by Steve Bailey
I was swimming laps one afternoon when I felt the pain in my chest. I felt it before when running up a hill, but this time it was so sharp, I could not swim, and I had to get out of the pool. At that time, cases of pneumonia with no known cause were showing up in China. The World Health Organization put out a publication about it. There was no recommendation for travel restrictions.
The cardiologist I went to see about the chest pain did a catheterization and determined that open-heart surgery was required. He said it would be a triple heart bypass, but it turned out to be a double. Like a base hit, it was open-heart surgery, whether a double or a triple.
Up to this point, in my life, I had not had surgery, experienced stays in a hospital, or a daily regimen of pills. The hospital was not a fun place, but the medical technology I saw was impressive. The catheterization done through my wrist left a tiny wound. I marveled that such a small camera could travel up a vessel to the heart and send back images I could see on a full-screen television. The heart looked like a bizarre black spider bouncing around in its web.
I experienced the same sense of awe when I saw the first close-up pictures of the moon’s surface taken by the Ranger 7 in the summer of 1964. This space probe transmitted these pictures through two hundred and forty thousand miles of space to Earth. To me, such technology was astounding. In the same year, the first attempt at a heart transplant using a chimpanzee heart took place at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. It failed, but the research into cardiac surgery continued; research that facilitated my CABG.
Nurses hooked me up to so many devices, my son told me that when I came out of surgery, it looked like I was lying in a forest of aluminum poles. Technology such as this has made surgeries like mine, that were once unusual, commonplace. About five hundred thousand of them are performed in the United States every year. No matter what people say about health care, medical science is impressive.
I have heard the procedure described as the “lobster’s revenge.” While on my back, surgeons sliced a ten-inch cut down my chest, sawed through my sternum, and then opened me up the way a ravenous diner does his lobster. The surgeon stopped my heart while he did the bypass. The procedure is called coronary artery bypass grafting, or CABG. The nurses used these initials, which sounded to the unindoctrinated like they were talking about the main ingredient in a coleslaw recipe.
While still in the hospital, friends and relatives came by to visit. At one point, the conversation turned to travel, and some were concerned that a new virus might hinder such plans. By this time, the cause of the mysterious pneumonia cases had a name: the coronavirus. The disease this virus brought on also had a name: COVID-19. A case of COVID-19 appeared in Thailand; the patient had been in the hot spot for the disease, Wuhan, China. It was spreading but had not yet made its way to the United States. My brother-in-law was afraid that he and his wife would leave on an overseas trip and then find all the airports closed when they tried to get home. His wife said he was paranoid. My son said the virus would be here soon, and pandemonium would come with it. He was right.
The coronavirus was here in the United States when I left the hospital. So were the jokes, ad nauseam, on the Internet, about it and the Mexican beer. Cases were still few and far been between — cases of the virus, that is, not the beer. Not too many people are joking about the coronavirus now.
The nurses that came to my house to do home health care follow up did wipe down their equipment with disinfectant but did not think it was necessary to wear masks. When I asked them about that, they all said they were following the Centers for Disease Control guidelines. By the time they started covering their faces, I was too frightened to let anyone in the house.
I realized I would have to recover from my surgery and dodge this virus. Open heart surgery is not a procedure one can recover from overnight. The sternum, which is wired back together, takes six weeks to heal. During that time, I had restrictions, like how much I could lift and when I could drive. I had special procedures to follow to get in and out of bed and took showers backward to prevent the shower spray from directly hitting the ten-inch incision.
I went from no routine of medicine to eight pills a day. Some of those pills came with uncomfortable side effects. At one point, a statin caused all my joints to inflame like I had arthritis. It hurt to stand up, walk, move my arms, and hold things. I would shuffle into the kitchen to fix breakfast and realize the box of oatmeal was new. Was the virus on it? Could be. That nasty thing can stay on surfaces for nine or ten days. So, I would shuffle back to my room for hand sanitizer.
Steroids and a change of medicine made that crisis pass, but there were plenty more. As some new malady appeared, I found myself repeating one of my favorite phrases from Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory, “What fresh hell is this?” It was discouraging to talk with people who had undergone the same procedure with no postoperative complications. None of them experienced inflammation or leg cramps or any other of the strange things inflicted on me. It made me wonder if I was recovering or going in the opposite direction. They did not go through their recovery amid a growing pandemic either.
The psychological effects of CABG were not discussed at the hospital before I left. When I first got home, I wanted to go back to the hospital. It was not because I liked being in the hospital, who does? It was because no one was monitoring my heart at home, which in my mind, was now fragile. In the hospital, a monitor kept tabs on my heart twenty-four hours a day. A light outside my room displayed its status to the health professionals on duty. At home, my heart could start malfunctioning in the dead of night and no one would know.
I was like a child riding a bicycle for the first time without training wheels. Of course, the child is in little real danger, but in my mind, the old man with a weak, unmonitored heart was in a potentially lethal situation. Notice I said in my mind. Lots of stupid things like this went on in my mind. After all, I had lived a long time without a monitor on my heart.
During the first few weeks I was home, I called and pestered doctors and nurses about matters that I now realize were unimportant and certainly not life-threatening. But there was a real danger looming that had not been discussed with me before leaving the hospital. And that danger is the one we all fear, COVID-19.
Three things helped me overcome these fears. First, recognizing every morning that I was alive and that I did not, as William Falkner described, wake up dead. Second, I took my temperature every day. When it was normal, which it always was, I celebrated that I got to live another day, and tomorrow did not matter until it got here. The third thing, getting a prescription for medicine that treats anxiety and depression, added to my daily pill count but chased away the blues.
