Old Feller
 Get Well Soon .

Receive the Healing & Favor of the Holy Spirit my friend.

This thread expresses everything I love about this site. Well, not the fact that Oldfeller has had heart surgery, but you know what I mean!  

Well, when a vehicle gets a valve job, they run like new again!  Recon next we see him, he will look younger too! We might not be able to keep up with him  

As one old fella to another, Hang in there! Changing my diet today, lucky so far!

Having some fun with the new Frankenheart.

First, all players who have viewed it (or been inside it) say my heart chambers and existing valves were all in great shape, especially so on very the last chamber that had been pumping through the stenotic (severe) restriction that my old 2 petal valve (and resulting reduced opening) had made it pump through.   The last chamber muscle is hyper-sized somewhat and the old meat valve itself was thickened and stiff compared to the rest of the valves and was relatively slow to shut completely -- which by the end it wasn't even really doing completely, BYW.

My heart had grown up hyperstyle (oversize) to make up that long high pressure final stroke that delivered blood volume X over more time (and at higher velocity) through the restricted meat valve.   Remember, I have had this condition since I was a baby .....

My resting rhythm was 80-90 long beats a minute.   My last muscle chamber had to clamp and squeeze for a long time, in other words, to move the blood out with the old defective valve.

Replace the defective meat valve with a FAST to completely open, yet complete closes instantly type mechanical valve --- now suddenly my heart says "beat" and the feedback from contraction cycle says"Done already" because the effective opening past the valve is over twice as big and opens twice as fast.  The blood charge is simply moved on out of there instantly.

That big ol last chamber feels like it never even really gets a grip on the charge of blood because it is out of there already.   There is no long squeeze period any more.

Actual pulse form is now very small and very abrupt, yet also very light compared to the past.

I have a heart that at full snoozy rest that barely seems to beat (yet moves the same amount of blood).

Give me a surprise or a shock and it revs up like a 4 stroke GSXr in first gear.

My new "normal" resting beats per min is 114 to 120 very small quick pulses -- I now have a humming bird heart.

When it digs in good it goes up to 140+ and I start to see the little dancing at the edges of your vision thingies that used to indicate high blood pressure.

When this happens I back off on whatever is doing that .....  too much sewn together stuff is leaking a tiny bit at those pressures.





It is a Frankenheart, after all.   I can call it up with an act of will inside the space of time of a single deep inhalation, which is kinda neat to do.  

Play with the nursing staff a little bit I did.

Nurse was being all fussy and rough with my blood pressure cuff, so I'd hulk it while the cuff was pumping up and force the cuff to do a reset, then do a bruce banner and relax on her on the next try, which made the cuff do another reset in the other direction.



       

Recover well OF, some of your 2016 predictions may be coming true.

While on the subject of young snarky head nurses, let's talk about Amanada.

First, very bright.  Second, very pretty.  Also a bit lazy, when she had the time to be.   A pleasure to look at, but the snarky BS bit flat got to me after a while.

Amanda was the sort that was never happy but always had some sort of further demand until she found something she flat couldn't get from you.

There is a gizmo called an "airlife" which is a suction measurement tool that measures your vital capacity of your lungs.

At one point in time I had two drainage tubes running from my chest to the same flat collection device sitting down on the floor.   I could only generate a 300 number on the airlife, which was low, even to me.   Amanda loved to torture me with endless repeated requests of "better".

Better did not come until had I lost both drain tubes -- then suddenly my punty 300 on airlife became a strong 1100+.

Why?   There is a bypass valve in the back of each of the flat boxes which provided a complete alternative air pathway during an airlife inhale test (air flowing back up the chest tubes).

I asked Amanda about it while showing her the flat box valve system in motion, she just made one of her snarky little moue grins so I no, don't think it was unknown to her.    She just enjoyed inflicting pain as an Airlife hurts you to do it when you have tubes in your chest.

At that point I stopped listening to Amanda completely, as she had hit the top of the BS roster for me.   This drove her crazy, of course.

She was on duty when I was due to be released at noon.   She flounces in at 12:05 and asks where my electro-cardigram harness was -- I pointed at the keyboard where the harness was neatly coiled up.   She then wanted to know where my elecrode pasties were -- I pointed at the trash can.  I was seated in my day chair fully dressed in my street clothes.  I asked her if she wanted to change my dressings one last time before I left and she said no, that it wasn't needed.  

I then asked her where my wheelchair to take me downstairs was.

Then I stopped that wheelchair trip twice to exchange hugs with two other nurses who were just plain good people just to make sure Miss Snarky Pretty knew exactly where she stood with me.