Television ’bout Hearts – Part II

The last time I added to this blog, I was talking about how much more I’m interested in TV shows that have something to do with open heart surgery and transplants. The reason is quite simple, I had a heart transplant but I don’t actually know what happened and I am an annoyingly curious person. I was going to the doctor’s office to see my cardiologist because I had a bad heart episode the previous day and I figured I’d have it checked out. I didn’t have an appointment but I knew something was wrong.

So I drove to Summit, NJ where my cardiologist “hangs out” and just went into the office. As I was explaining to the nurses that I didn’t have an appointment, they suggested I sit down and called out the doctor, not mine but his partner. He was listening to my heart, while the nurses started taking temps, BP etc. I was then told I needed to get to the hospital. When I said I’d drive, the doc said no way and called the recue squad. I was driven a few blocks to the hospital, remember being pulled out of the ambulance in the ER bay but don’t remember actually going into the hospital.

When I “woke” up it was five weeks later and I was in a different hospital with staples in my chest and tubes running into veins. Since that time I have been trying to reconstruct what happened by talking with the doctors and staff of the hospital, with my family and with friends who came to visit while I was out of it. Most of these people were actually not visiting me to say hello but were visiting to say goodby.

This is not enough information for me, so I’m interested in the television about this subject to expand this information. It’s like someone was video taping my surgery for me.

Now, TNT has a new show called Heartland which is all about transplants. There is actually very little surgery related video, you know carrying the heart, lung, kidney in a plastic cooler from one operating room to another. It spends more time about the procedure involved in getting an organ, going on the list, showing the donor’s family and the recipient’s family, basically, like most television, it’s a drama with a touch of soap opera.

What’s interesting to me is the drama about the process. After my transplant, I asked all the expected questions about the donor, but got no real answers, I knew the donor was male, early 40’s, but I didn’t his name, how he died, when he died, etc. I asked to talk to the family, but was told that I couldn’t. What I could do was send a letter to the family through the donor network. The letter had to reviewed first and it could only contain my first name. I wrote what is probably the usual letter, thanking the family for the gift, and promising that I would do them justice and take care of my heart, kind of a dumb promise, but I felt they wanted to hear something like that.

The letter was sent, the woman in organ procurement, said it was fine and well written, but I have never heard back from them and I was wishing I would. I might have liked to be a part of their family, but who knows, maybe I have the heart of someone who was killed in a shootout with police and I don’t want to be a part of that family.

Watching the show put what happened in a little bit of perspective. The final scene was the husband of the woman who’s heart was donated, standing in the hallway looking at the 14 year old girl who received his wife’s heart. In a good television trick, the little girl lying there with all the tubes, masks, etc, sat up and morphed into the man’s wife, looking up and smiling at him. He was smiling as well, knowing that her heart was helping some one in need.

So this is the beauty of television drama and for a person like me, very helpful in recontructing what happened (or may have happened) in those missing weeks of my life.

It gives me strength to proceed with this new life of mine.

Lately There’s Been A Lot Of Television ‘Bout Hearts…

So maybe it’s just me, but lately I’ve seen a lot of television where people are getting their hearts operated on.  Yes, I do watch a lot of medical shows, like House and Grey’s Anatomy, but it seems that they are more detailed in the portrayal of what’s happening.  It might be because I’m still trying to figure out what actually happened to me.  What did it look like when I was under the knife?  What would I have seen if I was standing in the gallery?

Okay, I know I’m a little nuts but I was out of it for several weeks and when I came to, I was in a different hospital with staples in my chest and a lot of confusion in my head.  I found some pieces of paper with notes on them.  Things I guess I was thinking about.  Some things were about my family who I was worried about, mostly my son Jon, but other things had to do with what happened to me.  I felt like I was missing a lot.  I would ask questions and I got answers, but not really detailed answers, not enough information that I could create a picture in my mind.

Now that I see this on TV, it gives me a better perspective.  When I go in for a biopsy (it was every few months, no it’s just once a year), I am in a very cold and cluttered OR at Newark Beth Israel Hospital.  I’m lying on the procedure table in a hospital gown with the doctor and nurse walking around me.  Everyone is masked, gloved and sterile.  The room is cluttered but it is very clean.  The large MRI machines are covered with plastic caps, just like hats.  Nothing is dirty, just cluttered.  During this procedure, I am wide awake.  I’v been given a local anesthetic to numb the pain, but I’m awake.  They have placed a catheter in an artery in my neck and the doctor is snaking it down to my heart.   The MRI machines are displaying the progress of the catheter as it moves through my arterial network and enters the heart.  I watch as the tiny claws scrape the inside of my heart to get a piece of it that they can send to the lab.  It’s just like one of the toy crane machines that were on the boardwalk in Coney Island.

