1 Firemen
In October of 2017 I had a cornea transplant, at the Stein Eye Institute, at UCLA, in Los Angeles.
Of course, a cornea transplant is nothing like an organ transplant. It’s receiving a bit of tissue from a just-deceased person, not a kidney or a lung or a heart… beating once again after a short hiatus. Still, curious as I am, I wanted to ask my surgeon what he could tell me of the person who was about to give me the gift of continued (right eye) sight.
We were in a hallway just outside the operating room - I on a gurney, he in his scrubs. He’d come out to settle me down and ask if I had questions.
“Yes,” I said. “What do you know of the cornea I’m about to receive?”
“All our corneas are perfect,” he said, before understanding that I wasn’t asking a qualitative question. I wanted to know who the person was.
He glanced at his papers, said “female, mid-sixties…” ran his finger a little farther down and added, “metastasized cancer.” He looked at me again. “That’s all we know. Some suppliers tell us more, some less, but we never get the name of the donor.”
Then he said he would see me inside and sauntered down the hall.
Suppliers? Really? Plural?
Later I discovered that though people wait on lists for years for matching hearts or kidneys, our country’s cornea ‘banks’, as we call them, are brimming with currency. We are a people who wear out our engines more than we do our headlights.
Someone rolled me into the operating room where an anesthesiologist said that she was going to make me feel fine - I had to be awake for the procedure in order to answer questions, but… to use the old 1960s parlance… I’d be ‘stoned.’ I smiled at that. It had been a good long while.
When the surgeon reappeared he had five young residents with him. UCLA’s is, after all, a teaching hospital, and there’d been residents present at every appointment I ever had with the man, so I wasn’t surprised. What did surprise me was that, along with the infusion of a wonderful drug cocktail into my bloodstream, the room was infused with the semi-melodic, oddly syncopated, heavy-beat sounds of electronic dance music - called EDR by those in the know.
I must have said something like “Yikes!” for the anesthesiologist leaned over to whisper that my surgeon’s hobby, indeed, his alternate persona during rare moments of ‘off time’ was that of an EDM d.j., with gigs as far afield from Los Angeles as Washington D.C.
“He’s good at it,” she said. “It’s his way to unwind.”
So, with EDM making the feet of the residents bop beneath their scrubs, I stared up into a glaring light to ‘see’, as it were, my failed right cornea lift off of my eye like a tiny flying saucer, only to have another flying saucer, from a sixty-something female cancer victim, settled down onto its launching pad, where it was ‘locked’ in place by sixteen equidistant sutures, each far thinner than a human hair, and hand-sewn by my d.j. doctor, his own feet, I hoped, firmly planted on the floor.
A couple of days later, when I went to have my new cornea checked in his clinic, I told him that the overriding image I had had during the surgery, concerning the sutures, was that of sixteen little fireman standing around one of those ‘life nets’ that real firemen use to catch folks who jump from windows to avoid getting burnt to death.
My new cornea was the life net, the sutures the firemen.
I thought that was brilliant, but he wasn’t nearly as captured by it as I wanted him to be. Rather, he kept staring through his ophthalmoscope at the incredible and inscrutable beauty of his work.
“Come take a look at these sutures,” he told one of the ever-present residents. “You don’t mind, do you?” he asked me.
Coal Miners
Now, five years later, on October 4 of this last week, to be exact, I was back at UCLA, this time in its Ronald Reagan Hospital, for an angiogram of the arteries around my heart. An angiogram that might very well turn into an angioplasty… The first a simple search party. The second, search and destroy.
I was worried. Certain breathing problems and an ominous treadmill stress test made my cardiologist decide that the procedure was necessary, and this time there would be no mid-sixties female donor, no one willing to offer up her breath.
If I’m being honest, however, I should say that I was looking forward to it, too. Not to the procedure, exactly, but to another meeting with a merry anesthesiologist, and maybe even a group of foot-tapping residents. What fun that would be!
Ah, but also, what a difference a half a decade, a different surgeon, and a different drug can make!
This time the operating room was huge and bright and silent, with machines that looked like hungry pterodactyls looming everywhere. I was naked on a skinny table, though I would much rather have been skinny on a naked one. No music played, and though I had to be awake again to follow instructions - “Mr. Wiley, hold your breath” - when my cardiologist inserted a tiny, technologically superb, wire into my radial artery, this time the drugs I was given made me imagine a minuscule, technologically old fashioned… well, coal car, full of miners with lamps on their foreheads, ready to jump out and chop away the plaque that was no doubt blocking my arteries and therefore about to kill me.
No valiant firemen this time, only miners. The drugs you take make a difference, I guess… a bit like in the “Go Ask Alice” song.
But they were nevertheless ready to pull a ‘stent’ from their coal car and pound it into place if they needed to, these miners, then jump back in for a ride back down to my wrist, where… get this.. their spouses and children awaited them with tears of relief and picnic baskets. Like in “How Green Was My Valley,” the John Ford movie from 1941. Only this time, instead of eating in their valley, they’d be eating out of the palm of my hand.
When the procedure was over the cardiologist - a man in his thirties, if you can believe it… a man nearly young enough to be my grandson - had to say “great news!” twice before I could get my mind off those miners and their families.
“Huh? What?”
“No blockage, or at least not enough to bother with,” he said, smiling his youthful smile.
“Really? I don’t need stents? Then what is causing my breathing problems?”
“It’s a cardiovascular mystery,” he admitted. “We’ll get our detectives on it right away.”
Or maybe he didn’t say that… maybe I made that part up.
Anyway, I am no longer interested in what the next new super drug might bring. Firemen and coal miners are more than enough for me.
I will, however, be seeing a cardiovascular detective, otherwise known as an electrophysiologist, in the coming weeks.
Like David, I'm also catching up on your series, RIchard. I hope to hear that all is well. Medics can be a very strange bunch. (Nurse filling in a form on me: Married: me - no divorced...twice. Nurse: "Lovely." Miscarriages? me - yes, two. Nurse: "Lovely." You've got to laugh.) What a great eye procedure you had. I've carried a donor card since about 1986 and can't understand anyone wanting to have their good bits buried or burnt after their demise if they can save someone's life or hugely improve their living. Now in the UK, one has to opt out but unfortunately it's not uncommon for families to decide - even when their relative was ok with it - that they will stop the removal of body parts for transplant to those poor waiting people. So well done that 60-ish woman who lost her cancer battle, and I'm sure you are extremely grateful to her every day for her generous decision.
Whoa! I hadn't checked into your Boat Ramp series lately. Sorry to learn of your medical issue. I hope all is resolved swiftly and soon. I nearly felt guilty for laughing while reading this. Just last week, I had to have a cystoscopy. It's a fun procedure, especially when they stick that tube into your penis. The two nurses who prepped me were talking across the bed to each other and one had a concern about the height of the bed. She said, "Can you get it up any higher?" I said, "I hope you're talking to her." Well, when you hear a line like that....