Surgery is Postponed Again and Why

I found out yesterday that the surgery has been postponed again and they did not have a new date for me.

The issue has been a staffing one. Specifically, they are short perfusionists (the person who operates the heart and lung machine) and could only do emergency surgeries so as not to burn out the few they have. This is apparently a nationwide issue, but Alberta has been removing investment in the healthcare system and so the wages are not competitive.

They couldn't give me a timeline yesterday, because I assume it would be difficult to predict how long a search would take.

Anyway, I was informed today of the new date which is October 29th. You will notice this is literally one month after the original date.

I feel confident in this date.

But who knows? We will just hope for the best.

In the meantime, I will look for things to pass the next three weeks.

Surgery is Delayed

 Surprise!

The surgery has been postponed until Thursday, October 9th.

I was already in process of being prepared for surgery. I was in the gown, they had shaved me and I was waiting for the porter to take me into the surgery room when the nurse informed me that due to some emergency, my surgery was bumped. I knew that this was a possibility. Emergency surgeries will bump scheduled ones if a life is on the line. There may have also been a staffing issue from what I gathered.

My surgery was only bumped 10 days due to the nature of my surgery and the importance of it which is a saving grace because it would be awkward if it was much more than that.

So, now, I am in this space of time where I have to wait. It's like a surprise vacation that I was not expecting. I'm going to focus on taking care of my mental health and fortifying my constitution.

As the surgery got closer, it was harder to sleep. The night before the surgery, I only got maybe 15 minutes of sleep due to stress. I know the stress will spike again as the new date approaches, but hopefully I can be more calm.

There is a decent possibility that I get bumped again. I spoke with surgeon's assistant, and she mentioned that staffing has been a challenge. The surgery will happen and I know I am fairly high priority for the surgeon.

Despite this delay, I am still thankful for universal health care. I would not be able to afford this surgery under a privatized system. I don't blame the doctors or the hospital.

I fully blame Danielle Smith and the UCP government. Healthcare is under the purview of the provincial government and the UCP time and time again have undermined the public healthcare system. Public healthcare works when it is funded and supported. Like many conservative governments, they do want to cut spending to the detriment of services that the public needs so they can give tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations. 

Smith has been pushing to privatize healthcare since she entered office despite a privatized healthcare system has been the ruin of many American families. Her government have put unnecessarily cruel new restrictions on AISH that makes it harder for those with chronic illnesses to have a decent quality of life. She restructured the healthcare system unnecessarily and has put down a foundation that can lead to privatization.

The hospital wouldn't be having staffing issues if we put money into system so they can give healthcare workers a good wage and they can hire more.

This is not just affecting me. This issue affects all Albertans.

But if I do happen to die waiting for this surgery. It is her and her government's fault.

There is all this talk about how the physical violence enacted by Luigi Mangione is beyond the pale. However, the American healthcare CEOs enact violence and kill people all the time with a stroke of a pen. That is violence beyond the pale.

If the UCP doesn't want the deaths of thousands of sick Albertans on their hands, they need to fund the healthcare system.

Anyway. I'm coming up with more island-themed activities for my impromptu vacation. If you're around in Edmonton, hit me up and we can both live on #islandtime!

The Day Before Surgery Update

(The following is the text from an email I sent out to people who were interested in being updated on my surgery. Some people may have missed being added to it, so here it is.) 

Hello!

You're receiving this email because you requested to be kept in the loop about the status of my surgery. Feel free to forward this email if someone would be interested in knowing this stuff.

First, I've done a fundraiser and people have sent me money and the response has been really lovely. I should be fine financially speaking for the duration of the recovery. There are also all sorts of extra costs such as getting a powerlift recliner and a bunch of Hawaiian shirts (I don't have many button-up shirts and decided to get the funniest kind of button-up). I'll be honest, to receive the amount I have from folks has been a little overwhelming as I am someone who is reluctant to ask for help. It's been really humbling to receive as much as I have and I hope I can pass it forward when I can.

If you would like to donate, I do have a GoFundMe:  Fundraiser by David Rae : Dave Rae vs. Heart Aneurysm: The Final Showdown! 

However, if you live in Canada, you can just e-transfer: davidjrae@gmail.com

Once again, I should be fine at this point, but if you want to help that is a way to help.

Second, I have set up supports for my recovery. My friend Jamie (whose mom used to work in the cardiac unit and actually knows my surgeon) is going to be there as I go into surgery and will stay with me in the hospital. Then I have a friend from Manitoba, Adriane, who will be coming to stay with me at my place for a couple of weeks. I will be giving your email to these two to potentially send an email once I have made it through surgery. I left their email in the To: line of the email so if you see an email from them, you don't have to be suspicious. I trust them to not harass you to join an MLM.

I have made a Google Sheet where people can sign up and bring me food. I sent it out yesterday, which is TOO LATE TO BE DOING THIS, but I don't know if you know this: real life doesn't care if you have heart surgery coming up and you still have to go to work and do chores and such. It's up now.  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QHwBQ29iGKNJoEQQzcFm0NcgVSpIg8YSyN7Eg-hPtzU/edit?usp=sharing

I am being admitted into the hospital tomorrow at 5:30am MST. The surgery is estimated to be 4-5 hours. It is to repair the weakened aortic root. This weakening is thought to be due to a genetic condition that I haven't officially been diagnosed with called Marfan Syndrome. I don't have all the symptoms, and so I may have a milder form of it. Essentially, it is a condition that affects connective tissue and can then impact the skeleton and circulatory system. You know how I'm tall, gangly, hyper flexible at the joints, and can faint easily? Those are all signs of Marfan. So, I owe much of my physical humor and stories to this condition. A real mixed blessing as it were. There is no real cure for it, because it is genetic. For milder cases like mine, the only way it impacts me is that I would need surgery at some point. And this some point is tomorrow. I should theoretically only need the one. My cardiologist has been tracking the progression of aorta for the last decade (when I fainted at the hospital visiting my now ex-mother-in-law. Hospital people don't handwave fainting away like I did). He was waiting until the right time to book the surgery. If we did it too soon, I may need another one later in life. If we wait too long, the aneurysm would burst and I would be gone in minutes. My brother, Darwin, passed away because an aneurysm burst in his heart that he had no idea about. Since it's genetic, it's a real possibility that he had a similar situation to mine. So, I'm actually lucky that my mother-in-law broke her hip while riding her bike down a half-pipe (fully true. That happened to her. I have no idea why she did it).

