Abide with me as I tell you a bit about the many micro pains and discomforts that follow a quadruple bypass surgery. Excuse the crafty click-bait headline and beginning but these days, one does whatever it takes.
I have, of course, written about that silly ‘Abide with me’ hymn debate in India here.
There are eleven cuts on my body, ranging from half a foot to half an inch. The biggest one being the main cut from the base of my neck to the end of the sternum. The sternum or the breastbone has to be sawed in order to open the ribcage to reach the heart. It stays open through the duration of the surgery to create bypasses of the blocked arterial passages. In my case there were four blockages. Hence quadruple bypass.
In order to create these bypasses, the surgeon and team take pieces of veins which is typically done from the thigh and groin areas. There are seven such cuts on my body.
Then there are three or four incisions needed to insert a pacemaker temporarily and other such external support. One of them is on the right side of my neck.
In short, one’s body is very significantly violated. These are multiple shocks that one’s brain and muscles process differently.
In the two or three days immediately after the surgery, the sternum cut felt tight and tender but surprisingly not that painful. It was certainly much less painful than my colon resection cut—a kind of C-section—a little over two years ago. That was a nightmare pain.
Just as you think, things are getting back to normal, micro pains and discomforts begin. Spots around the sternum throb and pain at random as do the thigh and groin cuts. There are so many of these micro pains that I marvel at the brain’s capacity to separate and isolate them individually and make me feel each one of them as they occur. In fact, I heard the brain laughing perversely as I suffered.
These micro pains occur 24/7 and without any pattern, which makes it difficult for one to anticipate and deal with them mentally.
These are routine pains and can be dealt with an ordinary painkiller. I avoid taking one as long as I could tolerate them. My pain tolerance is rather high. I am not saying this. Now two different surgeons—one dealing with a colon resection and the other heart bypass—have said so assertively.
It is these micro pains that make the recovery feel like a giant pain in the ass. Mercifully, that giant pain in the ass is figurative and not literal.
Add to this assortment of micro pains, a rather peculiar problem. Since my body was fully shaved for the surgery, the infuriating discomfort of body hair growing back, particular on the chest, is in a league of its own. It is both itchy and spiky. Wearing even a gentle cotton shirt and keeping it buttoned up becomes a problem. Not given to ever bearing my body it is a terrible predicament for me. These days though I keep my shirt unbuttoned except the last one. I live alone and my dadbod is not seen by anyone. As an aside, let me tell you what I told the team of doctors and nurses who were in the operating room. "I apologize for my simian body which you are about to see. I hope you don't faint," I said and everyone laughed. One of the nurses even said, "You feel like a cool guy to hang around with."
The final problem is as these cuts heal, you feel a delightful itch to scratch. One hesitates to scratch because of the fear of scratching off scabs and causing the cuts to bleed.
One remarkable aspect of the advances in surgical technologies is that the sternal cut is so finely done these days that one can barely see it. I remember having seen some bypass patients in India in the early 1990s whose chests looked like that of a cadaver freshly subjected to a shoddy autopsy. That is no longer the case.
