On things going wrong
I’ve spent the past 10 days in the waiting room of a cardiac ICU.
Well, actually, I’m lying because I spent most of today in airports, which is a similar yet different type of hell.
Whatever.
On the 25th of May my 72-year-old father, a smoker of 50-plus years, went to the Cardiac Surgery Center (it’s not just for hearts!) at a Missouri hospital to have a biopsy on his spotty right lung.
Spoiler alert: when you smoke for half a century, it will, of course, be cancer.
But, and here’s the twist, this isn’t a story about cancer.
He had rheumatic fever three times as a child. And that caused abrasions on his lungs, and that spot that started all this wasn’t on a edge and it got complicated. The margins were too narrow. A lobectomy was needed. It was routine until it wasn’t.
When the ribs were retracted something got tangled, or forgotten, or missed, and the pulmonary artery burst and his blood pressure plummeted to the 30s. The bronchus was cut during the race to repair, the surgeon said.
“There was too much blood. I couldn’t see.”
I don’t blame him.
When the chaplain arrived earlier that afternoon and asked how we were doing and if we needed to talk, it tipped the hand that not all was right. A nurse rushed out seconds after he took an uninvited seat to let us know that surgery was still in progress but there were some complications. They may want to work on their timing.
“This is going very badly isn’t it? Yes. It is.”
Five hours after the surgery began, and three hours after it was supposed to be finished, we sat in a consultation room waiting.
The surgeon’s scrubs were covered in blood. While he explained what went wrong, I stared at the red spots on his shoes, thinking that they were nice — the shoes not the spots — and wondering if they would be able to be cleaned or if he would throw them away. I didn’t ask.
“We almost lost him.”
He’s not gone but he’s not whole yet either. And he may not be.
We’ve run the gamut. A good day with hand-signaled communication followed by several days of zero response and additional complications. So many additional complications.
Words like tracheostomy and propofol and vent and blood oxygen and feeding and atrial fibrillation and fluid responsive and sedated are falling out of my mouth and really how do you keep any of this straight?
A steady stream of doctors have been through to poke and prod and still can’t figure out what is going wrong other than the obvious.
“Trauma.”
Consults from Pulmonology, Neurology, Gastroenterology, Anesthesiology, Cardiology, Infectious Diseases (way to ruin the -ology flow, ID) and I’m sure others I missed. The doctors have names. I don’t know them. There’s too many.
I asked a nurse to turn on his television, so that he could listen to the news. Anything but Fox, I said, which I’m pretty sure offended the nurse.
At some point the staff asked questions that would only come from Googling his name and I briefly wondered if that was a HIPPA violation but I am also nosy and probably would, too.
The past two days have been positive, a step up from the very grown up conversations that took place just a few days ago. Conversations that I’d prefer to not have at age 32. Conversations about letting go and medical directives and reasonable time frames. Conversations that may not be over.
Yesterday he showed surprise and communicated with the faintest of blinks and nods. Today he squeezed a hand and when I told him I was coming back in nine days he shook his head.
“No.”
Tough for him, the travel is already booked.
But then again, he didn’t want me here now. Hadn’t told me he was sick until just a few weeks ago; didn’t want to disrupt my life. Planned to tell me about it all when it was over.
If there was something to worry about.