I can watch it’s movements, I can see what it’s doing, I can hear the doctors and nurses talking.  And I’m watching it all on a CRT monitor.  So I figure that’s why I’m thinking I’m seeing so much heart related television lately.  I’m just reliving what I see in the biopsy room and wishing that I had been able to watch my transplant as well.  Yes, I know that wasn’t possible but only if they could have taped the procedure and then get Jerry Bruckheimer (CSI fame) to edit it down to a dramatic half hour. 

Whew, that was a long post.

What’s Different Now…

I’ve never known anyone who’s had a organ transplant of any kind. Since my transplant I’ve done some thinking on the subject and since my transplant was the heart, I can tell you about what is different.

First, let me tell you that I’ve always had a problem with my heart, since I was a kid. It became more apparent when I entered my teen years. The heart wouldn’t always beat in a normal manner. I had what is called atrial fribulation. The heart would be fast then slow then fast again. I would get out of breath, sometimes a little dizzy, sometimes a bit weak. No, I was never a good athelete but I don’t think the heart was the problem there, I was what we in Brooklyn used to call a klutz. But in general, I was in good shape. Early sixties in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, things that were considered sports were stoop ball, sick ball (no bases, just sewers) and tag. The grammar school in the area, PS 135, had just installed basketball hoops and painted lines on the cement.

Okay, so I was not showing any potential for the Olympics, but I was able to walk and chew gum at the same time with basic ease.

But what led up to the transplant was a gradual deterioration known as congestive heart failure. The heart muscle started to get soft and the general pumping of blood slowed down. I started to get more easily tired. Climbing stairs or running for the train caused for a lot of panting. But I still didn’t figure I was dying just getting old.

So now that I have a new heart which I know very little about except it was from a 41 year-old male, some one 13 years younger than me. I tried to contact the family but they didn’t want contact. Understandable. I wanted to know more about this man. Was he an athelete? A smoker? (I was) Did he have heart problems or did I get it because he died from a non-cardiac problem.

So what’s different?

One the things that I notice now is my vision. It has improved. According to the eye doctor, he thinks this new heart is pumping more blood and that is what is making me see better. I still can’t drive a car without glasses, but I can sit and watch TV, write this blog on my Powerbook, etc. sans spectacles. Well maybe that’s true or maybe it’s because of the damn anti-rejection drugs that I have to take. Or maybe it’s old age creeping up.

There are alot things that seem different these days. Is it the new heart, the meds or just old age. I don’t know the answer, but I will keep looking for it and hopefully stumble upon it. Or maybe, I’ll stumble because I’m not wearing my glasses!

Okay, that’s enough for now.

Did you see the light?

When you tell someone that you had a fatal heart attack, even though I actually don’t remember having one, what they think about is the fact that you died. That’s why the subtitle of this blog is deadman walking.

Now we all watch TV and we see people getting paddled in the ER scenes. Since I’ve had heart problems since I was a teen, I was paddled once by a doctor to resync my heart, so I’ve had it done when I was awake. By the wa it hurts like hell. Imagine your lying in the street and someone backed up a dump truck on your chest! As soon as the truck leaves, there is no pain at all. It immediately stops. You feel great!

So what everyone figures is that if your heart was no longer beating then you were dead. Not true, according to the doctors. What’s happening is that you are dying, your heart is not pumping blood, your lungs are not moving oxygen, etc. This lasts for a while until your brain shuts down, i.e. death. My brain and body suffered through this period dealing with something called oxygen psychosis. I wasn’t dead, my processor wasn’t processing. Maybe that’s what a coma is.

Anyway, back on tpoic here. If you watch any show or movie about ghosts, they always have to go to the light to get to heaven.

Well did I see the light? Did I see my mother or my dead son coming to “lead me home”, nope.

Okay, so here’s my opinion (hey it’s my blog so I can say what I want) I don’t know exactly where I was when I was paddled. The last thing I remeber is being lifted out of the ambulance in the ER’s entranceway. So let’s take it from there. At this point I was probably in the ER when they were applying the paddles. Picture it, semi-conscious, lying on a table with a big light over head and lots of people in the room. The semi-conscious person sees the lamp’s light in the distance and sees the doctors and nurses moving around the table. Like when you see some approach you out of the corner of your eye. Just a glint, a shadowy figure, a ghost!

So we have the light that people see and the ghosts that people see! I didn’t see any of this. When I woke up (or became aware that I was still alive) it was six weeks later, I was in a different hospital, in a different city and had a row of staples down my chest marking the spot where they sawed into me to insert the heart!

The next post will deal with being stuck in the hospital. They obviously did a good job of keeping me alive, but being stuck in a bed all day and night was about as exciting as the lime jello at lunch. I just waited for any visitor, phone call or a good movie on TNT. I even enjoyed the endless test because it got me out of the room and I could converse with people.

What’s the story?

Welcome to Lodato’s New Heart
I’ve decided to start a new blog totally related to my new heart. Last year, I died, woke up a few months later in a hospital with a new heart given to me by some donor somewhere.
I’m going to use this blog to tell that story.