Steve's Posts

I'm now in my 18th day of new life with my new aortic valve. I'm doing well! I've cut down on my hydrocodone/Tylenol pills from 8 a day to about 3 or 4 a day (using ibuprofen instead), and walking up to 4000 feet at a stretch; helping cook meals with my wife and doing dishes; and getting some writing done too. I sleep quite a bit. I love the fact that my normal blood pressure is now normal, around 120/70 (I used to have a huge gap between systolic and diastrolic) as is my pulse of about 65 resting (it used to be about 40--and no, I am NOT a runner!) But in this post I wanted to paste in something that happened on my third day of recovery. I wrote it up on the fifth day, and am just copy-pasting it here (with a few corrections). It was a pretty amazing interesting event that made be feel like Jason Bourne. Here's the description: I am finishing my fifth day of recovery after an aortic valve replacement. It went really well, but on the third night I had a remarkable incident. I woke up out of sleep, in a bed and room I did not know, with a young man standing near me fussing with something. I look around, felt he looked familiar somehow, but had no idea where I was. (Imagine waking up in a hotel room in Vietmam tomorrow morning) I asked him who he was, and he said' You know me, I'm Matt; I'm replacing the IV on your hand.") I said, "I don't remember you and I don't know where I am." He said "What do you mean?" I said "Well, if you asked me how to get from my home to "here", I 'd have no idea where to go. I have no idea where I am, how I got here, and what I am doing here." I looked at him, and around the room, and I could have been whisked to another planet for all I knew. The amazing thing is how clear and lucid I was. It was just that my current experienced world was completely detached from my larger memories. Matt quietly asked me questions, starting with my name, my wife's name, etc. I knew all that. I just didn't know where I was or why I was there. He then fished for any little things I could remember, doing this for about 20 minutes. One first things I said to him was: "Okay, I do remember my daughter was flying in from New York to help my wife, and my sister is flying in to help her too." ANd then: 'Hmmm, they were to help during some kind of surgery, but I don[t know what or what for." Then slolwly I would remember little patches of conversations with people in the hospital--but just little vague fragments tha tdid not form a whole. Like "I remember this nurse doing something ..." And then I started thinking out loud about why I couldn't remember where I was. I said "Okay, so maybe I had a stroke which affected my memory." The nurse guy--Matt--said "Why do you think that?" And I said "Well, I know stroke can zap memory, and I remember reading, this surgery--hmmm-- does have about a 1.5% of causing stroke." (Matt then had me do a few tests and said: "Good try, but you haven't had a stroke, Steve." I was just like I was Jason Bourne or something, so far as my recent past went. But after about 15 or 20 fragments fell into place, the whole fabric of memory reknitted itself to my larger memory… I then again knew just where I was at 100 Michigan Avenue Grand Rapids, and how and why I got here. But it took wonderful patience and gentleness on Matt's part, in a quiet private room, to recover this. It is interesting that I didn't go into any panic or anything (maybe hydrocodone helped!; instead it was like our our little science-fiction adventure or something. I'm glad my wife wasn't here...it might not have all been so calm and re-assuring if someone got panic-stricken. Each new round of nurses I'd tell about it, in case it happened again and they needed to "bring me back" back again. Perhaps it can be of some value for others to know about htis. It seems like memory-cells that seem to float off to the side can get re-knit to the mainland by low-key back-and-forth dialogue! A doctor-friend of mine suggested yesterday that it may have been caused by a very mild case of "postoperative intracerebral vasospasm." I don't know about that--I did a little research on postoperative cerebral spasm but didn't find anything described similar to what I experienced. But if you get like I was and don't remember anything about where you are, try to remember: don't panic!