Under the Knife

Yesterday morning, Thursday 5th April, I set of nice and early and arrived at the Royal Infirmary about 07:45. I had been told not to eat anything after midnight, so hoped to get the op in the morning. As it turned out, I didn't get to the catheter lab 'till 14:45, so I was extremely hungry by this point.

The lab consisted of a large table with a gantry mounted x-ray camera which was used throughout the 2 hour operation. They injected me with heparin to thin my blood and some heavy duty pain killer - I had planned to watch them putting the catheters in (in the right groin) but the pain killer knocked me out right away. I woke up to see a nice picture of my heart with the 3 catheters moving around and then resting as they 'burnt' the offending tissue - I use the term burnt coz I don't know what else to call it. In reality, they use Radio Frequency signals to burn or ablate the tissue. Anyway, as the pain killer was wearing off, I could feel it each time they switched the signal on, with the longest burn lasting 200 seconds. It wasn't excruciating, but rather similar to being at the dentist when he doesn't get the Novocaine dose quite right.

They then took me back to the ward where I dozed on and off for a couple of hours. The had left the 3 sheaths used to facilitate easy catheter insertion and positioning in the groin, as they wanted to wait until the heparin had worn off before removing them. I was hooked up to a blood pressure/heart rate measuring machine which they switched on every so often to check things out. I have a fairly low pressure and heart rate, so all looked OK, but one time when I woke up, I felt a bit odd, and as I shifted my weight I became aware of being 'wet'. I was thinking how to explain this when I realised that is was blood, and I called the nurse. Because of the heparin and warfarin in my system, my blood wasn't clotting correctly, and I'd lost over 2 pints of blood. So the put me on a drip to get my sats back up, which worked pretty quickly - the also put a cold pack on my groin which was way worse than the op :-)

Fiona came into see me at 19:30, and I was feeling much better by this time - she also bought me in some cake which I quickly demolished. I finally got some tea and toast about 22:20 along with another litre of saline, after suffering the indignity of having a bed bath/bed change (they wouldn't let me get up) and then it was off to sleep.

I felt fine this morning, and apart from a nasty swelling from the groin bleed, all seems well. I'm pretty fatigued, but given that I've just had lengthy heart procedure, it's not too surprising.

I have to go back in on Sunday to get my blood clotting checked, and then to my GP on Tuesday AM to get the results.

The only bad news is that I'll be on warfarin for somewhere between a week (good) and 4 months (bad) - I'll find out over the next week.

I'm glad it's over.

Thanks for the mails/texts - much appreciated.