Salutations™!!
Today, Dear Reader, is my ninth birthday. My ninth second birthday that is. Nine years ago today, I was shorn of every hair on my body that wasn’t on my head. Every single hair, from my chest, to my back, my armpits, my legs, there all the way down to the hairs on my toes. Why, you ask? Well, because I was a mere hour or so from being wheeled into an operating room to have my chest sawed open, my shoulders pulled back toward each other, my ribcage separated and my body basically put on a machine while my heart was disconnected. There was a couple of holes in my abdomen for drainage tubes. Then, a vein was removed from my leg slightly to the left of my right knee cap and snipped about halfway down my shin. That was used to create a bypass of three arteries, therefore constituting a triple bypass.
A CABG (pronounced cabbage), which means Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting.
They put a wire or two around my sternum to help it heal, did internal stitches on me that dissolved on their own, wheeled my on to recovery where I spent a whole day asleep, basically. My lungs were still collapsed and weren’t inflating so I had to stay on a respirator with tubes in my stomach, down my throat and on a lot of sedatives. My mother tried to be funny and tell me that I really do have a heart, to which, I motioned for the nurse to bring me a pen and paper. I wrote, “leave the comedy to me.” Everyone told The BCPF that I was going to look bad and be in a bad mood and all that stuff when I finally woke up. They prepared my son to see me like that. To everyone’s surprise, I was not bloated and didn’t look bad, considering the circumstances. And, I was in a good mood, again, all things considered.
This picture, that I use every year was taken 24 hours after my surgery. All I wanted to do was post a selfie showing that I was still alive. That was immediately after being wheeled into my room.
And there you have it. It’s my ninth second birthday today. I’m glad to be here.
Until tomorrow, same blog channel…
Scorp out!
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“Open-heart surgery is now part of a typical life experience for many people. Folks talk casually about ‘having a stent put in,’ as if they had their tires rotated.” – Roger Ebert