There are 119 operating rooms at the Cleveland Clinic main campus, and I was assigned to operating room 61. All of them were in use on the morning of my surgery. The halls were buzzing with staff, all donning surgical caps, masks, and scrubs. Big monitors lined the hallway listing the OR numbers, including which surgeon and procedure was happening and the time. The monitors reminded me of the ones in the Denver airport, except in these halls, there were no bucket list or business trip destinations listed. There were no Cinnabons or Smoothie Kings. These monitors listed life or death surgeries, and mine was one of them.
__________________________________________________________________________
People had called me a heart warrior leading up to this moment, which didn’t quite seem to fit. Insane was a better descriptor. After all, I knew exactly what I was getting into this time. This was my second open-heart surgery. I was choosing to be intubated, in pain, with chest tubes, a central line out of my neck, a foley catheter, a pacer wire that was screwed into my left ventricle poking out of my abdomen, nausea, vomiting… I knew what was coming, and I rolled into OR61 anyway. It was this or death.
The issue was with my left anterior descending artery (LAD), which was nearly 100% blocked most of the time due to a strong pressure gradient throughout the artery. This was all because of the remaining myocardial bridge that was not properly unroofed in my first surgery in 2021.
My cardiologist had hoped to stent the LAD in October. We traveled to Cleveland (our 3rd time in 2025 by then) for this one specific procedure in hopes the stent would do the trick and I’d be on my way. By procedure time, I had every symptom of advanced heart failure and was worsening by the day. Once in the cath lab, I watched my LAD nervously while my cardiology team threaded a wire through my femoral artery into the LAD and discussed options. Several chemicals were administered to measure the pressure gradient under stress. With the wire still in my heart, Dr. Ziada, my cardiologist, ducked around the drape separating my head and upper chest from the rest of my body and gently told me that he could not stent the issue.
I needed another open-heart surgery.
_______________________________________________________________________
As soon as I rolled into OR61, the heart-lung machine immediately grabbed my attention. It looked like a cross between a giant radiator and a bike rack, but with lots of tubes and wires. The perfusionist assigned to its operation was tasked with keeping me alive. He had tattoos from head to toe and tight scrubs hugging his body. Quiet, reserved, and focused, he just nodded his head towards me like… I’ve got you. My life would end up hanging in the balance for over two hours, and he and that bike rack radiator gadget thingy would keep my blood flowing so my surgeon could stop my heart and delicately free my LAD from my heart muscle.
_______________________________________________________________________
Dr. Shinya Unai, my main surgeon, walked in, followed by a 2nd surgeon who would be in charge of opening and closing my sternum. After a safety briefing and some general surgical prep, it was time.
It was all surreal. I shouldn’t have been there. There shouldn’t have been a need for a 2nd surgery. The first surgery should have gotten the job done. But there I was in OR61 facing a redo of the first surgery plus a possible bypass since the LAD was twisted and kinked. PLUS, there were the two possible valve replacements. It was all a dumpster fire, but I had the best fire crew.
__________________________________________________________________________
Rage Against the Machine seemed like the only logical musical option for background music during the surgery. I just kept staring at the bike rack radiator gadget thingy and couldn’t believe that thing was going to keep me alive. So, when the nurses asked what I wanted to listen to, that’s what I requested. The entire room spun around and stared at me, and the head nurse said, “We didn’t expect that request to come from you, Boots.” It was as if they had assumed so much about me already by 7 a.m. and then I threw them off course. The first song to play was “Wake Up,” which was deeply ironic for my situation. Just as it got going, Dr. Unai walked in, pumped by my choice and promptly quoted the end of the movie, The Matrix, for which the song is now famous.
I felt like I had been in the medical matrix for years. There were senseless boundaries and controls, denied insurance claims, gaslighting by doctors, bad news, wrong tests being ordered, long wait times, endless prescriptions… It was all too much. Neo (aka Dr. Unai) was going to free my LAD and free me from the matrix of the broken health care system, so my heart could experience full blood flow and finally feel what is truly possible.
_________________________________________________________________________
Slowly drifting off, my consciousness let go of reality, the surgeons opened my sternum, the bike rack radiator gadget thingy got to work circulating my blood while my heart was stopped, and my soul threaded the needle between this life and the afterlife.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.