Heart 2

At Waikato Hospital

But Tuesday evening I got a call from the cardiac ward that there was a cancellation and could I come straight away. 

So by Wednesday morning I was ready for the op. Margaret was with me all this time and a lonely wait while I was in the theatre. When I moved to ICU for recovery, the blood transfusions kept coming, and the blood kept flowing out of my chest. They tried a few methods of stopping the flow, and in the end would have had to operate again, but fortunately the problem righted itself, after a phone call to the surgeon in the wee, small hours of the morning, and I was moved out of ICU and back to the Cardiac Ward with a nurse to watch me all the time for the next few hours. 

I came to on the Thursday morning, with the sun shining, and Margaret there to greet me.  She was joined soon by Denise, who had driven down from Auckland to support her little sister.  

The nurses then helped me to get out of bed and walk (or stagger) across the room to the basin to wash my face and clean my teeth, which I managed OK. Then I turned around and there was no bed in the room. They told me it had been moved to the other end of the ward and I would have to walk to it. Fortunately I had the assistance of the nurse on one side and an OT on the other. 

I now learned the most important lesson of my subsequent life: I had to walk two kilometres every day from now on. The ward was 50 metres long, so we had do 20 lengths in the day. Every so often, we would get out of bed and walk to the end of the ward and back, and then collapse, exhausted, back on to the bed. 

The other main memory I have of the recovery process was odd perceptions I had, mainly I guess from the anaesthetic. I felt as though there was no wall behind the bedhead, even though there was a wall there when I looked. And I had tickles in my throat, I guess from the ventilator they had inserted to keep me breathing. 

The building was quite old, and I remember the bathing area as very cold, with a southerly blowing off the snow from Mt Ruapehu, which we could see from the windows, because the weather was fine. 

By the end of the week, I was able to walk up a flight of stairs to the next level of the hospital with no drop in blood oxygen percentage, so I was allowed to go home.