A couple of weeks ago I told you that one of our friends would be coming to Toronto to have major heart surgery. Well, the time has come. She should have checked into the hospital earlier today, and tomorrow morning she’ll be undergoing heart surgery.
She is so scared of the surgery that she doesn’t even know enough about it to tell me exactly what kind of surgery she’s having. I’m a nurse – I could help ease her fears if I knew what was going on … but she’s the kind of person that when she’s afraid of something doesn’t want to know anything more about it. I think that just serves to make one more scared! I’m sure her imagination is going wild.
All I know is that she has some scar tissue or thickening of the heart muscle and has to have surgery to correct it. That’s the most I could get out of not her ….
You might also remember that when I wrote about her earlier in the month I’d extended an invitation to her husband to stay with us while she was in the hospital. Well .. they never really got back to us about it. Chris had to call them several times before our friend finally told us her husband would be staying in a hotel near the hospital.
Nice of them to let us know, eh? I know they were probably both scared about the surgery and were in avoidance mode, but for me who’s sick at home, it’s a very big thing to invite someone into my home for an unknown period of time. My regular readers know I’ve been going through a bad Crohn’s flare and haven’t slept well in weeks so having a guest in our home would make things more difficult, but I offered because I wanted to help them out.
So as much as I hate to admit this, I’m a little ticked off. I mean, all we were trying to do was give him some support and companionship during this scary time and help him save some money (he doesn’t have a job) … but if that’s what he wants to do I guess that’s the way it will be.
I think her husband staying in a hotel is partly my husbands fault though. He kept telling him that he could take the subway from our house (small town folks are afraid of the subway! not all, but these guys probably are) and that it would take 20 minutes to get to the hospital. Well .. it only takes about 10 minutes and we’re very close to the subway … so I’m sure the travel from our house will be equal to the walk he’s going to have from the hotel (there’s no hotel that I can think of that’s closer than a 15 minute walk to the hospital).
On top of all that my friend who’s having heart surgery wants to diet while she’s recovering! She told me that she visited this page that lists the best diet pill and wanted my advice as to which ones she should buy. I told her she’d better check with her doctor on that. Some diet pills can be hard on the heart and that’s the last thing she needs while recovering from open heart surgery!
When Chris gets home from work we’ll call the hospital and see if we can talk to our friend. If she’s up for visitors we’ll probably go there for a short while. I don’t know if she’ll want visitors tonight though, she might just want to spend some time with her husband before her surgery.
I’m sure I’ll be on edge all day tomorrow wondering how her surgery is going. When the surgery is done the doctors plan to keep her sedated and intubated for a few days so that she can rest and recover. I’m sure that part will freak her husband out as there’s nothing like seeing someone you love unconscious and intubated.
I hear you there, my dad had heart surgery last year and i couldn’t sleep a whole week ahead of the operation. I was a wreck at work, but thank god it went well and he is still fine today.