New here, AVReplacement & poss ascending aorta replacement sched Oct 3. (2012)

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Cherie

Member
Joined
Sep 13, 2012
Messages
8
Location
Washington State, USA
How could the time go by so fast? It's been a month since I scheduled this... it seemed like I had so much time... now I'm having much anxiety...

On the positive side, my cardiologist says I will feel SO much better once this is done.
If everything goes well I'm sure I will...

On the other hand, there are all the potential complications. In my life I've been the one who gets the bizarre complications, so that raises my anxiety.

I live alone, with my 2 large dogs.

My biggest fear is of a stroke or CVA. Next biggest fear is of the pain. Third biggest fear is that I won't get the help I need when I get home. Then comes fear of depression. I already take meds for a long-term battle with depression. I can't imagine it getting worse.

So now that I've impressed y'all with my cheerful, positive attitude, "Hello!"
 
Hello and welcome!

Best wishes in your upcoming surgery. As regards to your being on your own, I hope you have family and friends that will be helping you regularly during the first weeks home. If that is not as full as you’d like it to be, then make sure to at minimum inform your health plan’s discharge coordinator. Sometimes they can approve additional at home nurse visits. This can be particularly helpful if you have any special needs during the initial stages of recovery, or even if you just need occasional basic medical monitoring or help with learning how to use medications (e.g., Warfarin). Also, since you have two large dogs, have a plan to keep yourself from being tugged (or knocked over) by them. I have a wonderful small dog that would greet me in bed by jumping on my chest and doing a few burn outs when he’d jump off, so I had to use a baby gate to keep him out of the bedroom for a while.

You mentioned “depression”, everyone’s recovery can be unique, and some do report battling periodic blues (I did), it’s a large operation and can present some changes that take time to assimilate. Be good to yourself, and take full advantage of the kindness your dogs will want to give to you (they do it freely, or maybe just for a few biscuits). Something I use to tell myself was, “if I can handle having my chest cracked open and heart stopped, then I can handle anything or anyone”. To stay positive I liked focusing on getting myself back to physical fitness, quite often two steps forward and one large one back on occasion, but it was good for me to get absorbed into a new routine, researching new heart healthy recipes, developing my walking plan, seeing how much exercise I could tolerate, and enjoying how I could do more with each passing week’s worth of improvements (even doing simple household chores was welcome improvement). Since you are in a single person household, you might consider some “cardiac rehab” sessions to help monitor your progress and present opportunities for camaraderie with other heart patients. If you ever suffer the blues too often, then seek assistance to get over that hurdle.

You have taken the great step to getting your heart repaired, and then on the road to a healthy recovery. The surgery has come a long ways. And everyone on the forum is a survivor.
 
Time flies (or drags) when you're worried, huh? Try to line up some friends and neighbors to help with getting you meals, feeding the dogs, driving you to appointments and such. I've begun to realize that most folks really do want to help out and they get a lot of pleasure from being able to serve someone else. Many will say "tell me if you need anything" because they honestly want to help but don't have an ideas about what you might need. It was hard for me to ask for help but once I actually said "we could really use a couple of meals" or "could you drive?" it was a great relief. I'll keep you in my prayers and thoughts on Oct 3.
 
Thank you for your kind replies :)
Had my hospital pre-op appt today, lasted 4 hours!!!! Is there anything, looking back, that you didn't know or do that you wish you had?
 
I've had the same operation you're about to have. You'll be fine. The odds of complications are pretty low. After surgery, you can expect to feel tired and sore for awhile. It won't be as bad as you are probably imagining. After your successful surgery, don't let yourself feel self-pity over the fact that you needed major surgery. Instead, focus on how grateful you are that modern medicine can treat problems like yours. Even 70 years ago, there's not much that could have been done to help you.

Here's the best advice I can provide - based on my personal experience. After surgery, do your breathing exercises with the incentive spirometer (even though it will hurt to breathe deeply). Your lungs will probably not be fully inflated after surgery so you will need to work to get them fully inflated again. This is normal. If your lungs are partially deflated (a condition called atelectasis), it can cause fevers and make you feel crummy. You also need to walk. Staying upright (instead of laying down all the time), walking as much as you're able, and doing your breathing exercises will speed your recovery, clear your lungs, and make you feel better overall.
 
