Last November I wrote a longish post here about the heart attack and subsequent bypass surgery I had in late October, 2020. Here’s a similar (but shorter!) post about my heart and kidney transplants in May, 2021.<\/p>\n
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After last year’s procedures, I seemed to have recovered fully. The incisions healed, my energy level returned, I had no pain or lingering side-effects. The only change was to be a little more conscious about eating a heart-healthy diet.<\/p>\n
Then in April 2021 I began to have symptoms similar to what preceded the October heart attack. Dizziness going upstairs, or after a short walk; bouts of cold sweat. It didn\u2019t occur to me that these were premonitions of some new heart issue; surely the surgeon in October had fixed everything that needed fixing.<\/p>\n
But it happened again, and this time in a more typical manner: I came upstairs after getting the mail, broke into a cold sweat, felt dizzy, sat down, and passed out. This was April 20th, about 4pm.<\/p>\n
Fortunately \u2013 fortunately! \u2013 my partner was working from home that day, and says (from another room, some 30 feet away) he heard me moaning, came to look and found me unresponsive. He called 911.<\/p>\n
Yet I came to sufficiently to see two fire engines, and then an ambulance, drive past and then pull up in front of the house. I even walked across the room. Ambulance staff came in the house, and put me in a wheelchair small enough to be lifted, or rolled, down the stairs to street level, to the ambulance at the curb.<\/p>\n
And after that point I remember nothing of the next 10 days.<\/p>\n
*<\/p>\n
I\u2019m told I was initially taken to Alta Bates Summit Medical Center, in Oakland near the 580\/980 intersection, the same place I\u2019d had the bypass surgery. I was put under sedation. Apparently my condition was Quite Serious, and there were concerns about my survival; my heart efficiency dropped to 45%, then to 30%. They installed a balloon pump (https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Intra-aortic_balloon_pump<\/a>) in my inner upper right leg, which connected both to the heart, and via external cables, to a machine next to the bed on a rolling stand. (The machine, about the size of a toaster, made a continuous chugging noise, rather like a running dishwasher.) The options were to do a heart transplant, or an LVAD (https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ventricular_assist_device<\/a>), in which the heart is kept pumping by an external device (which requires carrying this device around with you everywhere). Since Bates apparently doesn\u2019t do either procedure, they transferred me to one of the two large hospitals in the Bay Area that does: CPMC (for California Pacific Medical Center) Van Ness Campus, part of the same Sutter group as Alta Bates. (The other option, Stanford, was deemed too far away for a safe transfer.) That was April 28th.<\/p>\n At CPMC I was installed in an ICU room with connections to all sorts of monitors, as well as the balloon pump machine. (This ICU room, unlike the one I was in last year, had windows! Albeit with a view only of the side of an adjacent building.)<\/p>\n They took me off sedation, so I gradually became aware of my surroundings, but only in a vague, delirious way. For at least a week, every time a doctor or nurse visited me, they would ask me a set of basic questions: what\u2019s you name? your date of birth? do you know where you are? what\u2019s today\u2019s date? who\u2019s the president?<\/p>\n I got the last two wrong more often than not; I confused the year (I answered 2025, or even 1921) and the president (Bush, a B-name, right?).<\/p>\n Meanwhile I had vivid, hallucinatory dreams, which reinterpreted my surroundings in various fantastical ways. They remained and remain quite memorable, much more so that ordinary nightly dreams, and since some of them had distinctly science-fictional themes, I\u2019ll compile them in a separate post, ICU Delusions.<\/p>\n It took some two weeks before they decided I was up to, and qualified for, a transplant. They ran all sorts of tests. They specifically ran tests to be sure I was clear of conditions I\u2019d had in the past \u2013 a particular infectious disease back in the \u201890s; elevated PSA a decade ago suggesting prostate issues. There was even an interview with me and my partner about our relationship, our living conditions, our resources, and so on (though part of this transformed into one of those delusions; it couldn\u2019t have been a conference room full of contentious department heads). And I had the advantage of being blood type AB, able to receive a donation from anyone.<\/p>\n So finally, on Sunday May 16, I was put \u201con the list,\u201d the list of potential transplant recipients maintained by each hospital that does them. I was rated high, 2 on a scale of 10, meaning I was well-qualified; they were confident they would find a suitable donor very quickly, within days.<\/p>\n (Meanwhile, I lay in bed, unable to fully sit up past 30 degrees due to the balloon pump whose inner tubes could not be stretched. I ate my meals, whatever my limited appetite could stomach, with a couple pillows under my head, looking at the dishware on the tray almost edgewise.)<\/p>\n It actually took 11 days, still far more quickly than typical (some recipients go home with an LVAD and wait months until a suitable donor is found). One reason was because the doctors needed to do both a heart and a kidney transplant (the latter because the failing heart had damaged one of the kidneys) and so needed a single donor for both; the other was that the surgeon, a Dr. Sheridan, was said to be notoriously picky about finding the perfect donor for each recipient. But eventually he showed up at my ICU room door one afternoon, gesturing thumbs-up, and said \u201cWe have a donor! Surgery is tonight at 12:30.\u201d (And then presumably he went somewhere to get some sleep.)<\/p>\n So no dinner; prep the rest of the day (including shaving of the entire affected area); waiting for things to happen. People showed up around midnight to take me to the operating room. Big well-lit room with all those light fixtures hanging ominously overhead. I tried to be conscious this time of precisely what happened until they put me under. I heard repeated reassurances that I was in good hands, would be well-taken care of. Eventually a breathing mask was put over my mouth and nose, with oxygen they said, and I was told to take deep breaths. I think I took three.<\/p>\n The surgery took place over two days, May 26th, for the heart, then an overnight break, and then May 27th for the kidney. I woke on Friday the 28th, the intubation tube having been removed but a plastic ventilator still propping my mouth open, and three rubber hoses, called chest tubes, emerging from below my ribs to connect my lungs to several collection tanks sitting on the floor by my bed. They told me they would be removing the ventilator from the mouth that day, but it took them hours before they decided \u2013 doing more tests! \u2013 it was safe to do so, and this was agony. As they stood there calmly debating this or that, I was literally pounding (unable to talk of course) the rail of the bed\u2014get on with it!<\/p>\n And they removed one of the chest tubes. The others took another five days to be removed. The balloon pump had been removed, during surgery, so finally, by Tuesday June 1, I was disconnected from everything aside from electrical leads to the vitals display. But I was still stuck in bed, flat on my back.<\/p>\n