Peace that Passes Understanding: Part 4 1/2

Introduction:  This post is the first half of a much longer post (if you can believe that).  It details the day of my surgery to remove my brain tumor, as well the shenanigans that followed.  I plan to post the second half in a week or so. I have been very candid and vulnerable in these posts, but nowhere more than this post.  I have done this so that others who have to experience the same things feel more open and comfortable, when discussing such things.  I hope my lack of pride and shame can in some way help another to cope, through what has proven to be a difficult process.  If you are offended by immature language, behavior, and humor, then we probably aren't very good friends, and this post is not for you.  So lets grow up a bit and talk about some gross stuff, like mature adults.  Thanks for reading, much more to come...  

Wednesday, March 15^th

           

            My wife and I woke up about 4:30am, so we could do my last gasoline scrub shower, before leaving for the hospital.  I was very glad to be finished with the five day, twice a day regiment of showering with the special chemical soap, the hospital provided.  While the process does help prevent infections and MRSA and all kinds of other disgusting complications, is also does a great job of drying out every inch of your body on the first two nights, then giving you the sensation of sliding down a waterslide lined with razor blades, right into a waiting pool of aftershave, the following 3 nights.

            Once my final layer of skin was removed, I got dressed and we headed to the hospital. Still unable to eat or drink anything, prior to surgery, my body craved good black coffee, but this morning, I would go without.  Being up early is no shock to my system.  My usual shifts at work require me to be up by 3:30am, and on the road by 4:00am, if I want to be at work on time.  Being up early is normal for me.  This morning was different.  I didn’t want to go to the hospital.  I was scared.  I would have rather gone to work.

            Kim was Kim.  Organized, prepared, focused, and ready.  She is a morning person.  As I have mentioned before, Kim gets more done in the first hour of being awake, than most people do all day.  This is her time to shine and shine she does.  Once we are in the car, and on our way, she starts humming and singing disconnected lyrics from one of our favorite worship songs.  One of the first songs we first sang together as worship leaders this last year, Oceans by Hillsong United.

 “You called me out upon the water…the great unknown…where feet may fail…” an appropriate song, for our soon to be eventful day.

We prayed along our route.  Intentional, but drawn out and conversational, as if God almighty was sitting in the back seat of the Escape.  I don’t know where he was sitting exactly, but The Holy Spirit was present.  Every time I would feel anxious, or fearful, I asked for peace. It was given, quickly and freely.  I would ask, I would breathe, then I would feel warmth and peace, in places people cannot touch, and doctors cannot reach with a scalpel.

As we pulled onto Kingshighway, the massive medical compound of Barnes-Jewish Hospital, becomes less a part of the skyline, and more of a City.  We parked in the underground garage, and started grabbing everything we had packed for the stay.  Kim carried a pillow, and a backpack, full of snacks, books, cards, tissues, and numerous other things to keep her and other family occupied during the surgery, which promised to be as short as 5 hours, but depending on how the veins and arteries were positioned or involved with my tumor; upwards of 12 hours.  All my surgeon could promise, was that he would take as long as needed…which I was thought was nice of him.  My dear friends Sarah and Brigitte made Kim a care package for the whole ordeal, which was one of the most thoughtful gifts Kim and I had ever received from anyone (including me), for any occasion (birthdays…anniversaries…Christmas). 

We checked in at the surgery desk.  I gave the man my name, and he said, “Oh! Glad to meet you.  You are the man of the hour.”  Apparently, we were the last to party.  We had quite the welcoming committee, already assembled and ready, to do what they do best.  I was instantly humbled, and comforted, by a support team that had arrived to pray with, and support Kim and me.  All our pastors, their wives, my parents, Kim’s parents and Aunt, my grandmother, and so many more would arrive later, had packed this waiting room, and were ready to pray, laugh, cry, and do whatever it was my wife and family needed.

            The man at the desk said, when I was ready, to head upstairs and meet my pre-op team. Which didn’t leave much time for pleasantries with my welcoming committee, however, I was not going to go, without letting these guys pray for me.

