They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat Read online

  “Look,” said my friend at my left, “he’s trying to tell us something.”

  “What do you think he’s trying to say?” asked my wife, who was standing nearby.

  “I think he’s trying to say hello.”

  “How cute,” said my wife.

  I wasn’t trying to say hello. I was trying to say I had about eight seconds to live and don’t just stand there like a couple of raw oysters, get this blessed tube out of my throat.

  Finally, a nurse got the message.

  “He doesn’t think he can breathe,” she said. “It happens to everybody.”

  She peered over my bed and looked squarely into my fear-stricken eyes.

  “Just relax,” she said. “The tube is doing your breathing.”

  I reached my hand up again and tried to write, “You wouldn’t kid me, would you?” in the air.

  “He’ll go back to sleep in a minute,” I heard the nurse say.

  Some patients keep the tube longer than others. Some patients’ lungs clear up more quickly than others. If a patient is a smoker, he can keep that tube down his throat for twenty-four hours or more. On May 10, 1980, I had given up smoking.

  When I awakened for the second time, four or five hours later, the tube was out of my throat and I could breathe on my own. I couldn’t reach down there and pull in a big gulp of air because of all the diddling around that had been done in my chest, but what little breath I could manage never felt better.

  I vividly recall the thought I had at this marvelous moment: They ought to burn every tobacco field still standing.

  8

  Tubes

  Frankly, I would like to end any further discussion of tubes at this point, but tubes are what heart surgery is all about, especially after the patient reaches the Intensive Care Unit where the tubes begin to come out.

  There are seven places on the human body where a tube may be inserted without making a new hole. (I’ll wait a second while you count.) I don’t think God had any intention for anybody to go sticking tubes, or anything else, in at least a couple of those holes, but they stick tubes there anyway when they operate on your heart.

  I’m not certain the exact number of tubes they eventually stick in you before, during, and after heart surgery, but it is considerably more than seven, which means they have to make some new holes. Just north of your navel, they make two, one to the east and one to the west, and that’s where your chest tubes go.

  I wasn’t aware of it when they made the chest tube holes in my stomach because I was under the anesthetic at that point. Nobody would have made chest tube holes in my stomach, otherwise, because as a small boy growing up in the rural South, I learned if anybody came at you with something sharp with the intention of making new holes in you, you ran away as fast as you possibly could and called the local authorities and reported somebody was trying to cut you, which was against the law in my county unless it could be proved the victim needed cutting.

  One morning after I had regained some of my senses in ICU, I was relaxing with a jar of morphine when a doctor I had never seen before walked casually into my room, whistling.

  “I’m going to remove your chest tubes,” he said, once he had stopped whistling.

  My chest tubes, I had been told earlier, were for the purpose of drainage. Some tubes they use to put things into you. Others they use to take things out. Fully-tubed, a heart surgery patient bears a great deal of resemblance to the distributor cap of a 1956 Plymouth Fury.

  It hurt. Morphine or no morphine, the removal of my chest tubes was the worst thing that happened to me during the entire experience of having heart surgery.

  “You okay?” asked the doctor once he had removed the tubes.

  “Get away from me,” I said.

  I felt like he had snatched my innards from their very holdings.

  “Come back here with my pancreas!” I screamed at the doctor as he left the room, whistling again. I didn’t even get his tag number.

  I will never forget how it felt to have my chest tubes removed. Now, every time I hear a whistling sound, I double up into a tight knot and fall on the floor and lie very still, which is a problem only when I am driving in heavy traffic and the radio station to which I am tuned tests its Emergency Alert System.

  The chest tube experience did have its value, however, and that was to assure me that I had lived through the operation. You can’t be dead and hurt that badly at the same time.

  After the chest tube horror, I began to count the other tubes that were running in and out of my body. I started with the one in my neck. That is called a Swan-Ganz Catheter. It measures various pressures in the body. Find a pressure somewhere and somebody in a hospital is going to want to measure it, even if it means sticking a tube in your neck.

  There were also needles and lines in my arms and wrists. I was being fed through one. Given a choice between eating the lunch they had served me my first day in the hospital and getting food from a bottle through a tube and needle, I’d go for the bottle and the tube and the needle every time. At least there was no chewing involved.

  Another line was for the morphine to kill pain. Except for when somebody wants to pull a tube out of your stomach, the pain immediately following heart surgery is quite bearable, as long as you lie perfectly still.

  There was another tube in my rectum to measure my temperature. Why the rectum is a good place to measure a person’s temperature is beyond me, but at least it doesn’t take a large tube to do the job, which is something for which I was quite grateful.

  I also noticed some small wires that had been attached to my stomach. They were pacemaker wires. In case there arose the need to alter my heartbeat, the wires could be used to send electrical impulses to my heart. They mess your stomach up pretty good when they operate on your heart.

  Then, of course, there was the bladder catheter, and we all know where they stick that. I couldn’t bear to look at where they had stuck my bladder catheter.

