Arghh the pain, the agony! I need the drugs! GIVE ME THE DRUGS! No, it’s not my heart, where they’ve just spent hours burning away tissue to stop my palpitations, or my chest where they’ve fed wires through my arteries or even my groin which harboured two massive tubes... Oh no, it’s my shoulder.
Yes, MY SHOULDER! And I don’t mean the kind of dull ache in which maybe I lay awkwardly during the procedure, no, it’s the kind of pain where I want to rip my arm out of its socket and throw it out the window, and where a dose of paracetamol, tramadol and two shots of morphine can barely take the edge off it!
Apparently due to the aggressiveness in which the surgical team attacked my dodgy tickers tissue, it caused some ill effects on the nerves that lead up to my shoulder. Now I’ve done the entire YMCA dance and no matter what I do with my arm I cannot alleviate the pain at all... AAAAARGH!
I did a quick google (you’re right, I shouldn’t have) and in some cases it can lead to long term chronic shoulder dysfunction... Awesome, well that be me all over wouldn’t it? Go in for heart surgery and come out with a life long dodgy shoulder. But hey, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve left surgery with long term life affecting nerve damage, an operation many years ago rendered me deaf in my left, but you know, shit happens.
Anyway, enough dwelling on this horrendous pain that makes me want to render myself unconscious just to escape its horrid grasp... The procedure according to the surgeon, went really well! Woohoo, bust out the caviar and get the Doritos ready! Thankfully at this time they did not need to do the AV Node Ablation, which would have rendered the junction box to my hearts own pace maker null and void, thus having to rely solely on my fitted one.
Instead they believe that they were able to Ablate the tissue and electric circuit (yes, we’re still talking about my heart) that were causing the palpations. Now I won’t know how much of success exactly this was for a few weeks as my heart recovers. The objective of the procedure was to stop the ‘SVT’s’ or at least reduce their frequency of them. It may turn out that in the long run it will have proven unsuccessful and my weekly A&E trips shall continue and I’ll have to return again to have the AV Node wiped out... but let’s hope it’s doesn’t come to that aye (awkwardly hopeful smile).
As usual I must commend the BRI hospital staff for both their professionalism and their hospitality. With a room all to myself, electric bed, TV, ensuite bathroom and a skyline view of Bristol, I simply cannot complain about the 5 star accommodation. Though my only complaint of the room was that the clock didn’t work, and I was greatly disoriented waking up in the room still half doped up from the morphine and anaesthetic to find it was quarter to four... on Thursday. So not only had they fixed my heart, but invented time travel as well, marvellous!
After we got there we sat in the waiting room before myself and five others were ushered into cubicles like sheep, though nobody laughed at the little baaa I let out, shame, it was a top joke. We then proceeded to change into those Uber sexy hospital gowns, complete with rear slit to show a bit of rear skin, which I didn’t mind as my wife says I got a nice ass. Hey, if you got if, flaunt it!
‘Erm mr smith’ the nurse said to my as I sat crossed legged on the bed attempting to conceal my manhood in the thin layer of cloth. ‘That’s not a hair net’
‘No?’
‘No, they’re your paper pants’
Oh, I thought to myself pulling the pants off my head. I assumed the extra holes were in case you had pigtails, a ponytail or perhaps a man bun. They’re breezy though, I’ll give them that.
One of the nurses was quite impressed by my laid back attitude as we waited to go down to surgery, she said that normally she had to reassure her patients as they sat nervously on edge, but I was akin to a man sat at home in his favourite armchair with a whisky and cigar waiting for an episode of Emmerdale to start.
I explained that having been in A&E around twenty times, been knocked out sixteen times and undergone heavy surgery earlier this year, you kind of get accustomed to it.
I was then taken to the Cath lab, now I’ve never met her but I’ve heard she’s a lovely person, I did ask if cath had given permission for us to use her lab, which got a chuckle and oh look, Pat left her board here.
Now the lab seems less an operating theatre and more a resemblance of the medical bay from the Starship Enterprise. A Huge TV screen, the kind you’d find in a New Yorkers bachelor pad hung adjacent to the slab of metal they lie you on. Machines of all shapes and sizes surround the room and overlooking the entire operation through giant windows are a multitude of staff monitoring various screens. The doctors and nurses attire are not that of a standard surgical team, instead adorning colourful leaded vests, had they been black I may have mistaken them for a SWAT team.
Then they inject with a sedative which is the absolute bomb. Like downing and entire bottle of whisky but without the hangover or fear of alcohol poisoning. You sit there suddenly in your happy place, telling everyone how much you love them and what a splendid job they’re doing. You get more and more woozy as people are talking to you, trying to explain what they’re doing, but you just don’t care. You’re in your own little world of happiness.
‘We’re just going to put some stickies on your chest’
‘Carry on’
Just attaching you to a drip Andrew’
‘Yeah okay’
‘We’re probably gonna have to cut off your arm as it’s getting in the way’
‘Just do whatever you need to do’
Then you slip off into a dreamless sleep as the doctors and nurses do their stuff, slowly, painstakingly putting Humpty Dumpty here back together...
