Feb.-March 2005 (Written 2005)

Personal recollections of February-March 2005

I was released from LDS hospital on January 25th. Keith and Gloria gave me a ride home. It felt wonderful to be out of the hospital environment, where my whole world was first my room, then later the floor of the hospital my room was on. I did not however, enjoy being tethered to an oxygen bottle. It made me feel like a decrepit old fogy.
My first night home, I tried to lie down in my bed, next to Julie, but immediately started coughing and bringing up copious amounts of mucous. After about 15 minutes of this, Julie told me that as much as she wanted to lie next to me, she had to go to work in the morning, and could not sleep with my hacking nonstop, so I debouched to the adjacent bedroom, where I coughed and gagged half the night.
The next day, with Julie at work and Chantal at school, I was determined to begin my rehabilitation. But a short walk around the block, pushing that oxygen bottle, left me exhausted. I did not realize how much my capabilities had atrophied. In a month, I had gone from a reasonably strong specimen to someone who was winded climbing a flight of stairs.
I had anticipated a short recovery, with a re-entry to the hospital for surgery within about two weeks. But a visit with Dr. Pearl a little over a week later kyboshed those plans. I was still bringing up a lot of mucous, especially at night, and he informed me that surgery would be postponed until the flow all but stopped, which would tell him that my lungs were healed enough to tolerate the surgery. What a downer. I just wanted to get healthy, get back to work, and get on with my life. Now I found out that I would be spending at least the month of February sitting at home.
I did resolve to get stronger. Within a week, I was able to do a half-mile on the treadmill at the gym. The first time I went I dragged that old oxygen bottle along on its cart, but felt so self-conscious that I went home and figured how to put it in a backpack, so even though I had the tube sticking in my nose, at least the bottle proper was hidden from view. I told myself that from a distance I would look like a hiker in training.
About the middle of February, my Oxygen saturation improved to the point that I could ditch the bottle during the day, though I still had to be hooked up at night. Most importantly, my mucous flow was slowing and my strength was slowly returning. At the end of the month, I was cleared for surgery. It was hard to believe that I was looking forward to getting sliced and diced, but I knew that getting the tumors out was critical. As Dr. Collins told me during our pre-op visit, there was a one to two percent chance of death from the surgery. Then seeing my shocked looked, he told me that the chance of eventual death from cancer if I did not have the procedure was one hundred percent. Touché.
I had no memory of entering the hospital the first time, though I remember thinking that they would give me some tests, give me some pills that would make me feel better, and send me on my way. It didn’t quite turn out that way of course. But as I prepared to enter the hospital for the second time, I felt good, had a clear understanding of what was ahead of me, and was confident in the skills of my doctors. I honestly thought that it would be a fairly simple procedure. Shows you how much I don’t know about medicine.
I checked into the hospital the afternoon before my surgery about 1:00. By 5:00 I had done all the paperwork, been X-rayed, had enough blood drawn to satisfy a vampire, and was settled in my room, watching TV and eating dinner. Kind of like a very spartan hotel, though a bit pricier than your nearby Comfort Inn. Knowing that after midnight, I would have no food for 12-24 hours, I indulged in a late night snack of a sandwich and a dish of ice cream before hitting the light around 11.
At 5:00 the next morning, the light came on and I was confronted by a guy with a shaver. But this was no assault; my entire right side had to be shaved clean. Actually, his instructions were to shave my left side, but I grabbed a felt tip from him, wrote “don’t cut here” on my left flank, and “cut this side” on my right. He double checked with the nursing staff, who confirmed that his initial instructions were erroneous. As hairy as I am, it was an odd sight to see half my chest shaved clean, while the other side stayed gorilla-like.
Shortly after he left, my family came to visit until at about 8:00, a nurse came to put me on a gurney for the trip to the operating room. She gave me a pill to get me started on my long spiral down into anesthesia. I was told it would make me forget everything, that I would not even remember this conversation. Ha! I still remember, as well as recalling my ride through the elevators and halls of LDS, though I was now starting to get fairly, well, relaxed. The last thing I remember was being wheeled into the operating suite and thinking that it was a mess. There were machines and instruments everywhere, pushed back against the walls of the room.
