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My friend, Sarah - Part One

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I am featuring a series of a brave ordeal a friend of mine, Sarah Na'matovu, whom I went to medical school with, went through a few years ago. Her writing touched my heart. This story is about her heart. Heart surgery to be exact. 


April 1 2011

After eight hours of surgery, I wake up and am like, "Oh, I am alive, I made it through!" So I'm almost smiling but I have this thing in my throat and am asking the nurse to take it out, she says, "Don't talk." I motion for her to give me pen and paper to write. I don't know what I write because I am drowsy but the next thing I know the airway tube is out as well as the NG-tube. I have tubes going in all orifices of my body! 

Meanwhile I am thinking to myself that surgery is not so bad or that scary after all. 30 minutes later the anesthesia is wearing off fast. Suddenly I can feel every incision. Every nip and tuck. Every suture they had made on my heart and sternum. I start moaning in pain. Guess what they give me? Tylenol with morphine. I lay there for some hours soaking in my pain. There is no greater pain than that. I have to ask for pethidine but they will not give it to me. So I lay on my back and waited to die from the pain. And in that moment a nurse brings the miracle shot. Ooh within seconds I go numb. The greatest feeling in the world. Am still in pain but things have to get worse before they get better, right?!

I wrote this the day I was moved back to my room from the ICU, two days after an open heart surgery to replace my aortic valve and repair an aortic root aneurysm. The grammatical errors must have been a result of excitement or pain or perhaps, both. I wont edit it because it is a beautiful reminder of what resilience means.

Sarah, a beautiful reminder of what resilience means

May 7 2011

A month after my first surgery, I yet again woke up from a state of unconsciousness to find myself in the ICU. Yet again, I realised I could not speak because I had the freaking endotracheal tube down my throat. Like before, I motioned to the nurse for pen and paper. She obliged. I asked for the tube to be removed because it was causing me a great deal of discomfort. This is where this story takes a different twist from the first one. This is a story about fighting for my life.

"The doctor said you have alot of secretion in your lungs and you cannot breathe on your own", the nurse told me. The tube was connected to a respirator that kept pumping air into my lungs. What these people didnot know then, was that the secretions had formed a plug that had partially occluded the tube. So where as I could breathe in the air I could not exhale! I motioned for paper and once again asked for the tube to be removed. I got a similar answer to the first one.

They say, sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands and that is what I did. I reached out and tried to pull the tube out of my mouth. This is when the fight began. One nurse tried to stay my hands, but I fought on. I tried to get up, (which is probably the dumbest thing one can do after waking up from surgery, especially when the operation involved chest opening!!). I could have ripped the incisions right open! They applied arm restraints to my hands and tied me to the bedsise railings on either side. Thinking back, they probably thought that the anaesthesia had driven me nuts!

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