I'm Not Dead... Yet! (40 page)

So… Where was I? Yes! The need for sex. No—that wasn’t it. Ah—love. The need for…
Breastbone
cut, chest opened and many hands and instruments are inside your torso while a machine breathes for you. That’s where I was. I’ll still go with sex for 200, Alex. But only with Karla, Alex! Me. Not you, Alex. See? I am demonstrating what I fight when I write this book or even hold a conversation. I can begin to look like Charlie Sheen driven by his megalomaniac producer to that stage of ‘winning,’ but I don’t get Tiger Blood or conquer trolls—I get a new lease on life. I think I’m actually, ‘Winning!’ See? This is really
serious
comedy.

In my case, the next thing to be done was to put the bovine valve in the position of the aortic valve, sew it into place with the delicate hands of a Mom picking up tiny pieces of glass so her baby will never be cut as the baby is learning to walk, yet these are the hands of a grown man or woman surgeon (I need a larger fret guitar to play music, so I admire someone who doesn’t poke themselves in the eye when trying to pick their nose. Again, I apologize but am demonstrating the affects of that damn heart-lung machine that has saved my life). Love-hate.

Once the 3 leaflet valve (tricuspid) is working properly, the surgeon will then go for a smoke and a first year medical student will ‘close the heart’ and take the patient off the bypass pump (heart-lung machine), put tubes inside your body, near the heart to help drain the unwanted fluids that will accumulate because of the surgery. The body needs a way to drain all of the fluid build-up—which means these drainage tubes are in and out of your chest. They slit holes in your skin so they can drain into a plastic bag and they keep an eye on how much is draining and for how long, so they know when to pull the drainage tubes later in the week. Then they pull the breast bone back in place and keep it there by using stainless steel wire that they may have purchased at Home Depot for a dollar a foot, but your insurance (or you) will pay hundreds per inch, and your breastbone is now held together (hopefully) for the rest of your life by these wires.

The length of the surgery varies. It can be as quick as a dog race (okay, about 3 hours), or a bad year at the Belmont mile and a half—in other words, Secretariat would be ashamed with the seven hour version.

For even more helpful details follow the link below:

Surgery

I don’t believe I scared anyone with my explanation of the surgery and that is not the intention of the book. The point is to help you get through the aftermath of this military strike on the only mind and body we have (in this lifetime—you may believe in the next lifetime, and if you do, come back as a human because the techniques are getting better every day!)

The moment I awoke in the ICU I was crazed.
Every alarm went off in my mind and body.
Something was terribly wrong
.

I couldn’t breathe!

This was
not
how I felt after my first open-heart surgery. I could not… breathe—not even a little. I was suffocating. And the pain!

The pain was tremendous!

I managed to look up and without my contact lenses, I could barely make out Karla’s face looking down at me. Everything was a blur. Because I had the huge breathing tube down my throat (and every other possible place a tube can go, and then pick a few more) I tried to tell her, “Something’s wrong!” That’s when I realized a very frightening detail:
my hands were tied down!

I tried to do my best Houdini and when that didn’t work, I tried to pull frantically and see if I could loosen the restraints. No. I was a prisoner. I tried to move my eyes back and forth so Karla might notice my hands were tied down—but my hands were neatly tucked under the white blanket. I started to freak even more (which was a side of me no one had really seen before—including me). I kept thinking, ‘You’re not very good at panicking. No one seems to care.’ No one could tell because I looked as if I had a bad ‘trip’ as I was coming out of anesthesia—I was helpless. In my mind I was screaming: something is
wrong
. I CAN NOT BREATHE!

The nurse made Karla leave, saying I needed quiet. Suddenly I felt like I was in a Stephen King novel. I did everything I could to calm myself down. Lots of shallow breathing. I needed to get some oxygen into my system.

An hour later when Karla was allowed to come back for a ten minute visit in the ICU, she reached to hold my hand and saw my hands were bound flat to the bed under the blanket. Karla saw in my eyes how it was distressing me (it’s that look in a horse’s eyes right before they rear up in the air—there’s more white in the eye than eye-ball), and told the ICU nurse I wanted my hands untied. The nurse snapped back, “He’s not The Director in here. I’m The Director here!”