My lead pastor Doug Phillips was there, and as always, he was clearly the leader. He doesn’t need a tie. He doesn’t need a black shirt and white collar.  God has chosen him to minister. God has chosen him to lead leaders.  He does this wearing Realtree Max-4 camouflage Crocs. Doug has mentored me in the ministry, along with two of my best friends in the world, Michael Kauffman, and Scott Claybrook, who were also present.

Michael, Scott, and I have all been mentored and discipled by Doug, who is second to none, when it comes to raising up leaders. I would have quit the ministry long ago, if it were not for these three men.

Following some very moving prayer time with pastors, their wives, my Mom and Dad, my Grandma Jane, and anyone who was nearby, we looked up to see many of us in tears, but most of us in smiles.  I hugged and blubbered with everyone. 

I saved my Grandma Jane for last.  Grandma squeezed me harder than she ever had.  Though she is now an octogenarian, her life of hard labor has made her a very strong woman.  When I attended college down the street from her house, I would often bring my fraternity brothers over to be fed.  Things would get a little crazy when I started betting my fellow Alpha Sigs that they could not overcome my grandma in an ill-advised arm-wrestling challenge.  You will call me a liar, but my grandma beat most of them, and the rest ended in a stalemate.  These were mostly college athletes.  Don’t mess with my grandma.

I waved bye to my light brigade and I lead my family into the nearby elevator, to head to the pre-op floor…or maybe they lead me.  We shared an elevator with another small family who was headed to the same floor, but none of us felt the need to talk much.  We mostly breathed and sighed our way to the next floor.

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I was shown to a horse stall, with a hospital bed where I was asked to remove all my clothes and replace them with a shower curtain that would be my outfit, for the next few days.  My wife helped me tie my gown in the back.  Only a true nurse knows how to properly tie a hospital gown, so that the whitest parts of you do not escape.  I then reclined in my hospital bed, and proceeded to scare the crap out of everyone.

After being hooked up to several different monitors, the nurses hooked up an IV in the elbow crotch of my left arm (that’s what it’s called, right?).  Now, I have been a police officer and firefighter for twelve years.  I have seen some pretty messed up things.  I have seen some things that would make the average citizen’s toes vomit.  Having said that, for some reason, I have always gotten a little queasy, when I get an IV.  Usually I’m okay if I don’t watch it go in, and this is the strategy I employed on this day.

Once the IV was in, the nurses advised that I would be visited by the different members of the surgery team, and they would advise me how everything would go down.  While we were waiting, my wife and parents sat with me.  We cracked some jokes and pretended that everything was okay, and we were not terrified.  This was about to change.

I started to feel a little funny.  I had never felt light headed while laying down before, but this was exactly what was happening.  I told my wife how I was feeling, and she immediately began to lay my bed back, and lower my head, because, she just knows to do stuff like that.  I tried to breath my way through it, but then I started to sweat a little bit, and my vision began to fill with the purple clouds.  I recognized these purple clouds as being present two other times in my life. 

The last time I saw these purple clouds, I had just prostituted my blood and its life-giving treasures, to the platelet bank just off the Mizzou campus, for a case of Natural Light, a Papa John’s Pizza, and a bag of Doritos…I mean Thirty-Eight Dollars.  They still paid me for my donation, but it wasn’t until after the nurse’s assistant caught me from crashing into the floor.  However, I did take out the STD pamphlet rack, magazine table, and a life-sized Truman the Tiger cardboard cut-out, on the way down.

The first time I saw these purple clouds, I was part of a children’s choir, singing in a church Christmas program.  I was standing on stage with about ten other kids who did not want to be singing Christmas carols in front of our parents no matter how silent or holy the night happened to be.  When the clouds showed, I had no idea what was happening.  I felt light headed, but had no idea what it meant to feel, light headed.  The next thing I know my Dad was picking me up off the floor, and carrying me out of the auditorium.  The problem was, the floor was five feet below the stage, on which I was formerly standing.  On my way down I took a microphone stand and a couple of potted poinsettias with me.  I have always known how to go out with a bang.

