MY OPEN-HEART SURGERY NOV. 7

By Tom Bennett

Lilburn, Ga., Nov. 15, 2005 -- At 5 a.m. on Nov. 10, an Emory University nurse was in my room to take more of my blood. As she searched for a place on one of my limbs that had not already been stuck and drained, she began using what seemed some kind of strange, impromptu University of Georgia football jargon to express herself.

"I’ll use this left arm," she said. "It looks like it’s had its Wing, Dang Dooley."

That it had, and now that I am home with Lorraine, the backs of my arms and legs reflect the trauma and stress of being, in Emory Health Care parlance, a "double valve cabbage." I am so traumatized in my limbs that I look like a recovering troop who has been shot in Iraq.

In a Nov. 7 operation from some time after 6 in the morning to three in the afternoon, an Emory team led by Dr. Robert Guyton, chief of cardiothoracic surgery, replaced with mechanical values my aortic and mitral valves, two of the four pumping ports of my heart. Then they took blood vessels from limbs and achieved three bypasses of clogged arteries.

All this happened on the same trip in – for with hardened scar tissue in my chest from 1967 radiation after cancer and that Dr. Randy Martin of Emory (and WSB-TV) called "like concrete," everything had to get done this time. The doctors wanted to assure that no future return into my heart ever is necessary.

During my weeklong-stay in surgery, ICU and the Rollins Pavilion on the top floor of the hospital, I never passed a day when some heart nurse or doctor did not lean over me and say, "You got a LOT done."

My chest scar extends eight inches. I was swollen like a balloon; this former 155-pounder in high school grew to 197 before my weight began to recede (and now is 172). The Lilburn CVS pharmacist on duty Nov. 14 said my order for eight post-operative drugs is the largest he has filled. And 72 times a minute, my heart valves open and close in my chest. They’re louder than before, but you know what, I think I’ll keep them.

Lewis Grizzard’s physician, Dr. Randy Martin, was my encourager, friend and conversationalist during my difficult week. I thank him for taking my case, and for getting me the top surgeon in the hospital. Once Dr. Martin recalled that his father-in-law, a Miami dentist, was recovering from heart surgery and lamenting the pain he felt. He said he wished his family "would do as the Seminole tribe once did – just guide the elderly to the edge of the forest, and let them walk away." It was then that Lorraine said, "Well, Tom is a graduate of Florida State."

At another time Randy said that while in Stanford Medical School he worked in an ER at a San Francisco hospital "at the height of the Hippie era… When they had people brought in whom they couldn’t calm down, then they shot them with Thorazine and Phenergin," he said.

Those are the two drugs I received in my hardest night, on Wednesday Nov. 9. Sometime in the early morning, directly beneath my incision, I developed uncontrollable hiccups. They raged for two hours, every ten seconds. I was coughing and trying to spit up purple blood all broken apart in little dots. A nurse named Genelle Payne who lives in Buford saved me. At last when the hiccups had stopped, the two drugs had to be drained out of my system. So Genelle adjusted my bed, putting my feet well above my head. It was not a flattering position, but at that moment my pastor Dr. Bob Browning of Smoke Rise Baptist Church walked in and I squeezed his hand.

"I’m sorry you saw me like this," I said.  "Don’t worry, I’ve seen it before," he said.

It was the Emory nurse Phyllis Lowery, who lives in Snellville, who got me through intensive care. Every word that she said, every procedure that she carried out to cause the least pain, was so incredibly professional and kind.

EVERYONE IN the hospital reveres Dr. Robert Guyton. You can see on the Internet how the Harvard College and Emory Medical School graduate is one of nine physician children of two Jackson, Miss., parents who themselves were MD’s. The nine members of the current generation are in hospitals across the nation. One day Dr. Guyton in came to see me and he had with him his nine-year-old son, Nathan.

I said, "Nathan, you’re a member of a distinguished family in American medicine.  "Dr. Guyton said, "Thank you. Yes, he’s the only one in his generation who wants to go into medicine."  "That’s good news for the patients around here," I said.