My heartburn surgery still seems to be holding, which means that if it continues to hold for another three weeks I will be free from Warfarin. Then I will be all done, and everything will be a success. We are holding our collective breath (breaths?).
We read that a common after-effect of open heart surgery was depression.
I can understand that. But I don't think it is depression. There was a definite feeling state associated with the experience, an aversive one, but it wasn't depression. It's one I can't put into words because there probably isn't a word for it.
Vicky and I have talked about this. The best we can come up with is that having your heart stopped for several hours, and having your blood circulation and breathing be by machine for a few hours, and having powerful anesthesia for a few hours, and then powerful painkillers for a few days after that simply does something to the body that we don't fully understand. Did my brain get enough oxygen? Did the rest of my body get enough oxygen?
One indication of my body just simply not firing on all cylinders was obvious when I was in intensive care. I was hooked up to numerous machines and had several tubes in me that were oozing fluid. I don't remember much about it, except that the nurse assigned to me was like a guardian angel. Even in my haze I could feel her taking care of me. Vicky said she was adjusting those machines like I was a video game, competent and confident. She's the only person from that hospital stay whose name I remember. After I am completely healed I am going to send her a card thanking her. She got me from being a total wreck to being semi-functional. This is a lot of trauma for a body to experience, and it is no wonder my systems went haywire. How long does it take for the body to "unhaywire?" That's the best I can do to explain the feeling I had for a few weeks after surgery.
Fortunately I can't remember the actual feeling. All I can remember is having it.
I'm glad I'm past it.
When I was at home I needed something to do. I didn't feel like watching television or up to reading the bad news all of the time, so I pulled out an old, unassembled model car kit that I had kept from my days as a vintage toy dealer.
It was a welcome relief. However, the model was the most difficult one I have ever put together, and in my childhood I did them all of the time. This one had a ton of tiny pieces.
The model was an Entex brand Bugatti. Entex built models until the 1980s, often in 1/16 scale, so they were much larger and more detailed than were the standard 1/24 scale models of my youth.
I didn't get it finished while I was recovering on Whidbey Island, so carefully packed it and shipped it to Nuestra Casa. I finished it about a week ago. It was not my finest effort, because I had not assembled a model since my childhood, except with Ian, our grandson. Also, I had never assembled an Entex model, and that's a completely new ballgame. And why these kits are so sought after.
But it means something to me, even with it's imperfections. Just like I mean something to me even with my imperfections. It was something to help me get through those painful and awful feelings and give me the feeling that I was "doing something" instead of just sitting and looking out the window.
Vicky knitted during those times I was working on it--meaning, the times when she wasn't making meals for me, hauling firewood for me, driving for me, doing laundry for me, doing XXXXX for me, doing YYYYY for me, doing ZZZZZ for me, etc.
As I mentioned, as a child in Oklahoma one of my main hobbies was assembling models. It was nice because it made it easy for people to get me gifts---just get me a model kit. I assembled dozens and dozens.
One type I assembled was airplanes and jets. My father had built a room for me off of the living room, on the "second story." It had originally been a storage area above the garage. The entire room was done in plywood. I loved it.
Because it had plywood ceilings I came up with the idea of hanging my airplanes from it. So I had 10-15 at any one time, all zooming around. I put up little cotton balls to represent flak. In the early morning light all I could see was the planes, not the threads holding them up. So I would look at them and imagine myself flying around in one of them. What a memory.
Then, when I got tired of one or the other and wanted to replace it I would give it a hero's death. I would fly it into the ground, just like I saw in the movies. My version of that was to sail it out my window onto the small concrete slab below my room.
Remember I was a kid, and a boy, and those are a lethal combination, and sort of weird much of the time.
Here is my window of my childhood home, and the slab:
So doing this Bugatti model was also calming in that it connected me with my childhood and with memories of my childhood and parents.. I'm now no longer a child and a boy, but am an old person and a boy. Still a lethal combination I guess.
It's kind of cool--doors open, steering works, glove boxes open, very detailed engine.
I don't intend to give it a hero's death by ramming it into a rock or anything.
