Staring Death In The Face...

and coming up smiling.

When a highly skilled heart surgeon tells you just before a major intervention on your heart that there is one in a thousand chance you will die as a direct cause of the operation, it does not exactly fill one with confidence. When he adds the caveat that the odds of you dying are exactly the same if he does NOT do the operation, it's what we call a case of shit or bust.

Then when he's finished telling you that you might not make it out of this alive, he asks you to sign a piece of paper stating that you accept all risks. In other words, be it on your own head if it all goes base over apex. For a brief moment I was tempted to sign Mickey Mouse on the dotted line.

In the end I dodged a bullet, and then some. A previous mis-leading resonance echograph had indicated some pretty major arterial concerns which might have needed anything from the insertion of some stents to a full on quadruple by-pass or even a heart transplant. As one might imagine, I was not looking forward to any of it.

I actually started to have one of those dreaded conversations we all know one day we are going to have to have with our other half, you know, the chat where you tell them where you have kept that little pot of gold hidden all these years. It's debatable whether under the garden shed or stuffed inside that old mattress is the most popular choice.

My lovely wife managed to accompany me all the way to the operating theatre double doors and then had to wait outside whilst a team of amazing doctors and nurses set to. No doubt she was waiting to see if it was going to be necessary to move the garden shed a foot or two to the left before setting to with a shovel, not to bury the treasure that I am but to recover the one I jokingly told her I had left hidden in that place. Lovely as she is, I couldn't resist having the last laugh.

I was wheeled into a room to see the most incredible array of white encased equipment, dominated by a massive black plasma video screen. The lead doctor was now unrecognisable in his surgical blues and greeted me brimming with the self confidence bred by years of experience and the self knowledge that he is at the top of his game and in his prime.

For the next hour, with little more than a local anaesthetic in my wrist, this bilingual heart expert probed my veins-in at the wrist into the main artery, up the arm, across my chest and right into my heart. I lay there scared to move so much as an inch. I tried to control my breathing and actually heard myself controlling my own heartbeat. Breath in deep, hold the breath, and the beep I can hear off somewhere to my right slows right down. I have been practicing that little respiratory trick for many years as a performing artist and public speaker.The only other thing I could do was try to disconnect myself from what was actually happening. I just zoned out as best I could.

After about an hour I was told we were all done and that I could sit up. I was put in a wheel chair and pushed back to my little ward. On my right wrist was a sturdy pressurised airtight, transparent plastic band with blood stains underneath. Every two hours the pressure in the band was relieved a little until eventually it was removed altogether. All I could see was an incision mark no bigger than a comma! The cut wasn't even big enough to be stitched. it simply self closed in a vacuum. A regular sized Elastoplast had it covered in the shake of a lambs tail

Two hours later I was wheeled to a meeting room for a meeting with the surgeon and another doctor and treated to a full black and white video scan of the probe.

Incredibly, what had at first looked like serious damage amounted to nothing more than a minor branch slightly blocked. The branch was so fine it could not even be stented without taking a major risk. Far better to simply treat it with a blood thinner. There was also a minor branch that mysteriously just came to a dead end, best guess was that it was simply a birth defect. No threat there at all.

I was in hospital four days and most of that was prep and post op recovery. At one point I did feel that I was staring death in the face. In my own mind I went to hell and back. In reality, I have had a far worse time having a tooth filled. I have nothing but overwhelming respect for the surgeon who knowingly holds peoples lives in the balance and comes up smiling as if he has simply played a game of bingo and won a full house.