Chapter Twenty One - "Keeping Heart"

I started my new week with a positive attitude, feeling excited about travelling to a new place, and glad to be in an area of London in which I felt comfortable. However, things got off to a testing start when, following my pre-planned route on the underground (the only underground service I can currently think of which doesn’t seem to go underground), the train service terminated at Parsons Green. There had been a points failure at High Street Kensington, but I didn’t even get a chance to change at Earl’s Court as per my routine. I had no choice but to disembark at Parsons Green.

Confused and slightly at a loss for what to do next, I went downstairs at the station to ask the man at the desk for directions. He assured me all the other trains would go my way, so I turned around. Barring my path was one of the platform attendants, preventing everyone from going back to the platform; all trains had now been suspended.

The lady had said that we would be able to board trains at Fulham Broadway station, which was just a short walk away. So, not quite knowing where I was going, I followed some other people up the road, only to realise that I wanted to be going in the opposite direction.

When I eventually found the station I was redirected to a bus that would take me directly to the hospital. I arrived at 8:30, right on time. No need to worry about being late after all.

The day was full of introductions and finding my way around the buildings. However I soon settled in, and I even earned brownie points for my excursion on Saturday! The morning proved rather quiet so, aside from the occasional ward case I spent time perusing the archive of museum x-rays, trying to figure out what was going on. In the afternoon just before I went off home I managed to arrange a visit to the operating theatre for a case of open heart surgery. If I wanted to see the whole procedure I would need to report at 8:15 in the morning, which meant I would need to get an earlier train. Tomorrow looked like it was going to be a very exciting day.

I arrived early at the hospital the following day, and following advice from my supervisor yesterday, went to the restaurant to get a ‘good breakfast’. It was going to be a long day. I reported at 8:!5 and was soon shown into the theatre where the procedure was briefly explained by one of the team members. Then I waited in the staff room, to be called when they were ready to start.

A little after nine the procedure began. The patient was brought into the theatre and the doctor set to work on removing veins from the legs, while some others started on the chest. The procedure was a CABG (nicknamed ‘cabbage’) – a Coronary Artery Bypass Graft. It involved removing suitable vessels and stitching them onto the heart to bypass any diseased areas. Before long I was allowed to stand at the head of the table, looking directly into the chest and seeing the heart beating. It was quite surreal to see the heart and lungs moving, but amazing to watch as the surgeons performed. When the procedure began to calm down, the doctor took time to explain what was going on. In order to help me to understand the reasons behind the operation (i.e. the prevalence of heart disease) he started talking about statistics, and asked me what proportion of the population of the western world I thought would suffer from such conditions. I wasn’t prepared for such questions, and my mind went blank. Eventually he went back to explaining what was going on. I quietly watched, fascinated. I didn’t understand everything I saw, but most of it made sense. Eventually the chest was closed up with sternal clips, and I went for lunch; my hour long break was now reduced to about twenty minutes, but at least I would be allowed to go home early.

On Thursday I spent much of my day observing angiograms and on-table procedures, which was interesting. I began to understand what I was seeing on the screens, and began to recognise the various vessels supplying the heart. I would apply this knowledge on Friday, and it would prove to be one of the most interesting days of the week, and one of the most enjoyable.

But that’s for later.