You Never Know

It’s time for a story. This is a story that is hard for me to relive and even think briefly about. But it’s worth mentioning here, as it’s never very far from my mind and helps me remember what’s important.  

“Kirk, we know what this is. What you’re having is called an Aortic Aneurysm.” Everything in the small emergency room fell away as those words took hold in my brain, and I turned to lock tearful eyes with my husband lying on the bed next to where I was sitting. I didn’t know specifically what the aortic part had to do with it, but I definitely knew the word “aneurysm”. 

My best friend and I had been at high school basketball practice when someone came to tell her that her mother had been found slumped over her desk at work, dead with an aneurysm. A well-liked local family had lost their dad and husband when the man fell next to his car, dead with an aneurysm. I didn’t have the exact definition for aneurysm in my head, but I knew it meant swift and certain death. 

“Don’t leave me,” I demanded tearfully. His eyes answered that it was the last thing he wanted to do, but we both knew this was beyond us. The fact that we’d even been given a diagnosis as he was lying here conscious was more than most people we knew with aneurysms had gotten. 

“We’re going to fly him out of here,” I vaguely remember hearing. I know one nurse was working at a desk, while the doctor and nurse practitioner were setting plans in motion to get him to a heart specialist as quickly as possible. 

Someone handed my husband a couple of stapled sheets of paper with the heading “Aortic Dissection”. He read briefly and handed it to me, whispering, “I don’t want to read anymore of this.” I noticed a few phrases: serious condition, blood vessel tears, aortic dissection is often fatal. I shoved it into my purse and grabbed his hand tightly. “Do I bring your mom with me, or do I leave her here?” He just looked sadly at me and said he didn’t know. 

I sprang into action. “Okay, I’m going to start driving. You’re going to beat me there, so I’ve got to get going,” I kissed him gently. “I love you and I’m going to see you again soon.” He nodded with such a sad look in his eyes and told me he loved me, too. My mom, who was also in the emergency room with us, assured me that she would stay with him until he left for the helicopter, and then she would follow. 

I jumped into my car, which my stepdad had just returned to me with a full tank of gas. My husband and I had been spending an increasing amount of time with his mother recently. She had woken up a couple of times from naps and had no idea where she was, even though she was in her own home. I punched in the number of my father-in-law’s nursing home and called. 

This is the right move, I thought, I’ll have her to focus on, and that will be good.  

I picked her up after a quick stop at our house to grab a bag and shove a handful of clothes and toiletries in. I also foolishly grabbed an outfit for my husband, reasoning, or rather, hoping, that he’d be coming home right away. 

I had a two-hour drive to where a helicopter would be flying my husband. I did a good job of keeping it together and keeping the car on the road as I was driving 85 or 90 miles per hour. We caught and passed a car with my husband’s daughters and one of their husbands along the way. We were almost there when I got a call. 

“Hyde,” my eyes filled with tears as I heard my husband’s voice flood the car. I heard his mother do a sharp intake of air as she recognized it as him. 

“Yes, I’m here,” I said quickly, realizing it had taken me a moment to speak.

“Hyde, I’m here. It only took about 35 minutes or so.”

“I’m glad.”

“Hyde, the surgeon wants to talk to you. He’s here with me,” his voice broke as he said the word surgeon, and I found myself fighting to keep my emotions in check. 

“Heidi, this is Dr. Smith,” I heard a southern voice fill the interior of the car. “I’m here with your husband, and I’d like to visit with you for a minute. Is that okay?”

“Yes, that’s fine,” I heard myself say, all business again. 

“I’d just like to explain what’s happening with him. His aorta, which is the largest tube that comes out of his heart, and usually looks like a single-barrel shotgun, is under so much pressure that it’s split into essentially what looks like a double-barrel shotgun.” 

“Oh, okay,” I stammered. 

“Heidi, if we don’t do surgery, there’s a 100% chance that he’s going to die,” he paused. “And if we do DO the surgery, there is still a 40% chance that he may not make it.”

My voice cracked as I said, “So we’re going to do it, right?”

“Yes, ma’am. How far out are you?”

“We’re five minutes away.”

“Okay, we’re going to wait for you.” Both his mother and I were in tears as I thanked him and hung up. She continued to cry as I forced myself to get it together.

We arrived in the parking lot of the huge hospital, parked the car, and joined the rest of our family, climbing quickly out of their vehicle. I told them what the surgeon had said and that we needed to hurry so we could see their dad before they took him into surgery. 

We raced through the hospital, just to end up in the wrong area. A nurse finally called my cell and told me she would come get us. She led us back through the maze of hallways, and there he was, clad in a hospital gown and head cover, ready for surgery. 

I wanted to hold him as tight as I could, and never let him go, but I also knew his kids and his mother needed a chance to do the same, and the surgeon was waiting. 

A man introduced himself to me as the anesthesiologist and told me that if he were going through the same thing, he would want Dr. Smith to be the one operating on him. I think I smiled at him. He handed me something of my husband’s, maybe his wallet, maybe his cell phone, or possibly both. We all kissed and hugged him, every one of us crying, including my husband. 

I held his hand as they began to wheel him down the hall. We got to a certain area, and they told us that was as far as we could go. We kissed and hugged him again, and he said, “Let’s go, let’s just get this over with.”   

My mother-in-law, two daughters, son-in-law, and I were led to a large waiting area and given instructions. It was 6 p.m., and the surgery could take as long as seven hours. There would be a nurse in the room during the surgery who would be calling my phone every hour to let me know how it was going. If there was ever a time that I wanted to call them, there was a phone on a desk in the corner of the waiting room. She handed me the number, showed us that there was coffee and water available, and she was gone. 

