When I woke, it was, at first, the same as any other time I’d ever awakened. I faded into awareness. I could hear my best friend’s voice calling to me. I opened my eyes, and she was there, hovering over my face.

“Hi!” she said, her eyes red, her voice unusually, artificially cheerful.

I thought the words, but when I tried to ask her what was wrong, no sound came forth from my throat. I reached up instinctively with my hands only to discover I was bound. Cloth-covered circles around each wrist, keeping me from reaching the tube stuffed down my throat.
I was still intubated. That was not the plan. I was not supposed to be on the breathing vent by the time I woke up. One of the risks of this surgery was that I would not be able to get off the breathing tube because of my CTEPH — chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension, a rare condition that complicated my heart-valve biosynthetic replacement. I discovered I could not move my right hand, but I was unable to talk to tell anyone.

I panicked.

My eyes were wide with fear. My heart was racing and beating loudly in my ears. My best friend, Lynn, was saying something, but I couldn’t hear her. I tried to focus on her voice.

“Michelle, you have to calm down. They have you on the breathing tube still, and if you want to get off of it, you have to leave it alone, and show them that you can breathe on your own.”

I’m breathing fine, I thought. Fuck this. Get this fucking tube out. Right. Now. Now!

But of course, no sound. Nothing came out when I tried to talk. I calmed myself by focusing on Lynn stroking my hand. She was saying something about my mother being there and my son.

My son… where is he? I perked up to look for him. He’s always understood me. He came over to me, put his rough hands on my strapped-down hands, and I saw the same red eyes. He’d been crying. He never cries. This unnerved me in a way I can’t explain.

“I hurt,” I whispered out. It wasn’t clear. It barely registers. “I hurt,” I mouthed it more than I said it. “I hurt.” And my son bent down close to me and I said it again, “I hurt.”

“You hurt?” he asked, excited he seemed to understand me.

I nodded enthusiastically. He told the nurse. She said, “I can fix that. Just a minute.”

And she came to the side of my ICU bed and pushed a button or two. The next thing I know, my head is fuzzy, and I drift into a relaxed state. The panic subsides a little bit. I doze off into a fitful slumber that only lasts a few minutes but feels like an eternity.

I’m strapped into the bed. I can’t breathe on my own. I can’t talk or really communicate in any way. My family is all around me with red, watery eyes. I’m convinced I’m dying. I’m ready to give in to it, too, and just go to sleep. I don’t want to fight anymore. I can’t breathe. My chest hurts again. My throat hurts.

I reach up to touch my chest and am reminded that my hands are still in restraints. “Honey, you have to settle down,” Lynn said. “They won’t take the restraints off until you stop trying to pull the tube out. You kept trying to pull the tube out.”

There’s no way for me to say I won’t pull out the tube, but I’m awake now and as much as I want the tube out, I’m not going to try to do that on my own, regardless of what I tried to do while still mostly unconscious and unaware. I have no way to tell them that, though, so I just lie there, tears streaming from my face. It’s the most helpless I’ve ever felt, and it was very unnerving. I can’t explain what it feels like to wake up and be tied down and partly drugged, a feeling of being tortured and completely out of control.

Fortunately, there was no real pain anywhere now that the nurse dialed something up on a machine beside me. The pain in my chest was mostly anxiety I presumed, and once I calmed down, I was able to breathe through it, and the pain subsided.

I start coming around a little bit more, not so groggy. But waking up with a breathing tube was not part of the plan.

I’ll write more tomorrow, but this, for now, tells you how my surgery went. And this was the easy surgery. Wait until I talk about the one where they had me intubated for 22 hours straight while I was breathing on my own, and was in and out of consciousness. That one was sheer torture.

More soon. Consider this part one.

Love and stuff,
Michy