All's well, within reason

The miasma lifted slightly today. Zora came back from her surgery, it was a success, and she is recovering nicely.

Heidi was amused that I was shoe shopping while my wife was undergoing heart surgery. That’s not right. I wasn’t going shoe shopping. I was trying to get my shoe fixed. When my wife was getting her heart cut open, I was sleeping.

I biked over the hospital and got here around 3PM. Zora still had a tube down her throat but was breathing on her own. When I walked the room and said something, Zora raised her hand in a greeting. I’ve never been so happy to see somebody raise their hand.

We have been promised there will be ups and downs. But today everything went very well. Zora improved rapidly. The tube came out. I left the room for that and from hearing the details, I was happy I did. Zora was happy, too. After the tube was lifted, she could talk. Though she is sedated, she is 100% mentally there. I thought she would be very out of it for at least a day two. But she’s not.

She is in a lot of pain. And the pain meds only last about an hour. But she keeps getting more and keeps getting better. She has described the pain as a giant and heavy dog biting your chest and then sitting on it. Or like a small animal being swooped up in the talons of a giant hawk.

And though I wouldn’t describe her as happy. Or even very alert. She is at some level her normal witty self. She doesn’t seem to be in a funk or depression. But alas, as I type this next to her at 11:30pm, she has no words for her adoring fans.

She also says the pain meds don’t seem like they make the pain less. But they do make the pain seem “further away.” I guess pain in the 3rd person is better than pain in the first person. I’ve never been on opiates.

Within just a few hours, her fever had dropped, her heart rate slowed (from 120 to 90), and her blood pressure went up (it's now 87/55). She still can’t eat or drink. But there’s this little green sponge on a stick with which you can swab her mouth with ice water that she happily sucks away. It kind of looks like she’s taken one to many Es at the rave.

The surgeon came back. I had missed his initial post-op talk. I thanked him. He said something interesting. Flappy (he described it as the “floppy” thing… I guess “floppy” is the fancy medical term for “flappy”) was not vegetal growth. The “growth” was actually part of the heart valve. It may have been there for a long time. There was an infection around it. But flappy itself was heart valve tissue. Such a deformity would make the heart susceptible to infection. So the endocarditis was likely the effect of the growth rather then, as we had suspected, the growth being the result of the infection. In a way it doesn’t matter. But it’s interested.

So they took a biopsy and will examine that.

Zora is in very good hands here. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the nurses here are great. I went out without worry and had a burger and a few beers during their shift change.

But now here’s a funny story. I just checked myself in the E.R. I have a small infection on the tip of my left pinky. From picking a hang nail. I’ve kind of lost track of days, but I think I picked it maybe 4 to 7 days ago. It was so satisfying. But it did bleed a lot. And it got infected. And I ignored it. And now it’s a little red and puffy.

So with a little shame and grabbed a nurse and said, “Enough about Zora. Why does she get all the attention? What about my pinky?!” There was a high-level consultation and it was decided that the lance would be better than antibiotics. I didn’t want to go through the whole E.R. rigmarole. They said they would be able to call up here when my turn came.

So down I went, outside and through the rain to the E.R. Yes, to the E.R. for my little red pinky tip when my wife was lying in bed stoically after open-heart surgery. The E.R. bore little resemblance to the empty place a few nights ago. It was crowded and smelly and loud. The way an E.R. waiting room should be.

I checked in. Told the story to the guy there, whom I’ll call Man #1. He said there were 18 beds and 48 people there. The wait would likely be 4 to 5 hours. This is not high-priority triage. I gave my insurance information to another woman. And then a third person, whom I’ll call Miss Bitch, told me to wait in the waiting. I politely explained again that I would be up in 10ICC and if they could please call me when my turn came. She said I would have to wait in the waiting. I said she could just call up. She said they can’t call up. I said I know you can call up because the people up there told me to tell you to call up. She said she couldn’t call up.

I thought maybe she missed part of the program. I repeated, calmly and deliberately: my wife has lost vision in one eye and is recovering in this building from open-heart surgery that she had today. I am not going to spend 4 hours in the waiting room when I could be spending that time next to my wife. Ms. Bitch said I was free to leave and restart the process from the beginning at any time.

At this point I wasn’t speaking quite as calmly. And started to get choked up a bit. “Have a heart!” I told Ms. Bitch, “I’ve had a very rough day. A bad few months. My wife had heart surgery I’m not going to wait in the waiting room for hours.” She asked if I wanted to be triaged or not. And warned that if I left the waiting room they wouldn’t accept me. I said, “I want to be triaged because maybe some other person here can have the common decency to call upstairs.” She refused. What a fucking bitch. Though it was almost refreshing to find out that everybody here isn’t great. But enough people are great. Man #1 came and got me and apologized and said he would work it out. You’ve been through a lot today, he said. And it turns out he went to school with Stacy, the wonderful night nurse taking care of Zora. So not only was he willing to call, he was happy to call.

It’s almost midnight. Hopefully he’ll call soon. But it’s also raining, and I have a bike without a fender. So I wouldn’t mind if I could wait out the rain as well.

Tomorrow Beverly has the morning shift. Hopefully I’ll get a long good-night’s sleep. And I really have to do laundry. Patrick and Karen drove back to Santa Cruz to take care of their pets. But they’ll be back tomorrow or the next day. And Jim and Daphne and Heidi are all around as well.

Tomorrow morning she'll get to eat and drink a little and she'll have to get out of bed. That's going to hurt.

When Patrick called me today right after the surgery, I answered the phone and knew there would be important news on the line. I felt a bit like when I was younger listening to Harry Carey and the Cubs. You could always tell from his voice if the good guys were winning. Patrick’s voice sounded happy so I knew Zora was winning.

Later he told me a funny story. When the surgeon was talking to them, it seemed to him that everything went into slow motion as the surgeon said thaaat heeeeeeeeee "successfuuuuuuully rrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee[the re- went on for a long time]pppppppppppp…aired Zora’s valve."

I’m going to see if I can find a place where I can connect to wireless and post this.