A Medical Mishap

A Medical Mishap

    My heart beat to a different drummer from the time I was conceived. A complete classic heart block, I've been told. All that meant to me was a heart that beat slow, then slower, and finally too slow.   At age 47 they gave me a pacemaker.  This little computer ran my heart and I felt oh so much better.  The world around me blossomed with color. I began taking long walks and swimming at the YMCA. I loved it.

    Two years later, I started to feel strange sensations: first in my arm and then in my shoulder.  Next came the twitches accompanied by what felt like a small shock.  I went to the doctor and was told one of the leads had sprung a leak (of electricity that is).  Not to worry though. He turned the leaky lead off and the other kept my heart beating. When I felt like doing it, the  broken lead could be fixed. I felt like it right away.

   A few days later, I went for the first repair.  I had high hopes of feeling really good again. Unfortunately, that was not the case. When I woke up I could still feel the electrical current and soon the shocks and the twitching started again.  The pacemaker representative and the surgeon consulted. The rep had the solution:  program out of the problem.

   The twitches and shocks went away but so did my newly found energy.  Slowly I wore down and began to look worse and worse.  A friend took pity on me. His son taught at UVA Medical School and he found me  a pacemaker specialist in the Philadelphia area. I made another call.

    This doctor, an electrophysiologist, decided my problem was not fixed just covered up by creative programming.  He felt the placement of a new lead was indicated and set the date for the procedure.  Worn down from dealing with the leak from September to March, I couldn’t wait to check in.

         As soon as my butt hit the hospital  bed I spiked a fever of 102 degrees.  Nerves. I told them.  No one believed me but after many blood tests found nothing wrong, the procedure would go forward.

    Early the next morning the surgeon visited me. Proudly he shared his recent open heart surgery experience. I wasn’t quite sure why I needed to know that, but congratulated him. He winked and said, “See you in the pacemaker lab,” then left. 

     Lots of things went wrong that day. My scheduled time kept being moved back.   Finally they wheeled me into the lab where my newly recovered surgeon was leaning against a wall moaning. “I need an ice cream sandwich.”  From the way his shoulders were drooping I thought he needed the ice cream more than I needed the new lead.  However it was late.  Everyone wanted to go home and the procedure began.  

    They whooshed me from the gurney to the table. The next few minutes were a blur of doctors’ and nurses’ faces leaning over me as the anesthesia carried me off to sleep.  ” Let’s get this done. It’s just a lead,” were the last words I heard.

   When I woke up in my room, my husband was standing beside me. Suddenly my doctor appeared. “Are you coughing or having trouble breathing?” he asked. As I shook my head no, the cough began.

   “How did you know?” I mumbled.

    “When I checked the x-rays, I thought I saw a puncture in your lung.  It may collapse. I’m ordering more x-rays.”

    It was and it did. The doctor said the surgeon was on his way back. My mind got stuck on my last view of him leaning against the wall moaning about ice cream.  Boy, I hoped he stopped  and got some on his way home. .  I never found out.  He came stomping through my door complaining.  “This goes on my record. I can’t believe it. I was halfway home, and I had to come back to put this chest tube in.”

    My husband patted my hand and said he’d wait outside.  As the surgeon kept going on about his record,five nurses slipped into the room and stood around my bed. A tray of instruments appeared from somewhere.

   Grumpy, he exposed my ribs and started sprinkling a liquid on them.  Still complaining, he picked up a scalpel and cut into my chest. I didn’t feel a thing and didn’t know enough to be scared about what was coming.  Then picking up a flanged plastic tube, he inserted it into the cut, pushed it down and through my rib. Oh, that hurt.  Vengefully, I hoped he had dripped ice cream all over the seat of the black Mercedes I imagined he had.

   I looked up to see the nurses closing in on me and suddenly the surgeon pushed the tube again and again.  Fortunately I have a high pain tolerance and they didn’t have to jump in and hold me down.  I glared at the man who was snapping off his rubber gloves and pictured the ice cream wrapper floating to the car floor and sticking to his foot when he got out. I could almost hear his wife snap at him when he came home late tracking the sticky wrapper across their rug.

“Done!”

   I nodded.

   “Aren’t you going to thank me?” he asked

    “Thank you for what?  Mugging me in my bed?”

Thank You, Aunt Helen

     We visited Ft. McHenry Memorial Day weekend. Standing there listening to a guide tell about the origins of this holiday, my thoughts wandered back to World War II and my Aunt Helen who served as a nurse in the 12th Evacuation Hospital Unit.  When we entered the war she was working at Lennox Hill Hospital in NYC.. The hospital put together a volunteer medical unit to serve in an active war zone. She was one of the thirty-seven medical staff chosen to go. Her unit  ended up in various places on the other side of the English Channel once the Second Front was established. 

    After the war my aunt came home. She looked tired but after a short rest went back to work at Lennox Hill. Soon she had an ulcer. She came to our house to rest and get better. I heard my parents talk about her not being able to get over the war. In the following years the pattern was repeated and I always heard same comment  "she just can't get ove the war."

   She died at 60 in a Veterans' hospital. Her body could take no more. Her heart was broken. Standing at her graveside I knew  her declining health and death were due in part to never "getting over the war." I was twenty and had no real understanding of what that meant. 

   This spring I read The Paris Wife. The author describes Hemingway's struggle to overcome memories of WWI. Next I read a fictional novel whose hero, an English Inspector at Scotland Yard, carried on a constant internal conversation with a  Scotsman shot for refusing to obey an order very close to the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918,  the agreed upon moment to end hostilities in WWI. Reflecting on these two books pushed me to a new understanding of the phrase I'd heard so often, "she never got over the war." 

   Of course not. She saw carnage beyond anything I can imagine. Amputated limbs, bodies torn open, vital organs exposed. Men so badly wounded that she could only cover them until they passed to a "better place." Boys who lay dying still talking of going home to sweethearts who would never see them. Having to smile, give encouragement, and reinforce patients' misconceptions in the face of so much suffering  must have been all but unbearable.

    Part of her survived that war. She laughed, had fun and nursed the sick again, but what she had seen ate away at her until her body could take no more. The tears I shed at her graveside were trying to say, "Thank you, Leiutenent Helen Gertrude Ahern, for being the person you were." I hope it doesn't matter I didn't really understand the courage it took to be the woman who served in that war then. I do now.