pre-op

It was difficult to start the first post of this story until I had some kind of plan to report.  Otherwise, all I would have had to say was “boy I sure am fucked and let me whine about it for a while”, which is boring. But once the medical tourist plan was in place, it was pretty easy to write, because I had something to say!

Likewise, once I got here, with the awesomeness of it all staring me in the face, it was difficult to post until the damn thing was over and I could finish with “and then I woke up!”.

Tuesday May 19

First of all, let me say that my last night in Reno Tuesday night was just lovely.  Martha arranged for Tyler to be baby-sat Wed morning and she drove over the Sierras to see me off. We had a nice dinner, then wandered around my usual haunts saying good bye to people, and I was pretty lucky in running into the special people I especially wanted to see (though I did miss some of you).  We spent the early evening hanging at Se7en with Ashley’s crew and Cassie and Stasia, and got to see Haley for a few minutes.  They even got me a little get well card – which got me all misty.

Tuesday afternoon I had ventured into the ‘burbs to do my final errands — return library books, wire the $18000 to to the Hospital (yikes! stressful), and bought a euro-plug adapter at Walmart to be able to plug in my laptop at the hospital, and I’m ready to go!

Wednesday-Thursday June 20-21

These are basically one very long day to me — 34 hours of flying and waiting to fly, plus I gained 10 hours flying eastward.   For the record:

• wake-up 6-ish (thanks Martha)
• Reno airport 9AM (thanks Cassie)
• hang out Reno airport  1.5 hours
• Reno to LAX   1.5 hours
• hang out LAX  5 hours
• LAX to Amsterdam 10.5 hours
• hang out Amsterdam 9 hours
• Amsterdam to Istanbul 3 hours

add ’em up and you get 34-ish hours of waiting and sitting.  I will say that as airlines go I liked KLM pretty well, and if I am going to be marooned in a giant building for 9 hours, the Amsterdam airport was as good a place as any to be.

Erhan the driver picked me up at the Istanbul International airport in the official hospital van at about 2:30 AM, and here I am, 4:45 AM Friday local time, being admitted. Ten minutes in the hospital, and already they’ve got one of those nasty needles stuck in me; which they immediately had to tape over as I insisted on a shower (34 hours!).  Nobody speaks very good English, but they are all very nice.

Admission

Here are a couple of hospital rules.  They were not obvious to me at first, but by now they are:

• for the whole time you are admitted to a hospital you must have one of those needles in your arm.  I’m sure it has a more technical name, but I don’t know it.  It’s got a little plastic cap attached, so you can put more stuff in, or take more blood out.  I guess the idea is that you never know when you’re gonna need some pain killer or some kind of fixer-upper, so why not keep a handy spigot installed for it. You’ll see, that’ll be the first thing you get when you’re checked in, and the last thing they rip out when you check out.
• If they are taking you somewhere official you must get wheeled there. Unless of course, it’s your officially required exercise, then you must walk.

As soon as I had quiet time I toured my television channels and made the wonderful discovery that the NBA playoff games are shown live on channel 11 from 3:30AM to 7 AM – Istanbul is exactly 10 hours ahead of Reno.  Kinda screws up my sleep patterns, but the hospital routine is pretty hostile to regular sleep patterns anyway.  And it causes me to be awake for the amazing sunrise outside my window over the military area to the east. And I got to see LeBron’s crazy 3-pointer live, so woo hoo on that!

Friday May 22

This was officialy pre-op day, a little bit of fun, a little bit of HELL. The idea is that they do an extensive battery of tests so they know exactly what to expect when they crack me open. They have a very specific and detailed game plan.  I have nothing else to compare it to, but I will say that these guys are exhaustively thorough and prepared and all-around competent.

• First up electro-cardiogram – this is technically identical to a baby sonogram I think. It’s a real useful way to see what’s going on with soft tissue in the body.  This is how they identified my bad valve in the first place back in the 90’s.  The whole team is in the room watching, Dr C and the others yakking away in Turkish about what it all means – actually kind of fun – no pain, no poking holes in you, simply watch your own heart beat, listen to yourself on the monitors, and in this case watch your own mitral valve flop around like a broken screen door instead of closing off like a good valve should.
• Next came the coronary catheterization, which was the most completely un-fun experience of the whole trip. They don’t even bother with a wheelchair, they just wheel the whole damn bed out and down the elevator.  The room itself is scary  – a 3×2 bank of big screen tv’s, all the doctors and techs are in full operation gear – masks, shower caps, the works, and they all have their serious life and death game faces on. There is an observation window behind which good ole Dr. Cicek and his posse watch the specialists do their thing.
  I feel I should issue a GROSS ALERT for the next paragraph:
  It all happens from my left wrist. The give it a local anesthetic and make some kind a cut in my wrist artery and cram this little wire catheter up the artery and keep shoving it like a plumber’s snake all the way to the heart.  I am trying not to look, but there is blood  everywhere. They cut the wrist artery for chrissakes!! The one cool thing was looking at these banks of tvs and seeing my very own heart beating with this crazy little tube inside it.  The bad news was that they found I had significant blockage in one of my arteries.  In fact they called it a critical blockage, which is even worse than the bad valve, which was merely severe.  Something like 100% of the blood flow going in, and 63% going out – yuck.

I found this all pretty scary, and Dr C’s concerned face didn’t help, but when the dust had cleared, it turned out to not be that big of an additional deal, as we will see in our next episode.

They wheeled a completely wrung-out me back to the room and I slept very well, till the next basketball game.