Back in the hospital room, the purple clouds told me something was wrong.  I then felt as if I would vomit.  I asked my wife for bucket.  I saw my Dad grab a plastic basin from somewhere behind me, and passed it in front of me to my wife.  I watched the basin move, in slow motion, from left to right in front of me.  Then…well, you would have to ask my wife.

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“Andy! Andy! There you are, Dude.”

“There you are, what the heck, Bud?!”

Chris and Sarah, my two awesome nurses were suddenly standing over me, grabbing at unidentified wires and tubes.  They were shouting acronyms and letters attached to numbers, that I felt like I should understand, but didn’t.  “What happened?  Did I fall asleep?  Is everything okay?” I asked.

“Well, we are not sure if you passed out on us or what.” Nurse Sarah said. 

Kim made her way into my view, and looked as concerned as I have ever seen her in our almost eleven years of marriage.  She wasn’t crying, but she was making that face, that I recognize as the warning shot.  She looked over me and said, “It looked like you flat lined, for a few seconds.”

  Chris, the more excitable of my two-nurse’s confirmed, “He sure did!  No, beat for twenty seconds!  I grabbed the crash cart on the way over here!”

This is when I noticed that I had nearly 12 people wearing scrubs and stethoscopes inside my tiny little horse stall.  All of them either informing or being informed, about the goings on of the prior few minutes.  From what I could gather, I had passed out, sending all kinds of alarms through the pre-op center, and at some point, while I was out, the monitor showed a flat line.  This doesn’t necessarily mean my heart stopped beating unless you are watching a hospital show, but it is not a good thing.  According to my wife and Chris the nurse, the monitor was unable to detect a heartbeat for 20 seconds.

Once I woke up, all my vitals were back to normal, very quickly.  Sufficed to say, I had scared the living daylights out of my Father, Mother, and Wife, and didn’t have much to show for it.  Doctor after Doctor entered my stall to review what had happened, and none of them really acted like they knew what to do about the whole thing.  I spoke with the cardiologist, who was the first one who mentioned the idea of me possibly having to wait, and put off surgery until we could figure out what happened.  I said, “No, we are doing this surgery this morning.  We have to.”

The Cardiologist said he would have to consult with my surgeon, but we would need to make sure of some things before we continued with surgery.  This was very troubling to me.  Even the possibility of waiting one more day was unbearably frustrating.  What in the hell happened?  Why did I pass out?  Why does this whole situation have to be any more complicated than it already is?

The room had thinned out a bit.  My status was now much less exciting that it once had been.  My Mom and Dad had slowly filed back into the room, and Kim was once again at my side.  “You are never allowed to do that, ever again.” She said sternly, as if I had just pranked the whole hospital. 

It was never my intention to scare everyone.  I did think it would be funny, if the first time I saw my wife after surgery, I acted like I had no idea who she was.  Following this incident, I decided I would postpone any pranks or jokes I had planned.

Finally, my surgeon’s team came in and said they felt as if I had most likely suffered a Vagal Response.  Now, I am still not completely sure what this is, but when I first heard them discussing it, I thought they were saying “Bagel” not “Vagal”.  Having not had any breakfast or coffee that morning, a bagel with cream cheese, maybe even blueberry cream cheese, and a large black coffee, sounded like a good thing. 

A Vagal Response, is slightly closer to a physical reaction to the stress I was putting on my body.  The team seemed to think it was a perfect storm of fasting, my weird reaction to the IV start, and maybe my deep seeded stress and worry about the whole thing.  The cardiac doc even compared it to a weight lifter, maxing out and then immediately passing out.  This is the first time I have been compared to a weight lifter, and most likely the last.