This experience, along with the next 12 hours with this nurse, inspired a scene I wrote in my musical,
Open Heart
. The nurse was so sadistic and relished her cruelty so much that it made for great comedy. Even as I panicked I kept thinking how funny this was. Finally, when my hands were untied and my breathing tubes were removed from my throat, I managed to tell the nurse I was in pain, to which she responded, “What pain medication you take at home?”

“Excedrin.”

“I can’t give you Excedrin. You just had open heart s-u-u-urgery.”

“I need to see a doctor!”

“That’s why you in hospital. Doctors are everywhere. You’ll see one.”

“I need to see one now! I think I’m having a panic attack!”

“You ever have panic attack before?”

“No…”

“Then how you know it’s panic attack?”

This went on and on and on. She finally told me that I’d be very sorry when I left the ICU because there would be no one else to take care of me like she did.

A doctor finally made his way to my bed and I managed to say, “I...can’t breathe...I think...I’m having a panic attack.”

“Yes. It seems like you are having a panic attack.” (This
is
a Stephen King novel, I thought. I must not have awakened yet—this is too weird.) It got weirder when he told the nurse to get me a sedative and it took the nurse over an hour to return with 5 milligrams of valium.

“Gee, I feel so much BBBEEEETTTTTERRRR! I STILL CAN’T BREATHE AND IT HURTS MORE THAN ANYTHING I COULD EVER IMAGINE!”

“That’s because you just had OPEN HEART S-U-U-URGERY!” the nurse yelled, and I smelled the garlic on her breath.

‘I think I’m dying,’ was all I kept saying in my head, over and over like an old vinyl record caught in a groove.

The lesson I learned from my second trip
into the ICU after open-heart surgery was that they
tied my hands down
. No one told me
prior
to surgery that when I awoke from anesthesia, my hands would be tied down. It may not seem like much, but I was already a ‘prisoner’ because my chest had just been sawed open, so really, where was I going to go? Who am I going to assault or strangle? When you are in the ICU, you might not even have the strength to lift your arms. So why do they tie your hands down? To protect you from pulling out the tubes that are stuck down your throat. But, as I would later learn from the good people at the Cleveland Clinic, if a nurse is with you when you arrive in the ICU and he or she sees that you are beginning to come out of the anesthesia, they should check to see if you can breathe without the breathing tubes. If the answer is ‘Yes,’ you may never know that your hands had been tied down.

My suggestion to anyone having any kind of surgery is to ask what is expected from you after the surgery, so you can understand what you must accomplish in order to get out of the ICU. You will have to prove you can sit up, talk, breathe and clear your lungs with the ‘breathing toy.’ Each hospital may have its own protocol, so it’s necessary to ask ahead of time. It’s very simple. What may seem like a no-brainer suddenly becomes torture because you cannot speak with tubes down your throat and if your hands are tied down, you have absolutely
no way to communicate
with anyone.

Because I had been through it before, I knew something was wrong with the outcome of this surgery from the moment I awoke and could not breathe. I wanted to tell someone in charge. A doctor. Anyone who would listen.

By the time I had a chance to tell my cardiologist the surgery must not have gone as planned because I could not breathe, he patted me and condescendingly said, “Your surgery was a success. What do you expect, Robby? You’ve had two open-heart surgeries. This is your life. Get used to it.”

Nothing about this particular stay in this particular hospital went well for me. This is not to condemn this hospital; it’s just a fact. But leaving the hospital was a triumphant day. Again, I was ready to prove that I could have open-heart surgery and get back to a wonderful and productive life. So even though I couldn’t breathe, I thought, ‘Well, if this is what it’s like, so be it. I’ll make the best of it.’

I got up very early the morning I was to be released, so excited to get out of the hospital that I began walking the hallways. When I came to a window I looked outside, down below—at the back entrance to the hospital.

‘Hmmm. There’s a lot of press down there. I wonder who died.’ I quickly pinched myself. Okay—it wasn’t me.