If you haven't already done so, have your supplies stocked up before you go in, I mean I know you will be getting your support team mobilized, but living on your own you don’t want to be caught low on your favorite items. I’m skinny and after the fluid retention vanished I was an astonishing 20 pounds down (had none to spare), and it’s amazing how your body will need nutritious food and plain old calories to heal from the inside out. I liked having home made protein shakes made from yogurt ice cream, milk and bananas, among other ingredients for variety. The internal incisions like protein to heal and to help smooth over the heart tissues. My visiting nurse (a wonderful person) lectured me to put on pounds, suggesting healthy power packed snack items for between meals. No matter how much I ate it took a long time for me to get back to my normal weight (but everyone is different, it’s just good to be prepared with a full stock of food). Best wishes, you sound prepared and ready, and your experienced surgical team has done this many times.
 
Cherie, I had a surgery similar to yours when I was 63 and now I am in my 70s and doing well, even volunteering at the hospital to visit heart patients. It is perfectly normal to be anxious going into this, but it is amazing what the heart surgeons can do and do so successfully in our time. It is a blessing and life is full of blessings to enjoy.

You have received some great advice here. I just wanted to stress one point. I, too, am a dog lover -- I have one large dog -- a lab, Sadie -- that I walk regularly. There is no way I could have walked her in the weeks after surgery -- she could have lunged after a squirrel or something and damaged my healing sternum by straining on the leash. I had a daughter and granddaughter there to take care of Sadie.

You say you have two large dogs. I don't know if you walk them or not, or if they jump up on you or jump in your bed, but you will not be able to take care of them for a while after surgery. Even just feeding and cleaning up after them and letting them in and out of the backyard when they need to go, will be difficult. You need somebody to do that for you, and if that's not possible you ought to find someone to keep them for you for a while, or even board them at a kennel if that's the only option. I hate to say that; I know they can be comfort in the healing process, and they will be at some point. But if you're on your own with them, you need help or someplace folks can give them good care until they can safely return.
 
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Many good words of advice and support here, thank you so much! 3 days left.... so nervous... not about the actual surgery, but everything that follows waking from surgery.
 
Superbob, thank you for sharing your experience as a fellow dog-lover. You definitely know what I'm facing.

Forrest, Guyswel, anutherbuddy... thank you so much for your responses, I really appreciate it!
 
I'll second Bob's suggestion about the dogs. You will need help with them while you are in the hospital, and for a couple weeks afterwards. Even after that, you can't walk them until your sternum is fully healed - even more than 6 weeks for the big guys.

I love Jet dearly, but she's a handful, and horribly excitable. For both of my surgeries, my dog training friends kept Tank and Jet - for 3 weeks the first round, then the week I was in the hospital the second round. Of course, I have a fully functioning husband so home care was not a problem. But the initial greetings with Jet are a handful!

But Tank, my late sweet 80 pounder, gave me quite a yank, a full 8 weeks after surgery, that left me sore for days. You don't want to repeat my mistake.

Maybe your neighbors have a teenager who would like to earn some extra money by walking your dogs for a couple miles twice a day for the next 8 weeks?
 
Best of luck this week! From my experience, the pain was not that bad, just make sure they are keeping up with the pain meds. We wife used to work in an ICU as a RN and she said the key to pain management is staying ahead of it with the meds.
 
Rough night last night. Awoke at 3:00am & couldn't fall back asleep. To bed early for me. Tomorrow I guess I'm just supposed to rest.

Thank you all for your kind words of support!
 
Been looking to Post-Surgery thread and hoping for update. Any word as to how Cherie did with her surgery, and how she's faring with her recovery? She was having a surgery similar to mine almost 8 years ago, and she has two large dogs as companions. (I have one, and sometimes two, counting my son's next door).

Hope and pray it is all going smoothly for Cherie. Hope she will be back posting with us soon.
 
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