Give Up, Or Don’t
Don’t Make Me Be Better
February 28, 2017Heart surgery is hard. Not just the doing of it; the "open your chest 18 inches, stop your heart, play around for 6 hours, then restart your heart and close you up" part is also pretty hard. I'm talking about having it.
The hardest part is getting up and walking when everything hurts. There are huge tubes coming out of your chest, massive IV's coming out of your neck and chest. It would probably make more sense to wake up the way Neo did in the matrix than to wakeup in the harsh reality of life after heart surgery.
"Get used to doing the hard thing now, before that hard thing becomes really hard.” - E. Hodson
There is an incredible thing inside the human soul, that thing we aspire for when we watch our favorite movie or think about people we respect and admire the most. That is the ability to do what has to be done no matter what. Waking up with more tubes and wires sticking out of you than you even knew you had holes for is terrifying. But after surgery we are in a race, a race against time. The longer you sit there, the harder it is to get up.
As your body sits in bed, your lungs don't open all the way, which lets small bits of lung butter and slime collect and cause infection. Only getting up out of bed, and coughing will save you from life-threatening pneumonia. The blood in your legs is pooling, and every hour you don't use them, you are more likely to develop a blood clot. Blood clots and the damage that can follow is the most life-threatening risks of laying in a hospital bed after surgery.
The short story is, the very best thing for a heart patient to do is walk, and it is often the one thing they don't want to do. Many do well, but my patient today did not. It inspired me to share this lesson with you now before life puts you in a situation where your life depends on it.
Discipline. Grit. Endurance. Strength of Will. Perseverance. These are just as powerful as Morphine, Ciprofloxacin, Intrapulmonary Percussive Ventilation (IPV), and PEEP. Medicine can only do so much, it is the patient that must heal herself.
“Medicine is the art of entertaining the patient while the body heals itself.” - Voltaire