A very nice gentleman was mopping the floor and I turned to him and asked, “Who died?” (I don’t know why I went straight to ‘death’—it could’ve been anything, but for some reason, maybe the size of the press corps down below us—and it was a hospital—death seemed logical.)

“Frank Sinatra.”

“You’re kidding? Frank Sinatra died?”

“Yup.”

“He’s here? Now?”

“His body is.”

We both looked at each other. Of course his body was here—but it seemed like a perfectly good question until you hear the answer. I was also still on pain medication so I lost track of boundaries, good taste, and was not the least bit self-conscious. I was stoned out of my mind, actually.

I began singing a medley of Frank Sinatra songs. I went back to my room and was given permission to shower. Showering for the first time after an operation can be like sex. Feeling the warm water on your body, shampooing your hair, it’s all orgasmic. And the acoustics in the shower were tremendous. I started to croon, louder and louder:

“Start Spreading The Jews. I’m Leaving Today! You Can Stick A Fork In Him, New York, New York. I Want To Wake Up Some Place Where I Can Actually Sleep. I’m Gonna Sing For My Pills, Speaking Of Pills, I Wanna Hill Of ’Em, I’d Even Kill For ’Em—”

“Robby!” Karla stuck her head in. She was early.

“Hi, honey. I’m taking a shower!”

“I know. I’m looking right at you.”

“See anything you like? Wanna get some?”

“Robby… you’ve got to keep your voice down. It must be going through the vents or something but I heard you all the way in the elevator and Frank Sinatra just died!”

“I know! Modulate: ‘That Greg LeMond cruise! Is leaving today!I wanna hear the roar of it: U.S. of A!”

“Robby—shhh!”

“Okay doll.”

Ah, victory! Leaving the hospital. Upright. Alive! My Tour de France.

When I got home from the hospital
after my second surgery, I found that my old recliner in our bedroom was the only place I wanted to be. I was home in record time, but why was I feeling so awful? Was this the way it was supposed to be? There was no one who had been through it for me to talk to—no one to ask.

My gifts from the surgery were being home and hearing my children Lyric, (now 14) and Zephyr (now 6) playing with their friends and laughing and having fun. Our children’s lives seemed to be changing so quickly: the kind of jokes they laughed at; the sound of their voices when they laughed. I felt so ashamed that I was making the recliner my new home. I was ashamed that the children had to see me like this. I tried every trick I knew to not look sick or uncomfortable. I found that I would have to position my body in an awkward way every single time I needed a good gasp of air. I tried shallow breathing when my children were in the room.

Karla called the ‘cardiologist to the stars’ because this shortness of breath and the pain in my chest were like nothing I had experienced after my first open heart surgery. We knew I had perfectly clear arteries and low blood pressure; no worries there. Prescribed post op beta-blockers made me feel awful; comatose. I was given Digoxin short term. I was told to take pain medication short term—but nothing offered any relief. I got off the pain meds because they made me feel awful, too. (I ended up having acute surgical recovery pain for two and a half years without my doctors taking any notice or concern. It was as if when I spoke to them they hit the ‘Mute’ button.) My body knew something was wrong, but the doctors all told me it was ‘... natural to feel like this,’
always ending with the sentence:

‘
What do you expect—

you’ve had two open-heart surgeries
.’

Was this the way it was going to be for the rest of my life? No. I won’t allow it!

I checked out local cardiac rehab—thirteen and a half years later, it still was not for me. I had to do something. So I designed my own again at home—not the same as first post op because I still couldn’t breathe, but I had a new idea: I began running in place in the deep end of the swimming pool and I’d move my arms in different directions to gain upper body strength. It helped my chronically bad back and opened up my chest muscles, still tight from surgery. I had seen other cardio rehab programs where people ran in place in the shallow end of the pool, but in the deep end, the exercise was significantly more difficult and I also felt like it was straightening out my spine. I continued to roll on my basketball (something I did since I was a teenager, before the Swedish Balls came along) to lengthen my spine, and that helped too. If the deep end of the pool was good physical therapy for million dollar racehorses, it was certainly good enough for me. This routine was absolutely low-impact and still a tough cardio work-out. Eventually I did this for 60-to-90 minutes a day. I tested myself every day—my breathing did not get better, but it never got worse.