  All around me were machines with dials and screens and things making beeping noises.

  “Every part of your body is being monitored,” a nurse told me.

  She was a very pretty nurse, with dark hair and when she walked around in my room in her snug nurse’s outfit, I found myself monitoring certain parts of her body.

  “Do me a favor,” I said to her.

  “What’s that?”

  “Walk past me again and let’s see if the machine beeps louder.”

  She did and it did, and I felt quite comfortable in the assumption heart surgery hadn’t affected my capacity for lust, even with the aforementioned tube the size of a small garden hose intruding in the situation.

  In Intensive Care, one by one, the tubes began to come out. The chest tubes went by the hand of the whistling doctor. The nurse took out the Swan from my neck. The lines came out of my arms and wrists. No problem.

  Then, one morning the nurse pulled back the sheet and announced it was time to remove the bladder catheter.

  “And you’re going to do it?” I asked.

  “I do this all the time,” she said.

  The stories she must have.

  It wasn’t all that bad, compared to the removal of the chest tubes. The nurse gave the tube a tug and out it came with nothing more than a slight sting. I still couldn’t bear to look, however.

  “Everything seem to be in order?” I asked her with a slight halt in my voice.

  “Little fellow’s looking just fine to me,” she answered.

  You’d think a nurse with that much experience in such matters would have selected a better choice of words.

  Before I left ICU, the cough lady came to see me. I don’t know her official title, but she came into my room and explained that it was time I got out of my bed, sat myself down in a chair and coughed
.

  “You need to cough up the fluids in your lungs,” she said.

  She helped me out of the bed to the chair. My first steps were slow. I was dizzy, for one thing. I figured I still wasn’t over the chili dogs.

  After I had sat down in the chair, the lady brought me a pillow and said to hold it to my chest as tightly as I could.

  “This will ease some of the pain when you try to cough,” she explained.

  She even told me how to cough.

  “Take as deep a breath as you can take and then cough several times as hard as you can. Like this . . .”

  She took a deep breath, clutched the pillow and made a sounds like somebody trying to crank a pulpwood truck on a cold morning.

  “HRRRACK! HRRRACK! HRRRRACK!” went the cough lady.

  I took a deep breath and squeezed the pillow to my chest. I didn’t go “HRRRACK!” at all. I barely made a sound.

  “You’ve got to try harder,” said the cough lady.

  I tried again, but I didn’t try any harder. I knew if I tried any harder, it would hurt and no stupid pillow would make it stop.

  The cough lady came back two or three more times and tried to get me to do a couple of hrrracks. I never did the first one.

  “You don’t smoke?” she asked.

  “Gave it up two years ago.”

  “Smokers have to do a lot of coughing after their surgery. I guess you don’t have any fluids left in your lungs.”

  “I won’t tell anybody if you won’t,” I said.

  The cough lady left and went to bother somebody else.

  I was very pleased to get out of Intensive Care and back into a regular room in the coronary wing. The only thing still attached to my body that hadn’t come attached in the first place were the pacemaker wires on my stomach. My first morning out of ICU another doctor I had never seen came to take those out. He carried a pair of wire snippers. He snipped this wire and then that wire.

  “Dang if you’re not a bleeder,” he laughed.

  I looked at my stomach. It was very red.

  I remained as still as possible and didn’t say a word while the doctor finished. You don’t risk arousing a man who thinks a stomach covered with blood is funny, especially if he is packing a pair of wire snippers at the time.

  My cardiologist came in and checked my heart.

  “Sounds just fine,” he said.

  A couple of his assistants came in and they listened to my heart, too.

  “Outstanding,” said one.

  “Couldn’t be better,” said the other.

  My blood pressure. They checked that, too. Before the surgery, the range had been extremely wide. I even recorded a two hundred over zero at one point.

  After surgery, I was one-twenty over eighty. Perfect.

  I looked at my scar. I had expected it to be much worse. There would also be two small scars from the chest-tube incisions, but once the hair grew back on my chest, they would be barely visible.

  There was pain when I tried to get a deep breath, but nothing I couldn’t handle. The area around my collarbone and my sides were sore from the chest retractor during surgery, but that wasn’t so terrible, either.

  I was still a bit foggy from all the drugs, but I’d been foggier. Recall the tequila and oyster episode.

  I had made it. The surgeons had plugged the leak in my heart, my blood pressure couldn’t have been better, and my prior feeling of being delirious with pain at this point had been a needless concern. I was in only mild discomfort.

  All this presented a bit of a problem, however. You don’t go through heart surgery and not expect a large portion of sympathy. If the doctors and nurses and my family and friends knew how good I really felt, they might not feel as sorry for me as I wanted them to feel, and they might not continue to wait on me hand and foot as I most certainly deserved.

  I decided to do one of the things I do best in order to assure everyone involved I was in a most pitiable state. I decided to whine a lot.

  I can whine with the best of them. I have different whines for different situations. There is my hangover whine.

