Drugs and Angels

I’m spending Thanksgiving weekend recovering from heart surgery and counting my blessings. Number one on my gratitude list is that I’m home, not in the torture chamber commonly referred to as a hospital.

Though I’ve been in the hospital many times during my 48 years and things have never been pleasant, this visit took the cake.

IVs are always difficult, since I don’t appear to have any veins, and those that can be seen quickly flee under the needle. Several doctors have wondered aloud if I am alive, as they often can’t find my pulse.

Nurses and phlebotomists—those vampires who roam the floors, taking “samples” for the lab—find a vein and poke it, only to have it “hide.” Not to let a vein get the better of them, they withdraw the needle slightly, wiggle it about, and reinsert it deeper and maybe a little to the side in futile attempts to stab and subjugate the rebel vessel. In response to my wincing and thrashing, the vampires finally give up on one site and try another, with the same results. Usually the fourth vein is a charm. If only there were a way we could skip attempts one, two and three.

Though the vein-vanquishing and blood-letting were as dramatic as ever, the actual surgery was the show stopper. In the past I have proved highly sensitive to sedatives. While other patients chat with the physicians during procedures, I am unable to tell them my name. Though I have always been given the normal dose anyway, this time—the time when I’m having HEART SURGERY—someone must have decided to cut back—as an experiment perhaps.

I’m on the table, I’ve been given the anesthesia, the surgeons are poised to make an incision in the artery in my groin and thread a catheter up to my heart. I say as clear as pain, “I’m not feeling the drugs,” to which someone replies, “You will.” Yes, but I want to feel them NOW! No matter, the incision is made and I begin wailing, “Oh, God! Oh God!” I’m feeling every move they’re making. Someone asks, “Where does it hurt?” All these years of medical school and he asks me that! Where you’re making the incision! Where do you think it’s hurting!

I hear some talk about milligrams of this and milligrams of that, but all that keeps coming to me is pain. I can’t move my arms or legs, as I’ve been tightly packed with rolled blankets and rails. The only thing I can move is my mouth and my left hand, which is clawing at my left thigh in agony.

“Oh, God! Oh, God!” I’m crying, not as a curse but as a prayer, as in “Oh, God, deliver me from this torture. And while you’re at it, could you smite the anesthesiologist?”

Now lest you think I’m a wimp, I’m on this table because of a heart attack I had a few years back, when is not exactly certain, since I didn’t go to the emergency room at the time. I’d been having so much pain in my chest and arms that I didn’t see anything different from the heart attack and the feeling of having been kicked in the chest by a horse that had been with me for months.

Finally, just as they’re finishing up, someone says that they’re getting me morphine. What, as a prize for having endured this?

The morphine comes, and, sure enough, that does the trick. My body is so relaxed that I have the muscle control of a bowl of Jello, just in time to be wheeled to the recovery room.

That night when the nurse removes the catheter from the artery, I have surgery déjà vu. The intense, searing pain returns as she wrenches the catheter from my body, through the hard tissue and blood clot that were formed during the traumatic surgery. She does this without any pain medication, though because of my cries, she calls for morphine. Because healthcare workers have been known to become addicts, the stuff is kept under lock and key. Morphine cannot be “at the ready,” as I suggested, just in case a patient needs it. If it is checked out of the supply room, it has to be used. So, I was squirming for 15 minutes before the morphine arrived.

My brother called last night from Wisconsin to see how things had gone. When I told him of this m.o. of giving morphine after the trauma is over, he quipped that that’s what happens on the battlefield. How right he is! Think how much better it would be to go into combat on morphine, before you get shot to hell. Another item on my gratitude list: I’m not in a war zone.

So, how was the morphine? Great. Not worth the trauma I went through to get it, but it was great nonetheless. A delicious feeling of being completely incapacitated, floating, unable to move. I simply closed my eyes and drifted off to vivid, random imagery, like a can of vegetables from which a man in a green zoot suit walked off the label and tipped his hat to me, or a large cat that transformed into a medieval monk reciting prayers in a belfry.

I also experienced some tactile and auditory sensations, but I don’t think this was the morphine, as they occurred many hours following the dose. Someone briefly held my feet while I lay in bed. And I heard the soft whispers of a woman from the other side of the footboard. I like to think these were not hallucinations induced by the residue of pain medication, but an answer, delayed as my cries for morphine had been, to my prayers. “Oh, God! Oh, God!” I had pleaded, and God had answered, sending angels to gently hold my ankles and whisper softly to me in the night. And that’s really something to be thankful for!