Further
Further
SENT THIS FURTHER PRIVATE REPLY TO LIL, THEN THOUGHT IT MIGHT CONTAIN ITEMS OF INTEREST TO OTHERS, SO DECIDED TO PASTE IT HERE AS WELL. HOPE YOU DON'T MIND, LIL!
PETER
Lil -- Thanks for the direct message. I was actually thinking of adding a note to the one that I sent you on the thread, because I realize that in my post-operative peppiness I understated my age! Am actually 59 going on 60. And, as I mentioned, my sister had a second (successful) AVR at age 65, while my Mother had hers at age 86 and is cruising along pretty well six years post-op.
Janie is right that some fear is entirely normal and probably, for that matter, adaptive. I myself, though, had very little pain when you actually come down to it. To begin with, given modern anesthesia, you are the person LEAST aware of the operation itself. You seem to go from chatting with anesthesiologist and/or nurse and spouse in pre-op to waving groggily at those smiling heads greeting you somewhere out there in post-op. It's as if 4-10 hours (according to the case) had simply dropped out of history and I felt a bit like Rip van Winkle, needing to inquire about what had happened in the universe in the meanwhile, once I came around. (Is George Washington still President?)
Then in some ways ICU is like a luxury hotel (Steve W said he didn't want to leave), with the uncomfortable portions elided by your general grogginess -- so many people are waiting on you hand and (mostly immobilized) foot. The breathing tube seems to be everyone's least favorite portion, but still quite negotiable (have a family member stationed around to make sure you get ice chips when you need or want them till it is removed!); but, in my case, they removed it before I was fully awake. Other than the operation itself, you don't tend to get long stretches of uninterrupted sleep, even supposing you were inclined to them, given the hospital 4-hour shift routine and the tendency of whole different tiers of people to come around with medicines, blood draw requests, observation sheets and you-name-it. But just go into a cat-napping mode.
At each stage of your reanimation and reinduction into the wake-a-day world, the mutiple tubes and IVs and sensors to which you are connected begin to seem more constricting and uncomfortable, but then at each stage you develop a new level of adaptation and new strategems for coping. My biggest hospital pain and only certifiable injury (other than the officially induced one to my sternum) was sustaining a sort of sprain to a muscle I didn't even know I had running somewhere between my cranium back of the right ear and my neck. It all came from trying to leverage myself up into a sitting position without forbidden pushing or pulling motions with the arms! (That soreness has since subsided.) The key thing is (a) to ask plenty of times for people to help you move and adjust the hospital bed (those things are truly wonders nowadays -- virtual living creatures that will weigh you as well as contort in multiple ways and self-adjust to weight a bit like a waterbed; and (b) to get good yourself at running that machine. The biggest problem to resolve is access to the buttons, which end up in odd and counterintuitive positions vis a vis your reach and hand given various combinations of your own position and the stationing of the side rail.
See to what interesting micro-dimensions the universe shrinks at times like these? But then, as I learned from my Mother, attention to minutiae can be a saving grace in times of major change or stress.
Let me know if you have other questions I can answer or pontificate upon! Probably FDR is still partly right -- we have little to fear but fear itself (and there isn't much point worrying about it. Heck, why not treat yourself to some fear? Stood us pretty well in evolution, I'd say.) Barring very unlikely circumstances, this valley only contains the SHADOW of death, and many rods and staffs are there to comfort us.
Peter