Cardiac shenanigans
TLDR I spent 5 (planned) days in the hospital last week post-op by way of a heart valve repair. That’s as watered down as I can make it.
HEADS UP If you’re easy to queasy when it comes to medical stuff, you may want to skip this. There are a few images, too.
Y’all - what an emotional roller coaster it has been during this a winter-spring transition.
⬇︎In February, I shared the loss of one of my favorite people and as most of us know, grief can be weird and unpredictable, and sneak up on you at the most inopportune moments.
#yaybeinghuman
So there’s that. I continue to find myself grieving at unexpected moments, but they surprise me a little less each time they happen.
⬇︎About two weeks after that loss, I received confirmation that I would 100% need heart surgery to repair my mitral valve that I’ve been trying to manage for the past couple years.
THEN…
⬆︎Two weeks following that news, I had an interview for a grad school program I’d applied to in November.
AND THEN…
✨⬆︎I was accepted!⬆︎✨ This pivot made it even more clear that I need to be the healthiest me possible come September when I school.
I will be studying Art Therapy at one of the few NY accredited universities, with the hopes that I can eventually work with individuals who need to process severe trauma and do not want to use talk therapy to do so. More on that in another post.
I can’t believe that we - friends and contemporaries - have reached this point in the life of our health. Although I’m in the minority of patients who have this surgery aged 40-50, it does happen. If there’s anything I’ve learned through this experience it’s the following:
#ftlog, if there’s something in your health profile that seems slightly amiss or raises an eyebrow, just check it out and be done with it.
Stop worrying that you’ll look like you worry too much. Any medical professional who isn’t a complete a**hat will understand a patient wanting peace of mind. That’s why we have medical professionals: to provide expertise in areas that us non-medical riff raff can’t be bothered to study.
Check it out, and then check it off of your list.
I say this because I was diagnosed with a very quiet heart murmur when I was about eight years old, and I was told that it would likely result in nothing. In fact, I believe the word “musical” was used to describe it. Isn’t that cute for the kid who schlepped around a cello every day until she was 18 years old?
“Musical murmer” my a**.
For decades - DECADES - no one ever heard or mentioned it when I was examined. Not in high school, never through college or even during some rocky times in my twenties when I had benign breast tumors. I always knew the condition was there, but since no one ever said anything, I back-burnered it for 20+ years.
As I got into my mid-thirties, I began to notice that clinicians I saw in one off instances - like Urgent Care when I had strep throat or the occasional ER visit for gastritis - would mention it during the exam and suggest that I have it checked out. People who had never seen me before and haven’t since picked up on it immediately.
I thought nothing of it since it was such old news, but I saw a cardiologist and It turns out that my soprano heart was actually singing a…
Mitral valve prolapse with regurgitation
On the left side of the heart, there is a top and bottom chamber. The valve that sits between them was not closing completely.
In my case, it also meant that 30%-40% of the blood that should have exited the top to the bottom was actually leaking back into the top chamber. A visual aid:
There was only a brief window that I could wait between when I’d need it repaired versus replaced so I consulted a surgeon. After MRI’ing this (with and without contrast!) and echocardiogram’ing that, the decision was made that I’d need a repair within a year.
Symptoms and specific risks* of having an untreated mitral valve prolapse can be found in a list at the bottom of the post.
I can easily summarize them in three words: not worth it.
ROBOTIC SURGERY
My cardiologist knows THE guy at NYU Langone to do this repair. #NBFD, but he’s able to repair valves with a freakin’ robot.
(The link will show you the surgery using robot method if you’re curious or into nerdy stuff like that.)
Not only does he bang this out like a baller, but he studied with the dude who invented said robot so he really bangs it out with only five incisions and a chef’s kiss at the end.
Leading up to surgery, of course I was anxious about the idea of someone/something permanently altering the state of the most vital organ in my body.
What tripped me up the most, however, was the fact that I’d be on bypass.
BYPASS
“To do the valve repair or replacement, your surgeon must stop your heart. They will put tubes into the heart so that the blood can be pumped through your body by a heart-lung bypass machine while your heart is stopped. Once the blood has been completely diverted into the bypass machine for pumping, your surgeon will stop your heart by injecting it with a cold solution.”
I’ve been alive for forty three years, and in that time there has not been one single instance - EVER - when my heart didn’t pump by itself. It has never relied on a study guide or shadowing or legally enforced 15 minute breaks. I’m happy and grateful to say that my heart has always just worked.
For surgery it had to completely check out upwards of four hours. It’s still tough to wrap my brain around that.
🤯 MAY 8 - THE BIG DAY🥴
Surgery day was basically:
Thursday, May 8 6:00AM arrival
7:30AM - 2:00PM Surgery lasted for almost seven hours. What I remember about those first couple hours post-op is dizziness, severe nausea, mild visual hallucinations whilst wearing a breathing mask to help with shallow breathing.
