It's More Like Getting Stabbed or Shot in the Heart...
It's More Like Getting Stabbed or Shot in the Heart...
I have had very little in the way of dismissive or otherwise truly insensitive remarks, possibly due to my being around my wife's colleagues (medical professionals and the like) than other folks less educated about heart issues. However, the people who say I have had a heart attack, I gently correct then, saying it was a piece of my mitral valve that went bad and that my coronary vessels are just fine--so no heart attack. Nobody, however, has compared a surgery on a non-vital organ system to my OHS, so I haven't had the opportunity to 'educate' these people. I do have some ideas though to consider...
For those who are really dismissive about the intensity of OHS versus other surgery, perhaps the analogy of being shot wherever their particular surgeries took place, versus being shot in their hearts would make them wake up and think. Or perhaps the analogy of being stabbed in the heart would reach home for those who think being shot has nothing to do with surgery. Scalpels are like little knives... Let's say you get stabbed in your shoulder. It hurts--very badly, you bleed, you'll need fixing up, you heal and probably end up with a scar, but (unless you nicked a major artery) your life wasn't in immediate peril. However, get stabbed in the heart, and you're on your way to solving the Final Mystery unless you get immediate medical care. The only more perilous surgery I can think of is brain surgery--of course being shot in the brain is as quick, if not quicker a way of dying.
Or perhaps this way: It cost you about $100,000 to get stabbed in the heart. $5.00 for the stab, and $99,995 for knowing exactly where to stab, what physical 'evidence' to leave behind (repaired or replaced plumbing and valves), and how to un-stab you in such a way that you're still alive and hopefully on the way to recovery. Ask anyone in the first month or so after surgery, though, and it frankly still feels like you've survived being stabbed in the heart from anything from a bowie knife ("minimally" invasive) to a war axe chop (sternotomy).
While most people haven't actually known a stabbing victim, television exposure to such drama would at least partly bridge most people's understanding of the probable lethality of heart stabs, versus the messy and disgusting results of stab wounds elsewhere--but the main tv character survives albeit with a huge bandage or something like it over the healing wound at the end of the drama.
I hope this helps. Of course save the gory stuff for the truly insensitive, and tone it down accordingly for the merely ignorant.
Chris
(would be a good Halloween decoration...