  “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh, my Goooood!” is my basic hangover whine.

  “I think I’m going to die,” is the whine I use when I have a bad cold and I want somebody to bring me ginger ale and chicken noodle soup and a piece of carrot cake, which will cure a cold in a New York minute, as long as you can get somebody else to bring it to you.

  When I really want some attention and sympathy, however I use a whine that defies a spelling.

  It’s a sort of “Oooooooooh,” but with some “Awwwwwwwwwww,” and a kind of high-pitched “Uhhhhhhhhh” thrown in. Ever heard the sound a dog makes when you step on its tail? It’s sort of like that, too, except a dog takes a little break between sounds. When I use this whine, I am steady and constant with it.

  I use this whine in the dentist’s chair, and I used to use it when my mother wanted me to go outside and pull weeds out of her flowers, and I tried it on a state patrolman once who had stopped me for speeding. The dentist always ignores me and so did the heartless state patrolman, but I still haven’t pulled the first weed out of my mother’s flower garden.

  “How do you feel?” my wife asked me the first afternoon I was out of ICU.

  I put the big whine on her.

  “Bless your heart,” she said.

  A couple of guys from my tennis team came in to see me.

  “How are you feeling?” one asked.

  I let go a dandy.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said the other. “He’s giving me the creeps.”

  You would figure nurses would know better than to go for whining. They don’t. There was one nurse from ICU who had been particularly sweet to me. She didn’t stick any tubes in me and she didn’t take any out, either. She came to see me in my room.

  “Are you getting along okay?” she inquired.

  Whine.

  “Bless your heart,” she said, adjusting the pillows under my head.

  “Would you like for me to rub your face with a wet towel?” she asked.

  “If you wouldn’t mind,” I said, meekly.

  When I asked her if she would run down to the convenience store and pick up a couple of six-packs, she refused, however. Whining does have its limits.

  Actually, I think I did my best whining at night. They may have lousy lunches at Emory Hospital in Atlanta, but they make terrific milkshakes. I would order a milkshake and then whine my way into a pain pill. After a couple hours sleep, I would awaken and roll over on my back and press the button to call the night nurse.

  I never did see her face and I never got her name, but the night nurse was an angel, too.

  “You need something?” she would ask me.

  I’d whine yes.

  “Water?”

  I’d whine no.

  “Back rub?”

  I’d whine yes.

  “That feel good?”

  I’d whine another yes.

  “Had enough?”

  I’d whine another no.

  The perfect woman, I decided, would own a beer joint and rub your back for as long as you wanted her to.

  They made me get up out of my bed and walk once I was back in my room. I would walk up the hall and then back down it again. It got easier each time I tried it, although it was weeks before I could actually walk completely upright. Stooped over like that got me more sympathy, however.

  They also made me wear white stockings, which were very tight and which were supposed to improve the circulation in my legs. They looked like what baseball players call sanitary hose. Every morning, the orderly would come into my room and put fresh stockings on me. One morning, he asked if I wanted to try putting on my own stockings. I whined my
way out of that and even convinced him to go get me a newspaper.

  I turned to the sports section first. North Carolina was even closer to the national basketball championship, and the Cubs still couldn’t beat a team made up of night nurses.

  I received a lot of cards and flowers in the hospital. I also received some gifts. I have a friend who runs a men’s clothing store. He sent me a shirt. It fit. Another friend sent me a caricature of myself ogling a nurse in a tight skirt. That fit, too. The only thing I do better than ogle is whine.

  I also got candy and fruit baskets and jars of peanuts and boxes of pecans and a Valvoline T-shirt and cap, and one day they even delivered balloons to my room. Cards and flowers and gifts and balloons are nice. They say people give a damn.

  A little girl of nine or ten or so occupied the room directly across from mine. I thought I had trouble. She had two faulty valves. They had both been replaced.

  Crowds gathered in my room. We ate the fruit and nuts and we laughed amongst the cards and flowers and balloons.

  The little girl was alone. One of the nurses told me about her. She was from a poor family in another state. Her mother hadn’t accompanied her for the operation.

  “She’s frightened nearly to death,” said one of the nurses, “but she hasn’t whined once.”

  I got the message.

  The nurses helped me out of my bed and I walked over to the little girl’s room. Her eyes. That’s where most of the fear was, in her eyes.

  I asked her questions. She would only nod her answers.

  “Do you have any brothers and sisters?” I asked.

  She nodded yes.

  “How many?”

  I think she tried to count them in her head, but poor families run big, and it’s tough to keep track of the exact number who are sharing your attempt to survive.

  “Maybe now that you are well,” I said, “you can run around and play with all your brothers and sisters.”

  Maybe that thought hadn’t crossed her mind as yet. Her nod yes was a bit more enthusiastic than the others had been.

  I went back to my room and got back into my bed. Somebody had tied my balloons so they hovered above my head. I have always liked balloons. They remind me of circuses and celebrations.