We all found a spot to begin the excruciating, never-ending seven and ½ hour wait to see if my husband, her son, their dad, and his father-in-law, would ever be the same again. 

As the surgery began, each of us kept busy by sending text messages to other family members and friends. My phone rang and I saw that it was my dad. My parents are divorced and remarried. My mom and stepdad live near us and are with us often, certainly whenever something major happens. My dad and stepmom live states away from us. While we talk on the phone quite frequently, we only actually see each other a couple of times each year. 

“I’m on my way,” my dad said in my ear. The world dropped out from under my feet once again. If my dad was headed this way, it could only mean one thing: he didn’t think my husband was going to live through this. It became hard to focus on anything else he said. All I could think was that my dad coming could only mean that my life was about to change drastically. 

I joined the group with a few minutes to spare before the first hour ended. I stared down at my phone, waiting for it to ring, and when I happened to glance up, I saw four other pairs of eyes watching my phone screen too. It rang, and the cheerful nurse’s voice on the other end reassured me that everything was going along just as they had thought it would. Everything was going well. I thanked her, she told me she’d call me again in an hour, and we hung up. The wait for the next phone call had begun. 

The next couple of hours continued in much the same manner. People would call or text or Snapchat me, and I would respond with whatever information I knew. My mom and stepdad arrived, and my son-in-law went to a motel room. My sister called and one of the first things she said was, “Dad’s coming.” Everything skidded to a halt again. I told her he had called and that I definitely knew what that meant. We managed to talk for almost an hour after that, and it even seemed somewhat normal. My dad arrived a couple of hours later. 

The third hour hit, and we all sat around watching my phone screen. We watched, and watched, and watched. Nothing. We all knew the call would be coming in at any second, and none of us did anything but watch until we realized that the fourth hour was approaching. I wondered if this was how it would start: first, the phone calls quit coming, next, there would be a nurse coming in, asking for the wife. 

I couldn’t wait any longer. I went to the corner phone and dialed the number the nurse had given me, asking to get an update. The nurse asked who I was calling about, and there was a long pause as she did something. 

I envisioned her covering the handpiece with her hand, telling her co-worker that the guy’s wife was on the phone, the one they were cleaning up before they came to the waiting area to explain that they had done everything they could possibly do. The “we’ll get back to you just as soon as we can, we’ll call you on your cell phone,” confirmed what my mind had already decided. 

A call finally did come in, telling me that things were going well. I had been so sure they weren’t that it was hard to believe the voice on the other end of the phone. I don’t think I ever really did believe, until the call came telling me that the surgery was over, it went well, and the surgeon would be coming to speak to me. It had been a seven-hour ordeal. The surgeon was finally sitting with us at 1:15 a.m.  

Dr. Smith explained the whole process to us, beginning with the aorta swelling from a single-barrel shotgun, to a double-barrel shotgun, and how lucky we had been that it hadn’t torn into a triple-barrel shotgun. He talked about how they replaced my husband’s aortic valve, which had become faulty, with a pig valve and his aorta had swollen from three centimeters to 5.5 centimeters, where two layers had torn. They used synthetic mesh to repair the aneurysm. He also brought up the fact that the human body normally has around 1.7 gallons of blood. They had used 28 units during the surgery, which translates into 3 ½ gallons! Finally, he told us we could see him, although he wouldn’t be waking up for hours yet. 

I walked into my husband’s ICU room holding my mother-in-law’s hand. They had agreed that we could take turns seeing him, as long as we went in pairs. I had barely glanced at him when a nurse smiled at me and said, “he’s a miracle man.” My mother-in-law lost all composure at hearing that, and we just stood next to him, hugging each other and sobbing. 

I pulled away. I had to touch him, drink him in with my eyes, and make sure he was still the man I knew. The way he was lying was a lot like a person in a casket, arms folded over his chest, and I needed to see the rise and fall of his breath before I could be sure he was okay. 

He was covered by a blanket to his waist. There were gauze pads running from right underneath his neck to the top of his belly. He had tubes coming out of his chest and several other tubes close to his neck and coming out of his mouth. He was paler than I’d ever seen him. But he was breathing and he was alive. I could finally breathe again, too. 

It would be another 26 days before my husband was sent home “to cure like a country ham,” as his surgeon, Dr. Smith, put it. He had been put into a hypothermic state during surgery, and it took his insides a long time to wake up. 

We got to go home on February 26th, just to return about a month later for him to have his cecum removed, a part of the large intestine. It had never gotten the message to wake up, and it was decided that his stomach would feel and work better if he wasn’t constantly battling it. By this time, COVID had arrived, and I didn’t get to go with him; I just had to drop him off at the door to the hospital. 

I picked him up several days later, and we had to drive through a blizzard to get back home, just in time to spend Easter by ourselves. Another first. 

With all of the ups and downs of his medical issues, I fell deep into depression. Even when he came home, I couldn’t shake the feelings of sadness. There had been several times I was sure he was going to die, and the feeling stuck with me. He was home and back in his recliner, where I had hoped and prayed for him to be, and although my brain was happy about it, my feelings couldn’t catch up. 

The nurse practitioner, who had first recognized he was having an aneurysm, and I had become close as we were constantly texting about what was happening with my husband. She recommended that I start on some antidepressants. It was exactly what I needed to get back to feeling like myself. After a couple of months, I was able to ditch the pills and express all the happiness I had knowing “the miracle man” was home and working, and living life again. 

The thing is, you never know. If tomorrow were your last day here on Earth, are you okay to go knowing you have done every single thing you wanted to do? Or are there goals, hopes, and dreams you’re putting off until you’re ready? Spoiler alert: you’re NEVER going to be ready. My advice is that you should start chasing all those crazy ideas living in your head. Make every one of them your reality.