All my vitals returned to normal and none of the team felt as if it was going to be a reoccurring issue.  Other than scaring the hell out of everyone, it was if nothing had happened.  Everything was cool.  My surgeon, Doctor Kim, finally made an appearance in the room.  He was fresh off his multi-university lecture and teaching tour, where Doctor Albert H.J. Kim taught his specialty to many other doctors and students.  He shared his expertise in Meningiomas (the kind of tumor I had), Craniotomies, and how to properly remove them from brains and backsides without turning your precious brain into Jell-O.  All joking aside, I was extremely blessed to have such an expert in the field perform my surgery.  According to nearly all the research we did, Dr. Kim is the best of the best.  It was like being able to pick your own all-star, to start your own team.

Dr. Kim, decided we would continue with the procedure as planned.  He did tell me, however, that I was going to have to relax.  I was stressing my body into survival mode.  I have become very good at wearing a calm and cool face in stressful times, but below, I am typically a boiling cauldron of emotion and nerves.  As Rich Mullins sang, “It’s so hot inside my soul, I swear there must be blisters on my heart.”

I promised Dr. Kim I would do my best to calm down.  I went back to the Lord, and prayed once again, for calm, for peace, and for everything to go as planned.  I breathed.  Slowly and intentionally.  Peace came.

The next doctor I saw was my anesthesiologist.  She was a very smiley yet firm young woman, who knew exactly what to talk about, to prepare me for surgery; anything but the surgery.  I hugged and kissed my mom and dad, once more.  Then my wife leaned over me and did the same.  She told me she loved me, and that she would be in the recovery room, as soon as it was over.  She hugged and kissed me again, and I told her I loved her and would see her soon. My anesthesiologist smiled and said, “We’ll see you guys laaay-terrr…” as if we were leaving the kids with a baby sitter, so we could head out for the evening.  I waved goodbye, and she started to wheel me out of the pre-op room and down the hall.  I was with about four people, but honestly, I felt completely alone. 

Down several hallways with hundreds of fluorescent lights, and at least one elevator, we traveled to operating room.  The room was cold, and everyone was dressed in scrubs.  They had taken my glasses, so everything was blurry. It was not unlike the flashback scenes from the original X-Men movie, when Logan was remembering the scientists replacing his bones with adamantium.  If everyone were not so kind and accommodating, it would have been exactly like X-Men.

            The surgical mask and face shield above my face began to ask me questions about myself, making sure they had the correct patient, and that we all had the same expectation of what was about to take place.  This is a practice I appreciated very much. We then made small talk about our families, and jobs.  I asked who got to choose the music that plays during the surgery, and this opened the whole can of worms, as to what kind of music I like.  If you know me, you know this is not a short discussion.  My ramblings were apparently far too interesting for the O.R. staff.  Their minds were becoming far too engorged with knowledge regarding the greatest music and artists of all time, it was for their own good, that someone placed a mask over my face. I continued talking, but I was very quickly, and once again...out.

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“Mr. Oeth?  Can you hear me? You are all done.” 

I have no idea who was speaking.  “How do you feel?” said… uh..someone.

I really didn’t know how I felt.  Weird, I guess.  No pain.  Maybe some pressure in my head, but I felt, okay, really.  This was not so bad.

As the moment went on people kept asking me questions, but they all seemed difficult to answer.  The questions were not difficult, but the answering part, that was the struggle.  I was trying to re-marry my brain and my mouth, which was never a holy union in the first place.  “Your procedure took about five and a half hours.  It went great.  You did such a good job!” The unknown voice asserted.  By her over the top excitement I could only assume it was a Kindergarten teacher.

Little by little, I felt sharper and sharper.  My words started to form and I started feeling more like myself.  I still could not see.  Everything was a blurry show of light and shadows.  I still needed my glasses.  I asked for them and the unknown voice, said my wife had them, and they would fetch her and the glasses.  I was filled with joy.  I needed Kim, to help, cut the confusion. I needed her to clear the chaos, like she always does.  Soon she was there.  I could hear her voice, but could not see her. 

“Everything went great! The doctors said they got the tumor.  The left a tiny bit of tissue that was around a vein, but they got nearly all of it!”  They were excited it went so well.” She said. 

She put my glasses on my face, and the first thing I could seem was her.  As usual, Kim’s face became clear and I was okay.  “Are you glad it’s over?” She asked.