Exercise always helped. Whenever I was...blue, I would exercise. As a former jock, I knew my body. At least, I thought I did. The only way I knew to fix something was to exercise. It minimized my pain short term, I felt refreshed, and I felt like I was ‘trying’ to get better. At least I was trying. Out of that damn recliner.

I always had to try.

It was close to three weeks post-op when the phone rang (oh, I do love the phone when it comes to show business). It was my directing agent Rob Rothman saying my old friends—
Friends
producers Kevin Bright, Marta Kaufman and David Crane—wanted me to direct twelve episodes in a row of their new series
Jesse
starring Christina Applegate. Rob Rothman had become almost like a brother to me, and in all my years in Hollywood, I had only a few close friends.

Karla immediately voted ‘No.’ We had just discussed how an acquaintance who had recovered from a traumatic surgery advised me to take off a full year to heal. He hadn’t, and he felt it set him back immeasurably in the healing process. I pretended to understand but
a full year?
No way. When my best friend and wife, partner for life and goddess of everything tells me ‘No,’
I listen
. And then I do whatever I think is right. So, like an ass who didn’t learn a single thing,
I took the job
.

It seemed impossible to change a life long work ethic and
raison d’etre.
It also seemed impossible to ignore pain and ignore my inability to breathe. I should’ve been home healing? Sitting home wallowing in my physical hell wasn’t a good answer. My chest wound was still seepy, but I convinced everyone I was “A-Okay,” because I felt my stamped expiration date for being a ‘victim’ had passed.

Karla understands the yin and yang of being me better than anyone. She knew I was worried the phone would never ring again. I promised her I’d ‘take it easy.’ Going to work meant feeling useful and having purpose. It also helped me take my mind off of my breathing problems, but I could see from day one that because I would lose air at the end of each sentence and then gasp to finish the sentence, my actors were a bit worried. I explained, “It’s just the way things are. I’m over it. Not a problem.”

When I worked, I loved having Karla stop by the set. The show was being shot on the Warner’s lot in Burbank, just five minutes from our home in Toluca Lake. What could go wrong?

CUT TO: Karla walks onto the soundstage of
Jesse,
she hears my voice, looks up and realizes her husband, barely 6 weeks out of the hospital, is on top of a 20 foot ladder showing Christina Applegate how to do a comic fall through a window without hurting herself. Karla is witness to me balancing on the window ledge, placing my entire body weight on my wound.

I didn’t break anything, and it hurt like hell later, but it didn’t matter. I was completely focused on what did matter to me—that the stunt be safe for Christina and look good on camera. I never allowed any actor to perform a ‘bit’ that I didn’t do first to make sure that it was absolutely safe. Christina is athletic, extremely talented and a hard working, seasoned pro; I found out it was safe for her. Not so safe for director-guy falling on his freshly wired sternum who was just cleared to drive a car post op, but cool for Christina.

DISSOLVE TO: Karla lecturing me outside of the studio and me having to realize that what I did was really...dumb. Crap. She was right and I knew it.

CUT TO: Eight grueling episodes in a row later. Good or bad, it’s always grueling for a director if they’re worth their salt. I know it’s not digging ditches, but I would have welcomed the simplicity of digging ditches at this point. Shovel. Ground. Dig. Hole. (Jump in?)

One day, after dealing with an arrogant Executive Producer who did not know the difference between a Gaffer and a Best Boy, (Arrogance plus Ignorance equals very bad creative math.) I could no longer take it. I had to call Karla. That’s all I kept thinking. I must call Karla!

I made it back to my little office/trailer and was barely able to dial the phone—I was shaking and frozen simultaneously. Tears were running down my face. I think it was the first time I realized I was... not a machine.

“H--e---l-l-o Karla? I need you. Please come now.”

Minutes later she found me curled up in a fetal position on the floor of my private office/trailer. I could hardly speak but muttered something I have never said in my entire life—about anything: “I can’t do this. Call Rob and get me replaced.”