The odds are very much in my favor for this situation. The surgery has a 98% success rate. I am young and relatively healthy. Edmonton happens to have one of the best cardiac units in the country, if not the world. My surgeon is known to be one of the best in Canada. I have free healthcare. I have so many kind people helping me out. Final Fantasy Tactics will be released on the day of the surgery and it is pre-ordered, so my video game needs are taken care of, which I know you are all concerned about.

There is a 5% chance that when they get in there, they may need to also replace a heart valve. I have a bicuspid valve which is where a normal heart valve has 3 flaps, one of mine only has 2. It has been working well despite missing the flap. The surgeon said that he would prefer not to replace it because my natural bicuspid valve is better than having a mechanical one which requires medication for the rest of my life and may need to be replaced. However, if he gets in there and it is a worse problem than it first seemed, they will have to put in the mechanical valve. I hope not, but I don't want to hear clicking for the rest of my life!

I will be in the ICU for about 2 or 3 days, then moved to the... ward? Gen pop? Whatever the place where patients stay that is not the ICU. Solitary confinement? Anyway, I will be at the hospital for about a week. I plan on racing the other patients and talking a lot of smack. Maybe pick up a girlfriend.

Once home, I cannot drive for another 5 weeks or so. Then I should be allowed to get back to stealing specific high-end sports cars with Nicolas Cage. (Remember "Gone in 60 Seconds"? I liked that movie. Probably doesn't hold up, but it started with "Black Betty" which is a great song)

You can tell I am starting to get antsy writing this email because I need to throw in more jokes to make this fun for me.

Recovery is to take about 3 months before I'm back to where I was before. Less for the heart, but rather for the ribs and core muscles to repair. This is full open-heart surgery, so they have to break the ribs (GAAAAAHHHHH) to get in there. As I said before, I got a powerlift recliner because I will have to sleep on my back which is not how I normally sleep (I sleep on top of piles of money with many beautiful ladies). The powerlift is there to reduce the strain on the core muscles. I won't be able to raise my arms much for the same reason, and so that's why I needed the button-up shirts. Since I will be wearing these Hawaiian shirts, I am proclaiming that these next three months I will be on "island time" because I'm a comedian. Not a good one, but technically I try to make jokes.

I will not have much energy at the start and that's why Adriane will be there at the start of my recovery and I am so blessed to have her help. I cannot thank her enough. Once she heads back to Winnipeg, I should be in a spot to be able to do the basics on my own.

I also want to recognize Jamie and Cheryl Pratt who have been an immense help in the lead up to the surgery. Being able to sit down with them and go over information about the surgery, get their insight, and being there on the calls with the medical team has been nice.

Of course, I want to thank everyone else who has been there in various ways of support through donations for the auction at the fundraiser, donating time and energy to the fundraiser, donating money to me, to those reaching out with kind messages, to those who will send me food once I'm out.

This is a tangent, but this moment has really reminded me of something. One of the things I've thought about over the years is what is heaven like, if there is such a thing? Even Christian descriptions of heaven never appealed to me. We gotta sing for 10, 000 years and then sing for 10,000 more? The idea of living forever is terrifying to me, even in paradise. It makes the idea of heaven not seem appealing whether it is on that existential level or the experiential (like seriously, that's a lot of singing!). What I've come around to is that whatever the afterlife looks like, it will be good. It will be right for us.

Maybe we simply cannot understand what it is like until we are there and it will be easy to live forever. Maybe there's nothing and when we go, we spiritually evaporate into nothingness.

Regardless, even if there is no heaven, I have known heaven. Jesus described the Kingdom of Heaven being "at hand". The most common understanding of that is that heaven is coming soon. That it is a thing in time. When it is your time to die, you go to heaven. But that's not really what "at hand" means. When your sword is at hand, it means that it is within reach. It is more like an action than an event. There are moments in life when things are as they should be. It is like a sliver of heaven that makes you believe that things can be good and just.

Yes, this will be a hard time for me coming up. It is daunting.

But my goodness, with the number of slivers of heaven I have experienced in the last couple of months from the kindness of people from across my life, I have a 2x4 of heaven. This metaphor broke down there.

What I'm saying is, even if there is no literal heaven, I know heaven is real, because I have already been there several times when I have experienced love from dear friends and for a moment, even in this dark time, things are right.

Thank you for bringing the Kingdom of Heaven to me again and again.

To wrap up, here are the ways you can help include:
1) Visit me if you can. Whether when I'm in the hospital or at home. That brings me so much life.
2) Prayers and kind messages. I love hearing encouragement and how our connection matters to you.
3) Sign up for meal drop-offs. This is probably the most pressing thing at this time.
4) Send money if you'd like. This is not as important for me.

Expect to hear an update sometime next week.

Thank you, everyone.

- David "Heartbreaker" Rae
or

- David "The Broken Heart Valentine" Rae
or

- David "Island Time" Rae

or
- David "Avoiding Getting Ready for Surgery Because He is Nervous About It" Rae