Installment 4: The Time My Boobs Tried To Kill Me
I have, in years past (certainly not recently) been complimented on my boobs. I think most women have at one time or another, often in disgusting ways. I have posted a photo on this blog suggesting at the mess my boobs have become, but they used to look pretty good. The old cleavage had served me well, I thought. I had no complaints about it whatsoever. At least none that would hold up in a court of law. As it turned out, though, my boobs did not feel similarly towards me.
Okay, So What’s the Problem?
The problem is staph infections happen. You can be absolutely as careful as you can possibly be, and your medical team can be the most competent team ever, and the bacteria that causes staph infections can still creep in there.
And that bacteria goes directly to your incision site. And since that incision goes straight down the middle of your chest, and considering the fact that there’s nothing bacteria loves more than warm, dark places, I found that my boobs had been snuggling this bacteria and keeping it warm so it could grow big and strong. Talk about a major betrayal.
Here’s How it Happened
One day, shortly after my second surgery, which was the first one wherein they had to cut in to me vertically, bisecting the horizontal scar from my first surgery, I noticed the intersection (which I refer to as ‘Heart Attack and Vine’) had a tiny pinhole in it. I hadn’t suffered any kind of injury, and I didn’t have cats at the time, so I knew whatever was happening had to be entirely my own body doing something I probably wouldn’t end up liking.
So I made an appointment with my GP and she took one look at it and said “Okay, Sweetheart, for this I’m going to send you to the emergency room. Go in and show them this and they will know what to do”. I could tell from her tone this was a no-foolin’ kind of scenario so off I went to the ER. They kept me in the hospital for a few days giving me intravenous antibiotics, which wasn’t the most fun I ever had, but ultimately I was glad I was there because here’s what I didn’t realize would happen: The incision site re-opened.
Not the whole thing, mind you. It re-opened to a length of about 3.5 centimeters, top to bottom, and it gaped open in the middle about 2.5 centimeters wide, and it was about 3.5 centimeters deep. So it wasn’t an insane amount, but it was way more than I had been hoping for. Way more.
But, being in the hospital at the time made it easier because the nurses were all completely nonchalant about the whole thing, and it made it easier for me to avoid a complete tail spin of anxiety for myself. There’s one thing about a scenario like this that I didn’t expect, though. I imagined they would re-use the same method they used during surgery to close me up again. But they did not. Instead, they did not close me up at all.
I found this really surprising, but everyone said it would heal better if we let it do it on it’s own. So for the next several months, I had an open wound in the middle of my chest. First, I had to have a home care nurse come every day and clean it, measure it, pack it, and dress it. I was absurdly grateful to have someone help me with this because the very last thing in the world I wanted to do was to look closely at this horror on my chest.
One of My Top Three Most Off-Putting Heart Surgery Experiences
This larger-than-I’d-like hole in my chest came with rules. Most of those rules were about the cleaning/packing/dressing procedure, but they also included that I wasn’t allowed to shower until further notice. They wanted me to do sponge baths only. I love a good shower, so this was a hardship for me but, it turned out to be a little worse than I thought it was going to be.
What made it worse was the fact that doing a sponge bath involves standing naked in front of the bathroom sink, at which there is a large mirror. I had been working pretty hard at not looking directly at the open wound, and this really threw a wrench in to all that effort.
So one day, there I stood, trying to avoid looking directly into Heart Attack and Vine as I gathered everything I needed for my sponge bath. My washcloth, on that day, turned out to be off to my right, just out of my reach so I leaned over a little bit to get it. In the split second before my reach turned in to a lean, I thought about boobs and gravity and how I was probably about to see the wound gaping in an unpleasant way and I should quickly brace myself because…
Now, give yourself a moment right now to wonder. To develop a theory as to what it might look like to have a large open wound in such a location, and how would leaning over in Earth’s gravity effect the edges of that wound. If you were to hazard a guess as to how that wound would move, what would you say? In the split second I had to prepare, I surmised that it would just gape a little on the one side. If only it had, it would have been better than what I saw.
As I leaned over, instead of the wound gaping towards the direction of the lean, as I suspected it would, the entire circumference of the wound started to flutter, in a short wavelength ripple motion.
Now, if you’ve never seen me in person before, you should know I’m really pale. And, after heart surgery, I am much, much paler than I usually am. Morticia Addams would nod at me approvingly. So the whiteness of my skin, fluttering horribly against the darkness of the inside of the wound made it look like maggots were crawling around and around the open edges. The same way they would if I were already dead.
Okay So… Uhhh… What Are We Going to Do About This Problem?
The first thing you’re going to do is listen carefully to your doctors when they tell you what the symptoms of an infection are and, if you experience any of those symptoms, even if it’s just one, go to the doctor immediately and ask. If your family doctor can’t see you, go to urgent care or the ER. Staph infections are incredibly dangerous so do not wait on this. It’s important.
Eventually I had to learn to do the wound care myself, which was upsetting at first, but I learned that I was stronger than I thought and I could do it. So if you find yourself in this position take a deep breath and decide to find out if you’re stronger than you thought you were too.
As for the next thing, in a previous post I mentioned that staph infections are no joke (and they’re not), but you can think of them as a metaphor if you want to. What did I mean by that? Well, if a large hole opens up right over where your heart lives, once you’ve seen all the doctors you need to see about it and you’re on the mend in terms of bacteria, while you’re doing the off-putting work of getting the wound to close again, you may be looking for ways to make this ordeal seem less horrifying.
I think the best way to make something like this seem less horrifying is to think about, if this were a dream you were having in which a hole opened up over your heart, what would you assume your brain was trying to tell you? Maybe you would think it was saying “hey, here’s one more chance: Do you have stuff in your heart, metaphorically speaking, that shouldn’t be there anymore? Is there stuff you haven’t let in to your heart that you should have? Does anything need to be admitted, or evicted? Because look! Here’s a convenient door! Move everything around now, before it all closes up again!”
It’s possible this makes me sound crazy, but I feel like letting the metaphor do its thing at a time like this really helps me feel better about the bad stuff.
The Bright Sides
Okay so this sounds really gross, frankly, but it’s not all bad. For example, you can really freak people out with this information. While all this was happening a co-worker of mine was asking me all about my healing journey after the surgery and I told him the incision had re-opened. His eyes got really wide and he immediately took a large step backwards. He had many questions, like “are your insides in danger of falling out?” They were not. My sternum, such as it was, was still intact. But if grossing out your friends and acquaintances is your jam, there’s good times ahead if this happens to you.
Another bright side is that I’m really not at all squeamish anymore. Nothing is as awful as all this was.
Another one is that I can clean, pack, and dress wounds like nobody’s business. And I still have a large bin full of saline, gauze, and all kinds of other things in my closet. So if I experience any further wounds, I’m all set.
PLUS! This whole story is what provoked me to write the Interdimensional Tree House Monologue, which I will post just for funzies next week.
Wanna tell me how gross it is that I even posted this story in the first place? Tell me in the comments.
Change of Heart Patient Support 
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