My NASCAR Surgical Team

Well…. apparently….. I’m tougher than an old boot… both me and Harry Potter are “the boy who lived”

All my “bad feelings” and the nervousness I was having as a result of having gone through the heart operation twice already and somehow, in my head, that meant I was due for something to go wrong made – it made me discover two things, one – I’m not psychic and two – I’m an Idiot. Well some small section of my brain is anyway, the one who made damn sure I was so stressed out I could barely function. I tried really hard to banish the thoughts of foreboding & doom but those thoughts were mighty sticky.

Luckily, I had loaded up on hookers and blow as is customary before my surgeries. It was the only thing keeping me from completely freaking out, special shout out to Sapphire and Kandi – thank you…

So I’m fine… you can either sign off here, secure in the knowledge that I will be around to write more nonsense for a while longer OR you can press on and hear the details… the decision is yours but before you go, I would like to thank everyone again for their well wishes, you have no idea how important they are and the strength I get from them, you are more than awesome….

I was to be in admitting at 9am, then there is about an hour or so where they get you in a gown, take your vitals, draw blood, get your IV in, make you sign all your waivers,  blah blah blah, so I expected to be in the OR sometime after 10 or 10:30… but they had someone cancel and so before I knew what was happening, there were people all over me, suddenly I was in a medical NASCAR, the pit crew prepping me for immediate action. I was in the operating room by 9:20am. No time to stress or worry, everything was happening too fast. One of my big concerns was the anesthetic and how it would affect me and my MG, so I made sure I told them this and also made sure that when I was coming out of the surgery, I wasn’t laid totally flat, had some trouble last time….

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The first thing I actually noticed was – the last two times I was put under, it was with something they injected into my IV and it worked fast, this time it was a gas, they had me breathe, so while going to sleep I felt much better knowing they had altered the methods to my specific situation. I Went under, came out about 4.5 hours later. Afterwards they told me one of their concerns was that in some cases the previously burned and scarred electrical pathways can “fix themselves”, regenerate and start conducting the bad electrical impulses again. This would be bad, because no matter how many times you go in and burn them closed, they fix themselves, so it’s never-ending and un-fixable and basically all they can do is give you a lollipop and wish you well.

THAT, was NOT my case… the old paths were all still good and burned and nothing was getting through.. really good news, well as good as having huge burned scars on the surface of your heart can be… anyways it’s much welcomed good news… they also said they had found a couple of pathways they had not found before and were able to burn those up and all looked well – so there we have it… this just might be the winner. How sweet that would be, to finally be able to put this behind me…. and start tackling the next issues.

An unexpected and welcomed side effect of the surgery, my MG was not just good, it was fan-freakin-tastic. I took my mestinon 3 hours early and then not again and my eyes were perfect, speech, chewing, throat, everything was strong and just flawless. I mean like the old days before I contracted the MG. At around 11:30 that evening my eye started drooping a tiny bit but I was so good it was really messing with us. Normally I get double vision about 4 hours after taking my meds and the throat, jaw, mouth weakness is nearly always with me. We were trying to figure out how this could be going 14 hours between meds and doing perfectly – was the MG just taking a break and letting the heart have centre stage for a while, I mean seriously, what gives. Something obviously took the MG out of the equation for a really long time, so it seems obvious what I have to do next… keep on having heart operations and viola…. problem solved.

Anyways I’m home, the pain is slowly receding, the incision is healing and I’m fully into recovery now. I made it, I’m the boy who lived… again.

Have a Great Day