OMG !!! Due to an apparent scheduling conflict, my cardiothoracic surgeon postponed my coronary artery bypass surgery (four or five bypasses) AGAIN !!! It is now scheduled for 7:30 a.m. (6 a.m. arrival at the hospital) on March 9, 2022, instead of March 8, 2022.
That's OK. It gives me an extra day to strengthen my lungs by using my two incentive spirometers and also to continue to take my heart and lung medications (and vitamins and iron supplements).
I was in the hospital from February 28 to March 3, 2022, for preoperative tests of my heart, lungs, both carotid arteries (in my neck), and blood. A 30-minute-long pulmonary function test at the hospital deemed my lungs to be just about strong enough for surgery.
Basically, my surgeon, my cardiologist, and the pulmonologist at the hospital all cleared me for surgery.
My surgery was previously postponed because my lungs weren't strong enough due to my chronic asthma and my bout with a covid infection late last year. Other factors that may complicate my open-heart surgery include chronic diabetes; kidney failure (both kidneys last year, with complete recovery after six weeks of dialysis: four straight hours a day, seven days a week); congestive heart failure (last year, with severe edema in both of my legs); and a recent heart attack (date unknown due to diabetes).
Throughout last year, I was hospitalized seven times, including a thoracentesis (450 milliliters/22 ounces of fluid was drained from around my right lung); three of four surgeries on my left foot (two to remove decayed bone fragments due to osteomyelitis and one to remove a benign tumor growing within a diabetic ulcer); pneumonia twice; dangerously low hemoglobin levels (requiring iron infusions); dangerously low white-blood-cell count (almost zero); and intensive testing for a possible TIA (mini-stroke), which I didn't have. I started my series of hospital visits in December 2020 with dangerously low potassium levels and dehydration. The kidney failure and low white-blood-cell count were due to a six-week-long, daily (outpatient) regimen of intravenous antibiotic to cure osteomyelitis (bone infection) in my left foot.
After the completion of my five-hour-long, heart surgery, where my heart will be stopped from beating and my lungs stopped from breathing, if all goes well, I will be in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) for three to five days, and then return home after a total of seven days, give or take. Full recovery takes three months, which includes physical therapy.
If all doesn't go well, there is the potential for another kidney failure; and/or to receive a tracheotomy and/or to remain sedated up to two weeks being fed by a tube into my side and then into my stomach, that is if they cannot get me off of the ventilator and breathing on my own, so says my surgeon's assistant. That sounds like fun, huh? Of course, the "worst of the worst" is also possible, so let's hope and pray for the best.
In the near future, I may need to have a pacemaker or a defibrillator installed, but my surgeon assured me that would be a comparitively simple operation.
