If you are going to have open heart surgery and you’ve never had it before, it might be overwhelming imagining what’s going to happen on the actual day of surgery. They’ll give you instructions as to what to do that day, but those instructions will probably seem to have holes in them. They won’t tell you if it will be scary. They won’t tell you if any of it will hurt. They won’t tell you how much time you’ll have to spend waiting, as if it were something you were doing willingly, for something to happen that as far as you know, is going to be an absolute nightmare.
I can’t tell you exactly how it’s going to go for you on that day, because each hospital is going to be different, each surgical team is going to have different protocols, and it might also depend a little bit on what kind of surgery you’re having. I can tell you what sort of things I have experienced on my big days so you can at least have that to hold on to while you wait.
What to Pack
Have a suitcase or a big bag with changes of clothes, toiletries, phone chargers, and whatever else you will need for an extended stay. Imagine you’re going on vacation instead of… this. You won’t need a fresh set of clothes every day, just to get there and get home and maybe some extra clothes just in case. And if someone tells you it’s a good idea to get up and get dressed every day of your stay that is false. They may claim it will make you feel better to keep to a normal routine but if you were strong enough to do that you wouldn’t need to be there and nothing makes you feel worse quite like working your ass off to get dressed and then getting blood or other ooze all over your nice outfit, and having to change anyway.
Before You Leave for the Hospital
It’s likely they’ll make you do some sort of weird shower ritual, possibly twice. Do everything they say because if there is any chance at all that this ritual will lessen your risk of a staph infection you will want to follow their instructions to the letter. Do not risk a staph infection if you can help it.
Getting There and Checking In
This is the worst part, if you ask me. First of all, you are about to have heart surgery and it’s probably not for no reason, so you’re likely to be at your weakest point right now. Maybe you’re not breathing well and maybe you can’t walk very fast or very far without getting winded and, unless you have more than one person helping you, you will have to walk from the parking lot, and then all over the hospital on your own. If you’re like me, you’ll be looking down at your own feet carefully stepping one and then the other, over and over, and you’ll be wondering why am I working this hard to do something I most certainly do not want to do? If you find yourself doing that, just remember that this is the last hard thing you have to do before other people step in and do the rest of the hard work for you. At least for the next several hours.
Then you’ll have to check in. The hospital I go to, no one who works there has any idea whatsoever how to check in. It doesn’t matter who you ask, they will make you walk back and forth, the full length of the complex over and over again and they don’t care if you can’t do that. So if this happens to you, if you go to any more than one location and get told “you can’t check in here” stop the nonsense and go to the cardio ward (if you know where it is) and insist they handle the check-in there. I did this the last time and it worked like a charm.
What to Do With Your Stuff
It’s best if you have someone with you who can take your stuff with them and then bring it back after you wake up in the ICU. If you don’t have someone who can do that, the hospital has places they can lock your stuff up so arrange with the nurses while you’re waiting.
How Long Do I Have to Wait
It’s a complete mystery how long you’ll have to wait. If you’re lucky you won’t have to wait very long at all, but this is not the norm. Remember that this is a hospital and nothing is likely to happen very quickly, just because of the nature of the work that goes on there. If your surgery is happening first thing in the morning, the odds are better that they will be able to keep to the schedule, but it’s also possible that a huge emergency arrived during the night and members of your surgical team had to be up until the wee hours attending to that and now they need to sleep before they can see to you.
You will not want to wait, and this will likely be a huge annoyance, but you WANT them to sleep if they need to before they start cutting in to you. So just breathe and wait as long as you need to. I promise you will be waiting longer than you want no matter what happens and that’s okay. It’s not like you’re trying to knock out this surgery and then attend the Oscars in the evening. The only thing on your schedule for the next week or so is to be a patient. So be patient.
They’re Wheeling Me to the OR Now, Surely It’s All Downhill From Here
Yes and no. They are likely not going to wheel you directly in to the OR, they are probably going to take you to a little holding area just outside the OR where you will do more waiting. There are people who are going to come up and talk to you. They’re going to double check some things with you, like if you have any allergies to medications or other things they might end up using during the surgery. Don’t panic about these questions. They already know all of this, they’re just verifying to make sure everyone is on the same page before go time.
Members of your team will likely come up and introduce themselves to you now. You may have met some of them already in the lead-up to the big day, or some you might be meeting for the first time. This is your chance to tell them any last minute things you want them to know. Things like “if I leave this hospital with uni-boob you’re going to be in a lot of trouble”. At this point your anaesthesiologist might ask you if you’re feeling anxious and if it might help if they gave you something for anxiety. Some hospitals give you anxiety meds by default, and some ask you what you want. If you’re in an asking hospital and you’re not sure what to say here are some thoughts:
Pros:
- If there was ever a time to calm your nerves artificially, this is that time.
- You don’t get extra points for toughing it out, here.
Cons:
- I was once given anxiety meds just prior to surgery that completely knocked me out even before the anaesthetic was administered and I think life is easier for the team if you are awake if not entirely aware for the bit leading up to when they actually put you out. Maybe ask about that before you decide.
- I’ve been in there with no anxiety meds at all and, while it’s not entirely pleasant, it’s manageable and you’re talking about easing anxiety for no more than ten or fifteen minutes at most, so decide if you need something extra for so short a time. You might need it, and if you do that’s okay, and if you don’t that’s okay too.
Okay, NOW I’m Actually In the OR
As long as you’re in the OR, that’s when you can comfortably say “it’s all downhill from here”. HOWEVER, the OR is the scariest part, if you ask me. Partly because it’s quite cold and sterile and metal in there, and also because it’s so full of people and all of them are talking at once and you feel like you have to pay attention to all of it, because something big is about to happen and you’re going to want to know every detail. Just know that there’s no exam you have to write afterwards, and you probably aren’t going to understand any of what they’re saying anyway, and you’re not helping do the surgery so just let them sort everything out for themselves. Instead, I think you’ll find this is a good time to focus on your breathing.
You will have to get yourself from the stretcher to the operating table. They will wheel you up right next to the table and you can just push yourself up and over. Be careful, though, because the table is not a bed or a stretcher, it is narrower than you expect. Ask them if you’re positioned properly before they administer any meds. I say this because, for my second surgery, they gave me a spinal and then they asked me if I could move up a little on the table and I said “yeah, sure” and tried to move but it turned out the spinal rendered me completely incapable of moving anything below my waist. I genuinely had no idea how heavy my ass was.
There will likely be people on the team who will talk to you at this point, in an effort to help you be less freaked out. Go ahead and talk to those people. There might also be people working on getting angiograms in to your arteries right now, which sounds scary but it isn’t nearly as bad as you might think. You’ll feel pressure, but very little actual pain (you can trust me on that, I’m a baby about these things) and, if you don’t want to watch what they’re doing live, from the outside, they’ll have a screen you can look at instead that will show their progress inside your arm. If they’re going in through your femoral artery instead of your arm, this will not happen until you are out so don’t stress about that.
The next thing that will happen is the big mask will appear in front of your face and someone will place it over your mouth and nose. They will tell you to breathe deeply. Do exactly as they say. It won’t take any time at all before you start to feel much less anxious. They might ask you to count down but I don’t think they did that with me for my last surgery. I think they just kept making conversation as if it were a lovely day, which is what it started to feel like, and then my eyelids started getting a little heavy and that’s the last thing I remember. And it will be the last thing you remember, too, until you wake up again in the ICU. Congratulations. You made it.
Is there anything I missed? Is there something scary about surgery day you want to hear more about? Tell me in the comments and we’ll talk about it.
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