute” could do it :).  The valve repair however seems to be much more of an art form, involving as it does parts that move and little flanges of flesh that are supposed to be just the right degree of rigid versus supple to provide a perfect seal on each heartbeat.  He drew me little pictures of cutting out flesh here, adding flesh there, putting a little plastic ring around the whole thing, and there was even some gortex involved; I am evidently carrying some around now, in the “striae”.

I was very interested in the interaction between my two major ailments.  Turns out that the original November heart attack was caused way more by the clogged artery than the bad valve, although the bad valve got all the blame since we didn’t know about the clogged artery.  Dr C hinted that an experienced doctor would have made an educated guess that there was more going on than just the bad valve, but no one had done that out loud to me.

Then we talked about lifestyle, diet etc.  The rest of my life divides into two parts:

• the first eight weeks after the surgery (now five weeks!), where the answer to “can I do this?” is almost always NO! Well, I can walk as much as I want, but cannot drive/swim/go to hot spring/bike/play any sport/you name it.  It terms of body movements, pretty much everything is cool except “torquing” my ribcage – that is very uncool during these these weeks.
• the rest of my life, which he tells me should be pretty normal.  The idea is that it takes eight weeks for the ribcage to completely heal, and one wants to be very conservative until that process finishes.

As of this writing, I still tire very easily and am sort of all-around zoned out, and I look forward very much to not being so.

the last night

As a final treat, they basically discharged me that afternoon, so from the staff point of view, I was no longer a patient that needed to be poked for blood every two days and measured every four hours, I was just a guy taking up a room for another night.

Erhan picked me up around 5-ish, and drove me to Suadiye and turned me loose for a couple of hours.  I got to wander the streets on my own, catch my breath on street corners and look at pretty turkish girls bustle past, and go to a cafe and order coffee and baklava on my own – how very exciting!  Having baklava in Turkey was on my checklist of things I wanted to do over here.

Then we drove to a fancy seaside restaurant area, where he turned me loose again to have a nice meal at one of the fancy restaurants.  I had something pretty basic, garlic shiskabob as I recall, but the extra cool thing was that the maitre’d recognized the little bit of scar visible above my shirt for what it was.  Turns out he (a very fit looking forty-something guy) had had open heart surgery also, so we immediately bonded, and he boosted me a half-order of shwarma and a fruit plate.   I think he said shwarma, but whatever, it was an extremely tasty strip of grilled lamb that was a hundred times more tasty than my ground meat shiskabobs.  That was excellent on its own, and it also told me that I was now a member of a fraternity previously unknown to me, the fraternity of dudes (and women come to think of it – hi sis!) with big ole heart surgery scars down their chests.

Back to the hospital, finish packing. The restaurant experience prompted me to compose current Facebook pic when I got back to my camera – of me in my striped shirt unbuttoned a little to flash some scar.

I flew to Turkey with three carry-ons – backpack, laptop, bookbag.  Backpack didn’t seem like a good idea for my recovering chest, so I packed it in my suitcase, which would get me down to two carry-ons. But … the International Relations folks gave me a very nice little bowl in a nice box in a nice shopping bag, so as it turns out I had three carry-ons going back also.  Some things are just meant to be.

In bed by about 11:30, giving me a delightful three hours of sleep before the thirty hour ordeal described next.

getting home

Here is the one time on the whole trip where I would have really loved to have a companion.  I’m pretty independent in my crusty bachelorhood, so in general, having a companion over here would have been just one more thing to worry about, ha,ha. But managing carry-on bags through three airports is something I coulda definitely used some help on.

• up at 2:30 AM, Erhan drives me to the airport for my 5:55 AM flight.  He lugs my suitcase to the end of the half-hour line for the KLM ticket window, we shake hands and he is gone and I am alone in the cold, cruel world of international transportation.  Erhan is a really nice guy – he did not approve of my  bachelorhood, he kept asking if I was going to get remarried, little motherly hints like – would I come back and visit with my new wife, etc.  I tried to give him the 411 but he was pretty determined.
• for this particular flight I was able to get a window seat with a view.  We will fly over Bulgaria and the Danube, and that’s probably as close as I will get to those places in this lifetime.  It was pretty cool.  The Danube is really windy (that is, it has a lot of bends rather than a lot of wind).
• Amsterdam airport – got rid of my Turkish lira in one of those charity kiosks (shoulda given it to Erhan, my bad), used some of my euros to buy that frenchy fast food I love so much – a baquette with ham and sweet buter (yum), turned the rest of my euros back into dollars, and off I go to the second round of belt and boot removing security of the day. Maybe there was some kind of security situation, because the Dutch seem noticeably more pissy about everything than they were three weeks ago. We even had a passport check getting OFF the plane!  Little brown men were shuttled off to talk to grim looking Dutch security and the rest of us were waved through. The security check getting on the plane also had a little edge to it – they took away my hospital bottled water – jerks.
• Amsterdam-Seattle, ten hours – caught a break on this one, I scored an aisle seat with an empty seat next to me – the universe making up for the horrors of the fat lady coming over – thank you universe!   The flight coming over was an actual KLM flight, smiling blondes in blue uniforms everywhere, and lots of amenities – hot towels, brandy with your coffee.  This flight was a Northwest flight – no blondies, our steward was a biker-looking dude (but no hatin’, he was a very attentive and competent biker dude).  Anyway, Northwest is shorter on the civilized amenties, but way ahead on the technological wizardry – each seat had its own video screen with controller.  About 20 movies to choose from, and this very cool zooming world map feature which kept me occupied for probalby an hour or so.  I watched Gran Torino and this really, really cool indie movie about a Japanese zoo.
• Seattle – six hour layover in Seattle, which completely kicked my ass and destroyed any energy I had left.  I was doing pretty good till this, but by now, my body thought is was like 3AM Turkey-time, and I’d been up since 2:30 the previous day.   I called Danny to confirm pick-up about 40 minutes before the flight, and somehow lost my phone in that short interval, because I was just too f—ing tired to follow usual airport pocket-checking protocols.
• Seattle-Reno – uneventful except for being pissed about my phone.  I realized the loss when they said to “turn off devices” and I couldn’t find my device.  “Stop the plane, I need to go back for my phone!” didn’t seem like a good idea.  The plane had propellers!  I didn’t know they still used those things.
• Thank so much Danny and Ashley for coming into baggage check and helping me lug my suitcase out to the car.

being home

It sure is great to be back home.  It’s been almost a week now, and sleep patterns are approaching “normal” (they never really are that normal anyway…).   I’m doing a lot of walking, but I tire easily.   Actually just walking goes pretty well, but if I try to talk to someone while walking, well I just don’t have the breath for it.

Dr C wants me to get a blood test this week and mail him the results to see if we need to adjust my blood thinner med.

Martha came up this weekend, with Tyler (toddler grandson) this time, we had a great time and I need a nap.

Some time this week I will decide that Seattle airport is not going to find my phone so I will have to decide if NOW is iPhone time or if I will just get the best free phone and commit to two years of servitude like I always have before.

I can drink and eat like a normal person, but of course moderation is the plan at least until I feel like a normal person.

Tune in later for exciting new topics:

• Will John be able to afford his dream machine RV camper van?
• Will John give himself a lifestyle transplant to go along with (and pay for) the RV?
  – sell his ideal downtown Reno party-pad condo
  – buy a modest little house near downtown.

all this and more in future episodes.