2:00PM - Monday, May 11 Recovery in the hospital
I’ll spare you t he monotony of my days which was basically a glorified rinse and repeat cycle of napping on and off, some PT, lots of medicine, EKGs, blood and glucose draws, x-rays and eating the same foods over and over.
What has been more helpful to me is writing about the mental experience of it all.
INCISION SITES
Here is a rough idea of the five sites of incision they made on my right side to navigate the path toward my heart. Anything on my arm is a result of shots. This was taken five days post-op so this is an improvement but there was (and still is) a f*ck load of bruising.
There were incisions elsewhere on me, but I will definitely not be showing those.
Oh! They also had to run a tube into my jugular vein. #nbfdaa
I bruise easily.
It’s true.
WEIRD THINGS I’VE EXPERIENCED
…since the surgery, both in the hospital and at home.
Anesthetic delirium
Anesthesia is WILD, y’all. I’ve had general anesthesia for other surgeries and minimal procedures, but this felt like a different beast.
Those first couple days I could only stay awake for maybe 5-10 minutes at a time before falling asleep where I began some of the most vivid and nonsensical dreaming I’ve ever had in my life.
Unfortunately for anyone in the room with me (mainly Joey), as I gained consciousness I continued my interactions from the dream into the real world. I think I may have even gotten annoyed at him one time because I felt like he wasn’t listening to me/forgetting everything we’d covered in the dream.
I definitely came out of my sleep talking a few times.
I 100% saw a cat jump onto the pull out couch in the room.
Sleep guffaws
…that woke me from sleep at least one of the nights.
Overly dramatic hypnic jerks
You know those jerks that your body automatically as you’re somewhere between asleep and awake? I’ve been having more of those but they are just off the charts unnecessary.
Sudden, intense waves of emotion
On Wednesday I was in bed, doing something on my laptop and I just started crying out of nowhere. They were big tears, too. It passed within 10-15 minutes, but I can’t pinpoint a catalyst.
ON THE MEND!
I had my one week post-op check on Wednesday.
I received confirmation that it was 100% successful because I now have 0% regurgitation.
Now, all I have to do is let my body finish healing.
“DOWNPLAYING” IT
The day after I came home from the hospital my older son had his spring concert. I really wanted to go so we took extra measures to make it easier for me, one of those being the use of a wheelchair we happen to have in our house for my mom.
When people saw me, they were understandably caught off guard since I didn’t exactly announce it before it happened. They’d ask what happened, I’d begin to explain and I’d get teased because of the way I worded it - minimally invasive heart surgery - as if I were trying to play it down.
I probably was, but it’s not like I was lying! It was heart surgery, there were risks involved and the bypass conversation is a scary one to have. However, I am very fortunate that I do not have to experience the same physical healing process as someone who gets open heart surgery. I have no broken bones, no transplants or anything. Someone cut into me, improved my heart’s structure via surgery and did some trauma to that area of my body along the way.
Unless I have a very specific thing I’m struggling with and need help, I get very uncomfortable if a conversation goes on too long and only my stuff has been discussed.
It makes me want to crawl out of my skin so sometimes I think I try rush it. I also just have a lower threshold for people who overdramatize health stuff.
With regard to the benign tumors I dealt with throughout my twenties, I had more biopsies than I care to think about. Is it fun? No, but truly the worst part is just waiting to hear the result. I’ve heard people say they’re “getting surgery” when it comes something like a biopsy or a mole removal and that just makes me roll my eyes so hard. It’s a procedure - it’s not surgery. Stop trying to make it something that it isn’t.
I understand the medical stuff can be scary but it’s also a really wide spectrum that provides a great deal of perspective. I’m just grateful that the healing process will only take a few weeks and that I’m alive. Already, I feel far better than I did when I came home on Monday.
I’m sure I’ll find a lot of typos here tomorrow when I look at what I published, but it feels good to share this now.
This was taken from my room on Monday morning before I went home. I just really loved the way the sunrise was hitting the buildings and I felt some relief that I’m finally on the other side of this thing. Good things are on the horizon.
Heart,
*Symptoms I experienced:
Heart fluttery feelings at very random times
Simultaneous warmth would wash across my chest
Both eventually subsided, but sometimes I’d just have to leave wherever I was to wait it out.Slightly more difficult time breathing, especially when lying on my back.
Sleepiness spells - there were days when nothing on the planet would have kept me awake and I’d have to stop whatever i was doing and give in to it
It turns out that if it goes untreated for long enough it could throw one or more of these charming conditions your way:
Heart failure
Atrial fibrillation
Stroke
Pulmonary hypertension
Endocarditis (I feel like House talked about this a lot on the show)
Dilation of the heart - it turns out I had this
Pulmonary edema
Sudden cardiac death
I won’t bore you with long descriptions but I think we can all agree that none of these sound ideal.
My cardiologist tried her best to treat it with meds so as to hold off on surgery for as long as possible, but after two years it was clear that we’d have to take the next step.