“I think so.  Are you glad it’s over?” I asked

“Yes.  We waited a long time. Most everyone is still here. You can see them in a bit.” She said.

“ How do I look?”

“You look really good! You have a big bandage on your head, it looks like a drain tube, coming out, but you look pretty good! How do you feel?” She asked.

“ I feel like my head weighs a hundred pounds.” I said.

“Does it hurt?”

“Not much, just heavy, and a lot of pressure on the back of head.  I feel like I’m in a halo brace, like I broke my neck or something.”

“How is your face?” She asked

“Fine, I think.”

“WELL ITS KILLING ME!” She laughed.

She not a mean person, this is just the nature of our relationship.  It was what I needed.  Apparently the next hour or so was filled with unusual behavior, from yours truly.  While continuing to wake up from the anesthesia, I was commenting on how attractive the nurses were, male and female.  I was teasing my wife relentlessly, and dropping random F-bombs, which is not exactly a common part of my vocabulary.  Most of this is blur, and I only remember bits and pieces, but according to Kim, it was all highly entertaining.  For her.

The next few hours were filled with visits from family and friends who had had throughout the procedure, five and a half hours.  They still stayed.  I wondered if I would have.  I hoped I would have.

Several doctors and members of the surgical team came to visit me, once I was moved to the Neuro-ICU.  They filtered in and out.  I slept, woke up to say hi, slept some more, and woke up to say hi.  I was really, really, tired.

Later in the day, after sleeping for several hours, I awoke to find my wife and her sister, a nursing student, in my room.  It was very comforting having my own personal nurses all to myself.  They catered to my every need.  Mikayla, my sister-in-law was even good enough to hold the bucket, while I threw up.  A common side effect of anesthesia, and brain surgery, and a hole in your head.  I was okay, it didn’t last long, but I am pretty sure I threw up every drop of water I had drank since I woke up from surgery, which was a lot.  Kim and Mikayla looked like a bucket brigade from the bed to the sink.  It was actually kind of funny. For me.

Kim and Mikayla spent some very active hours with me.  They assisted my nurses, and I think Kayla learned a lot.  Kim was able to teach her little sister, first hand, how to be a nurse.  In hindsight, it was such a beautiful moment, for Kim to lead her little Sis, in the true profession of nursing.  Treat every patient with dignity, compassion, humor, and as if they were your own loved one, Your own child, your own husband.

A nurse’s humor is not at all unlike that of a Police Officer or Firefighter.  Sometimes we have to laugh about things, so we will not cry.  One things I have done a lot of through this process, from the very first night, we found out I had a tumor, was to learn to laugh and cry.  These verbs are not mutually exclusive.  Often, they are enhanced by the other.

This was made true, that very night, when the simple act of urinating, became one of the most frustrating things, I had ever done.  My night nurse was a young guy named Derrick.  He was pretty cool, we chatted a lot, mostly because his other patients were comatose. We talked about the Basketball tournament, nursing, and my inability to fill a hospital urinal. 

I tried.  I tried and tried.  I drank more and more water, yet could not go. Derrick informed me that, if I could not go within a couple more hours, that they would have to re-insert the catheter.  I informed him, that this was not an option, and that they would have to apply restraints, had better get some help.  Derrick without missing a beat, informed me that this was no problem and he has been dying to use the new restraints, because they look so cool, and were literally unescapable. He said this with a dead-pan face, and eyebrow raised to the sky. He didn’t budge, until I smirked and laughed. 

The next, couple of hours consisted of Derrick, randomly entering my room to check if my urinal was full.  When he saw I had failed him, he would make a suggestive hand motion, mimicking the insertion of a dreaded Foley Catheter.  He would smile, and let me know how much he was enjoying my struggle, it was all in good fun.  For him. 

Luckily, I was able to make with the pee-pee, and impress my nurse, who claimed the staff was placing bets on if I could go or not.  I said, “Never bet against me.” 

He said sarcastically, “Oh, I wouldn’t dream of it.”