{"id":101,"date":"2009-06-15T05:37:16","date_gmt":"2009-06-15T13:37:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/whufu.com\/wp\/?p=101"},"modified":"2022-03-21T07:37:11","modified_gmt":"2022-03-21T14:37:11","slug":"101","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/whufu.com\/wptest\/?p=101","title":{"rendered":"recovery"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 This will I think be the final post in the Heart Surgery Odyssey series.<\/p>\n

The basic outline of my post-op recovery overseas was to be a week in the hospital, then another week at a local hotel.\u00a0\u00a0 Dr Cicek however kindly offered to let me remain at the hospital the whole time.\u00a0\u00a0 The tradeoff was that I would experience a lot less of the real Istanbul<\/strong>, 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!\u00a0\u00a0 So I went for it.\u00a0 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!<\/p>\n

Every day they would remove more and more apparatii (apparatuses ?) from me.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This made things like walking down to the cafe a little cumbersome, carrying these boxes around.\u00a0 The larger one came out after two days and the little pocket model after four days.\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

My second post-op Wednesday turns out to be media day<\/strong>, where a camera crew filmed an interview with me and Dr C about my experience<\/a>.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Oct 09 – I have gone viral!\u00a0 That interview has made it to YouTube, at the link above.<\/p>\n

I also recently discovered that I have my own page on the hospital website:\u00a0John Freeman is from Rino\/Nevada<\/a>! It’s entertaining, more or less a transcription of the YouTube interview. :)<\/p>\n

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”.\u00a0 He was very pleased, as of course was I.<\/p>\n

Then the Friday before I left, they treated me to another day with Erhan the driver.\u00a0 We went to a very cool restaurant overlooking the Bosporus, where we started the day with coffee and dessert.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 People seem to love hanging out in cafes above all else, and I could see spending a lot of time here.<\/p>\n

Rest all weekend.<\/p>\n

the last day<\/h3>\n

Monday is my final day in Turkey.\u00a0 I have my final interview with Dr Cicek.\u00a0 He described in pretty great detail what he did in there.\u00a0 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 :).\u00a0 The valve repair however seems to be much more of an art form<\/strong>, 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<\/em> to provide a perfect seal on each heartbeat.\u00a0 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”.<\/p>\n

I was very interested in the interaction between my two major ailments.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Then we talked about lifestyle, diet etc.\u00a0 The rest of my life divides into two parts:<\/p>\n