There was another challenge. My wife has memory issues, possibly the early onset of Alzheimer’s. As I tried to heal, I had to rely on her to get the groceries and provide meals. Sometimes she would forget something and go right back to the store. When I reminded her that every time she went shopping she increased her risk of a COVID-19 infection, she would become irritated with me. I never knew for sure if she was using hand sanitizer and social distancing from people when she was at the store. Occasionally she fixed a meal, but most of the time, I had to scrounge for myself. I lost more than sixteen pounds in the first six weeks after leaving the hospital. I began to put on weight only when I was well enough to shop for myself. Even then, some of the food I bought would mysteriously disappear. Once I went to make a sandwich and discovered the bread, I purchased two days earlier was thrown away.
My first time in a grocery store after the surgery was a scary affair. The pandemic by then was fully engaged and the casualty figures coming out of American hot spots were ghastly. While many people who catch the disease survive, the odds for a septuagenarian with coronary heart disease are not promising. There was no room for error in the store. I was not completely recovered and had to walk slowly. Most of my fellow shoppers were wearing masks, but not all. High anxiety washed over me whenever people were not six feet away or approached from the opposite direction with no face cover. How many of the items I touched had the virus on them? I hand sanitized over and over. The N-95 mask I was wearing got hot and itchy on my face. It made it hard to breathe. I wanted to hurry up and get out of there. I felt no relief from anxiety until I was home in the bathroom, washing my hands and face. For days after, fear would grip me whenever I put the thermometer in my mouth. Fortunately, when I took it out of my mouth, the news was always comforting.
At the end of the first month of my recovery, I was supposed to go to a cardiac rehabilitation center. In this gym-like place, health professionals help cardiac patients regain their strength. Thanks to the virus that shut down, I was left to rehabilitate myself. I faithfully performed exercises the home health nurses had shown me before I banished them.
My recovery and the pandemic moved into spring and then into summer. The recovery moved slowly with setbacks, but the disease moved quickly, taking some lives, and disrupting others. The television news had an abundance of heartbreaking stories to share every night, and I found I had to stop listening. Even the anti-anxiety medicine could not alleviate the angst these broadcasts created.
Major League Baseball called off its season and then reinstated in an abbreviated form. My fantasy baseball league was able to cobble together a season, and I embraced the diversion. But the virus was an unwelcome player in the game, causing real-life teams to go into quarantine and players to drop out from the infection. The most startling thing to me was seeing the number of players in the dugouts without masks.
Lots of things shut down. My cardiologist folded up shop but made himself available for video chats with proprietary software I did not have. My first post-surgery follow-up visit was a phone call. It would be six months before he would use his stethoscope to listen to my heart and lungs. My barbershop closed, and like many others during that time, I got shaggy. Schools shut down, and my grandchildren took lessons from computers at home,; their teachers struggling in this new environment like freshly caught fish on the deck of a boat. Family gatherings were rare, and when they occurred, they were outdoors with social distancing. COVID put the kibosh on traditional grandfather-grandchild hugs.
Walking became my tool for recovery, and speed and distance became the measure. At first, I walked in a circle in one room of the house. That was the best I could do. Next, I made figure-eight patterns using two rooms. Gradually, I expanded to walking all over the house.
When the weather began to warm up, I started walking up and down the driveway and then into the street for about twenty-five feet. Most of my neighbors would wave and shout encouragement from the front stoops of their houses.
One did not. This neighbor was a Trump guy who believed the virus was something hyped up by the diabolical Democrats and their cohorts in crime, the media. With no mask, he walked up the driveway as I walked down, his little dog in tow. I stopped immediately, and as he approached, I backed up. He got closer, talking volubly about his son and how successful he was at some environmentally damaging business in some underdeveloped country. Finally, I told him I had to leave and retreated into the house.
The walking continued to expand, and soon I was walking past my street and into other neighborhoods. Now I am up to forty-five minutes and a bit over two miles. I will continue adding distance. On these walks, the music from the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai comes into my head. It is a marching tune, and its rhythm helps me keep up a good pace.
My mind goes back to that movie I watched as a child with my father. I had just recovered from the chickenpox, one of the many childhood diseases I went through. My siblings and all my friends went through it. It was part of being a kid in the fifties. Thanks to vaccines, my grandchildren have had none of them. I was among the first children to get the polio vaccine that made a crippling disease all but disappear. Medical science took care of these problems then. It will take care of the problem we have today.
In The Bridge on the River Kwai, British prisoners of war whistle the tune as they march into a prison camp after a day of labor forced on them by their Japanese captors. As the bedraggled men whistle, an orchestra joins in as if it supports their spirited dignity. To me, this music is a sound of courage and defiance in the face of adversity. No matter how much CABG and COVID-19 have changed my life, I am way better off than the millions of people who suffered in that war or the millions of people today who, for one reason or another, suffer. I believe CABG will prolong my life. I believe COVID-19 will be defeated. I will prevail. We will prevail.
I still need all the breath I can get when walking, so I do not whistle “The River Kwai March.” I let it saturate my soul. It makes me swagger and sway as I go from one street to the next. It turns my walks into marches, marches away from the anxiety and dread of experiencing heart surgery in a pandemic, and towards the day I am no longer required to wear a mask and can hug my grandchildren.
I have yet to return to swimming. Due to the pandemic, the pool is closed.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Bailey is a retired middle school teacher starting a second career as a freelance writer. During his teaching years, Steve wrote articles about using computers in the classroom. Earlier in life, he wrote stories for two English language newspapers in Panama, The Panama American and The Star and Herald.
Steve has a Bachelor of Arts degree from Gustavus Adolphus College and a Master of Arts from the University of Minnesota. He lives in Richmond, Virginia, where he writes fiction, and creative non-fiction. He has a novel long manuscript in search of a publisher. His blog is https://vamarcopolo.blogspot.com/. He is also on Facebook and LinkedIn.