How I survived the heart surgery

I had a hole in my chest.

Three weeks have passed since my operations on the open heart. My body rejected some of my sutures, spitting them like rotten food.

“He should heal himself,” said the doctor when she used the tweezers to pack the wound with gauze.

She was imprisoned just under my neck with a reflector on a full explosion. I wanted to turn around, but I had to know: how deep this hole actually went?

A few weeks earlier, I checked in in the same building to undergo an operation that I carefully avoided. There was no final sign or test with the inscription “It was time”, but the deteriorating symptoms made my unwell heart not be ignored. Dash, to catch a train, sent me to a full asthma attack, climbing the stairs became apnea. The time has come to accept reality: it was not a version of my heart that could move me to my ancient age.

At the age of 43 there would be no “good time” to take 12 weeks off. There was a diminutive business and my aging parents.

“I just didn’t have peace in my schedule,” I told my friend.

“Listen to yourself,” she said. “This is not a conference. This is an organ. “

I was worried about my husband. How would he do? What about our children? Would they be traumatic, watching how I go through it? And there was always a risk of complications and the fact that later I wasn’t better. Still, like a good girl I am, I chose the date of surgery.

I prepared as much as I could. I read books, meditated, went to therapy. I talked to other people who had the same surgery. I prayed. I joined the online support groups. But the only person who really helped me was the last person I expected.

She was on the table in front of me. Dead.

***

I usually don’t know women I prepare for burial. As a member of the local HEVRA KADISH, a Jewish funeral society, I participated in my last TaharaIN Ritual of washing and dressing the dead, Before the surgeons open my chest.

It was around 19:00, when I sat in an indefinite conference room at the local funeral home. This group of women, most of whom I have never met, would work together in silence, after age-old, well -established choreography.

An elderly woman lying in front of me was loved; The list of survivors at the end of her obituary exceeded the paragraph. When we checked her body, I noticed her stomach scar and flawlessly painted nails. I was telling me so much.

I really can’t explain, but I felt called to this work. I kept my grandmother’s hand when she died at home, and sat down next to my dad when he disappeared into the hospice. I was devastated, but I was never afraid. And I’m someone who is always afraid.

I was worried that I was hurt, losing someone, falling, insulting people, making a huge mistake. So I decided to direct this very sporadic lack of fear in something productive.

At the orientation for joining HEVRA KADISH, we sat in a room surrounded by coffins. After the rabbi’s speech, the current member gave a hospitable but direct tone: “If you had a bad day at work, you must be able to leave him at the door. If you just fought with your partner, you must be able to pack this anger. This experience does not apply to you. Whenever. It’s about taking care of a person before you, the dead. “

Completely focusing on someone else at that time, but that day in the funeral salon before my operation I began to twist “I” on the territory. When I was gently washed by this woman’s arm, I thought about my own body. I was incensed. Born with a heart defect, I had a feeling of fragility, which harassed me since my first operations at an open heart at the age of 10 months. My scar or what my parents called my “castle” made me feel like damaged goods.

I massaged the woman’s hands to make them malleable, carefully scrubbing heated pink varnish. Despite the trust of my parents and doctors, I always wondered if my heart would take me a middle -aged. Can I deal with a stressful career? Can I lead the marathon? Maybe yes and no.

After closing the casket, I joined others, putting my hands on a straight wooden box, thanking this woman for giving us the opportunity to prepare her for the last journey. But I realized that she also gave me a personal gift, clarity that I was looking for since planning my operation: regardless of the risk, I desperately wanted to get older.

***

A few weeks later in the operating room I felt a up-to-date sense of possibilities. I smiled at the surgical team when I moved from the chilly steel table.

Hey! “I was waving.

They seemed a bit shocked by my enthusiasm.

After that, I don’t remember much, except for waking up fully intubicated in the intensive care unit, hearing my sister and my husband calling my name. Despite stopping both arms, I remember that I said that I was ready to pull out the tube. The nurse gently told me that I still have a few hours. And between painkillers and the power of persuasion, I closed my eyes and returned to sleep.

Surgeons replaced my up-to-date cow pulmonary valve, and only 72 hours later the echocardiogram showed that maybe for the first time both chambers of my heart were normal.

My heart has adopted this valve with a slight protest.

“The heart is the most grateful organ,” a cardiologist told me. “It’s so trusting, so willing to accept support.”

Six months after the surgery, I was called to do another Tahar. My bridge healed, but the scar took over half of my torso. Although purple would disappear to Biała, such a scar would be forever.

I entered the funeral show and I was with a group of women I didn’t know again. They had no idea about my surgery, persistent pain, complications around my incision and months of recovery. I was grateful that nobody was worried if I could raise, stand, wear or push. We would focus completely on the person in front of us.

I kept my woman’s head and rinsed her hair on the shoulder, exhausting the weaves as gently as possible. We would be the last people who saw her face in this world, a holy honor.

I was hoping that I would become like her. I would live a long life like her.

To be straightforward, I never felt so alive.