Don Amend

I ended my last column just as my real medical adventure became more interesting. 

I was scheduled for surgery in mid-February, one year to the day after I took my trip to the ER in Powell. However, the surgeon at the Mayo Clinic wanted me to be there a couple of weeks earlier, so we made the trip to Rochester, Minnesota, in the last few days of January. 

After an evening at our daughter’s house, I was admitted to the hospital, where I would stay for the next six weeks. The first order of business was to haul me into the operating room, where the surgeons fastened a halo to my head. The halo was necessary because the surgeon wanted to apply traction that would lift my head and straighten my neck, giving him the room he needed to fuse the vertabrate in my neck and stop my head from drooping further than it already had. 

Strangely, placing me in this traction device attracted the attention of multiple staff members. Traction isn’t as commonly used as it was in the past and as a result, the equipment needed to apply it wasn’t available. Even a world class hospital like Mayo has to improvise.

The result in my case was the use of an ancient metal wheel chair if I wanted to sit up, an old, rather rickety walker for when the nurses felt I needed to take walk and an addition to my bed for when I wanted to lie down. 

Weights attached to the halo supplied the traction that lifted my head and straightened my neck. It seemed as though none of the nurses or other staff members had ever seen equipment like this, so for a couple of days, people kept dropping by to look at it.

During this time, I enjoyed a major benefit of being at Mayo. I could enjoy visits from my daughter’s family, and my two grandchildren took visiting grandpa seriously. I have a photo of myself taking a mandatory walk down the hall that shows one of them doing just that. On my left, a nurse is providing support, and on my right my grandson, Arun, who was about 3 years old at the time, is supporting and encouraging me. That was the best medicine I received while I was there.

The next 10 days were uneventful. I spent most of my time just thinking about the next step in my adventure. I had brought along items that I thought would help me pass the time, including an iPod filled with music from my digital library back in Powell. I could also shop online for ebooks that I could purchase and read.

But I didn’t take advantage of either. My mind seemed to keep thinking about the surgery I was about to have. Even television, the ultimate time-killer, didn’t help.

I had a TV in my room, but it was in the wrong place, high up on the wall at the foot of my bed, and I couldn’t find a comfortable position to view it. If I lay down, I could only see the ceiling, but when I sat up, I was unable, thanks to my condition, to look up at the picture. This was a disappointment to me because an international baseball tournament was being televised that I would have liked to have watched.

On the positive side, the hospital kitchen turned out great meals, and a couple of good coffee shops provided excellent coffee. The grandkids dropped by to cheer me up, and a cheerful nurse and a Kenyan aide with a good sense of humor were good for my morale. The aide decided that I looked just like Steven Spielberg, the movie director, although I failed to see the resemblance myself.

Finally, one year to the day after the pain in my back began this odyssey, it was surgery time. It had been delayed a day because the surgeon had taken a short vacation with his kids to Wisconsin and picked up a bug that sidelined him briefly. He had recovered by then, though, and he popped into my room early the morning of my surgery with his camera. He took a few shots of my condition that he needed to document the problem with my spine and his efforts to fix me up. (I think he made a PowerPoint presentation about my surgery so he could show it to other surgeons.)

Anyway, my surgery was done in two stages. During the first stage, he cleaned up some scar tissue from the earlier surgery and began installing the metal supports that now hold my spine together. A week later, he operated again to complete the reconstruction of my spine.

After the first operation, my mind was elsewhere. I lived in a nightmare world of loud noises, weird colors and flashing lights, and I didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. This continued after the second trip to the operating room that my mind began to clear, and it took another week or so before I began to recover my wits.

That’s a story for another day.