The next thing I knew I was waking up in surgical ICU, and noticing that the clock on the wall said 4:00. I was informed that what was supposed to be a fairly straightforward procedure lasting under three hours had turned out to be a bit more complicated than planned and had taken over six hours. When the bill arrived from the hospital, I had been billed for 415 minutes in the surgical suite, or almost seven hours from entry to exit. (I wonder if they punched a time clock or had an orderly there with a stopwatch)? Shortly afterward, Dr. Collins came by to see me. He explained that instead of two collapsed but intact lung lobes that they had expected to remove, he found unidentifiable tissue plastered against my chest wall. The extra time it had taken in surgery was caused by the necessity of scraping it off, bit by bit. He also told me it was rotting and stunk to high heavens. I surmise that is what caused my pneumonia in January, since having dead, rotten tissue inside your innards is not exactly sanitary. He had sent the tissue to Pathology to be tested for cancer, but told me he did not see any obvious tumors. Apparently I was a unique enough case that they gathered up a couple of residents to scrub up and come on in and take a look at my blood and guts. I hope you are not reading this before dinner.
That evening, the nurses tried to get me sitting up in a nearby chair. However, my blood pressure dropped through the floor and I started feeling decidedly woozy. They hustled me back into bed, where I slept the night away.
Late the next morning, I had stabilized to the point that I was transferred out of ICU into a standard room. Based on my January stay, I thought that meant that I would be able to get out of bed and walk around. However, this time I had so many tubes sticking in and out of me that leaving my bed was out of the question. Bummer. I was draining lovely pink fluid through a pair of chest tubes protruding from my lower torso, had an epidural pain killer needle in my back, several IV’s in my arm and neck, and probably a few tubes I don’t remember. The right side of my torso was also taped together and bandaged. I was also more than a little hungry, since almost 36 hours had passed since I last ate. At least they didn’t stick a #*&^!!! feeding tube up my nose. I was actually given real food to eat for lunch, which lifted my spirits considerably.
When my family came to visit me, I noted a difference between their January visits and their March ones. In January, everyone was genuinely worried about my prognosis. Okay, I admit I had given them more than enough to fret about. In March, they wanted to know how I was doing, but the worry was gone. It was nice to visit with Julie, who in January often could not emotionally handle visits of more than 10 minutes or so, but who came and sat with me for hours in March. My parents also were much more relaxed this round.
The only thing was, I was hurting a lot more. In January I was weak, struggling at times for breath, and unable to walk more than a few dozen yards without assistance. But I was essentially pain free, except for a pulled muscle or two caused by coughing. After my surgery, once the pain meds wore off, I was not in agony but was definitely uncomfortable. Any time I coughed, the pain from my incision was excruciating. When I wasn’t coughing, it was more of a dull ache, but not something I was enjoying.
A day or so after the surgery, I was taken to physical therapy, which was a treadmill and a short set of stairs. Most of the Thoracic surgery patients had been in for open heart operations and could only manage a very slow pace on the treadmill. I was constantly pushing to go faster than the program called for. Once the nurses on duty could see that I was not winded by the more careful pace, they did bend the protocol a bit. It felt good to be moving and exercising, even though I was tethered to several instruments still hanging from my “Christmas tree”.
One by one, these IV’s, monitors, etc…were removed, until the last two days in the hospital I could finally get up and walk freely around the room and hospital. Even though my side still was an obvious patch job, I was off the epidural and on oral pain medication. Unless I coughed, I felt pretty good. The pathology report had come back with no living cancerous tissue in the gunk they had scraped out of me. Apparently, other than the tumor that Dr. Pearl lasered out in January, in collapsing my lungs over a year ago, the cancer had cut off its own blood supply and engineered it’s own demise, though I will need to have bronchoscope every six months for the next five years and annually thereafter in perpetuity ensure no return of the cancer.
After a week and a day, I headed home to continue my recovery. My parents came and stayed with me for several days, but I turned out to not be as helpless as everyone imagined, though now sporting a nice ugly “I wonder what happened to him” scar. In fact, just the day after I came home from the hospital, I went on a four mile walk with my dad, though we did take about two hours to complete it. Five weeks after leaving LDS hospital, I was snowshoeing up Big Cottonwood canyon, catching the end of the winter that I had mainly glimpsed from my hospital and bedroom windows. As I write this, I have gained back about ten of the thirty pounds that I lost in January, (boo/hiss), but feel great and am in better shape than I have been in years. Nothing like almost buying the farm to give you an incentive to get to the gym/pool/mountains and move your kiester.
I do not know what else to add except that I am grateful for the love and support of my family, both immediate and extended, as well as to my Heavenly Father for the restoration of my health and vitality. Hopefully, I won’t have another episode like this for another 46 years or so.
Lorin (July 2005)