The advice my agent gave me was, “Just give 50 percent. Your 50 percent is like everyone else’s 100 percent.” I thought, what a horrible thing to say about my fellow directors. My problem is I simply can’t do anything half way (not even wash the dishes). I was taught to do everything to the best of my abilities or why do it? That’s still my M.O. I can’t be a traffic cop/hack director just to get a paycheck. I can’t
not care.
(The use of a double negative is my way of showing the DOUBLE NEGATIVE!)

People may hear that you have had open-heart surgery, but there is no way for the uninitiated to understand what that means. They expect you to quickly heal and forget about it, like it was a broken leg or an appendectomy. (Or in Hollywood, a face-lift and a tummy-tuck.) This mindset is hard to defeat. Open-heart surgery is in a category of its own. And when the results are not good, you can’t ‘just pull yourself up by your bootstraps.’

I was told Christina was upset with me and felt like I had abandoned her and her show, but how could I explain to her what even I didn’t completely comprehend? Our friend was right—I needed a much longer time to heal properly.

I now had time to reflect
. I tried to replay all that had happened to me and what was making me feel the way I was feeling (inadequate; ashamed. Why?).

I remembered the day when Karla and I were sitting forever (it was only two hours but it really seemed endless) in my surgeon’s waiting room for my post open-heart appointment just after the Ross Procedure. While we waited, the line of appointments to see the surgeon was backing up and many patients ended up crowded in the room staring silently at one another.

First, someone responded to small talk, “It’s funny you should mention that. My scar hurts more than the doctors told me it was going to hurt.”

“Really?” another patient perked up. “So does mine.”

I couldn’t help myself. “My scar hurts me too. Much more than with my first operation.” We all nodded and went back to
Field & Stream, Sports Illustrated
and
Time Magazine
.

Then some brave soul blurted out, “I’ve been feeling a bit… blue. You know… sad.” So there are other people who don’t want the “D” word in their cranial lexicon, I thought. Hmmm.

“Me, too,” a grown man said. I looked at him. He was rugged. His hands looked callous from doing real work, not ‘show biz’ work, like my hands. My hands were pink and soft. ‘Damn,’ I thought, ‘I’m such a wuss.’ This was a man—through and through—this was one tough guy.

“Yeah… I’ve been feeling really depressed lately.” He stated, without a hint of embarrassment.

He said it! I can’t believe it! The
man’s man
said it!

He used the “D” word!

“I’ve been feeling like crap, too,” I blurted out and all heads turned to me. Why did I open my mouth? How come ‘crap’ came out instead of ‘depressed?’

“Me, too,” uttered an elderly lady who has lived a lot of life and just oozed wisdom. “They definitely don’t prepare us for that. They give us pain pills or they tell us where to go for cardiac rehab and how to stretch and when we’re allowed to drive a car, but no one even mentions that we might be feeling a bit
depressed,”
she softly continued.

“A
bit
?” an older man with his wife holding his hand extra tightly, said. “A
bit
? I think of suicide every single day.”

“Whoa,” I heard myself say. “Are you seeing a psychiatrist?”

“It doesn’t help. They want me to talk about problems I had with my father and mother. I’m 73 years old. I stopped blaming my parents 30 years ago.” Everyone laughed. We needed to laugh. In just a few minutes of honesty, we all felt like family. Fascinating feeling...

Finally, the surgeon returned from emergency surgery. When Karla and I got in his office he asked me how I was doing and I spoke honestly of my shortness of breath and my chest pain. He looked at my records and said my post op aortic echocardiogram looked great—this was all part of the second surgery healing process. I knew he was busy, but we were in and out of his office in less than five minutes.

That was that
.

I still felt guilty that he stayed for my surgery, when he could’ve been with his dying father—but now… I also found that I couldn’t ask (but wondered) if he got to his dad before his father passed away.

As we left the surgeon’s office I said goodbye to my new ‘friends for life,’ even though I knew I’d never see them again. We came looking for answers and the best ones I received were from my older open-heart compatriots in the waiting room.