That Night In The ICU

Open-Heart Surgery Leads To Confessions

Anthony Shoals and the Broad River—To spend eternity here would be a good and beautiful thing.

It’s said the darkest hour is just before dawn, and just now it’s daybreak. In minutes I will move through a complicated machine that will remake me. The goal is more trips around the sun. What I’m about to undergo will be good for me ... I hope.

After a sleepless night I’m undressed, sanitized, chest shaven, wired and hooked up, and scared. My prep for open-heart surgery complete, medical support rolls me to the operating theater. In no time, the liquid running through the IV in my arm turns cold.

“Here comes the anesthesia,” I say.

“Fentanyl and —— ” says a nurse from the Ukraine, citing some drug I can’t recall.

“Fentanyl’s in the news a lot.”

“We know where it’s sourced,” she says, the last words I remember.

I never expected to find myself undergoing open-heart surgery yet here I am, a victim of lifestyle and something else.

“I never smoked. I was a runner for 41 years,” I tell my Ukraine nurse.

“You can’t outrun heredity.” Ukraine phonetics give her words a somber mood.

Obviously, I didn’t.

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What I remember most about my running years is summer versus winter. Summer days, each ray needled my flesh as I ran. A thunderstorm refreshed me. Come winter’s early dark, I remember a night when ice coated my beard. I will never forget running over the old Cooper River Bridge in Charleston and the new one too, the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge, though it will forever be Cooper River Bridge Jr. I remember running in Germany within view of the Danube. Running 10 Ks.

I never ran far. The farthest was 13 miles. Over 41 years I ran enough miles to cross the continent and back several times. The miles didn’t stave off heart disease but they gave me a false sense of confidence and for that I would pay a price.

My running years ended October 20, 2019. While removing padding staples from my late mother’s hardwood floor, I bent down to pull up one last staple. When I knelt on my right knee, something snapped and a pain shot through my knee. Torn meniscus. My last run came up short October 23, 2019. Done. That moment, I want to believe, is when heart disease seized control of my life.

I dream of running some nights, just as I dream of being in a football game beneath the lights. In a bit of irony, football and a mailbox would save my life. During the fall of 2024, University of Georgia games extracted a heavy toll. The hills seemed steeper; the stadium steps more severe, my wind gone. Then one March afternoon a walk to the mailbox and back felt like a forced march through the Mojave. I made an appointment with my physician and that led to a cardiologist. A heart monitor, scores of EKGs, panels of bloodwork, echocardiograms, CT scans, another cardiologist, and X-rays later I got the verdict: an irregular heartbeat and a low heart rate. Next came prescriptions. Still, something, I knew, just wasn’t right.

In my last cardiologist appointment for a while, I asked a question. “Do I have any blockages?”

“No, all the tests say you’re fine.”

“I know I have a blockage. I insist on a heart cath.”

May 13, early morning, I underwent a heart cath. I had four blockages ranging from 90 to 99 percent. May 14 MUSC Columbia called me. “Be here tomorrow morning for surgery at 5:30 a.m.”

Four blockages had me good. Three would be bypassed. I remember the operating theater’s circular blue-white lights ... they looked like an alien rocket landing over me. That is the last thing I remember seeing.

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The anesthesiologist brought me out and I found myself in the ICU, a place so deep in the hospital surely they pipe daylight to it. That night in the dark ICU I fell into a kind of delirium. I wasn’t quite awake. I wasn’t quite asleep. Twilight, they call it. I was doing the one thing I would like to do before dying. I saw myself on a cool spring morning in Georgia at Anthony Shoals, the wildest most beautiful place I know. I was wearing blue jeans and a white linen shirt as I stood by the shoals watching bald eagles wheel, osprey dive, and rocky shoals spider lilies dancing upon stems as green as bell peppers. The silky song of whitewater soothed me. I felt peace and knew I belonged in this rare serenity. My mother took me there as a boy and it has been special ever since. It is the place.

I have a family plot and were it not for being with my family, I would love to be buried by the Broad River at Anthony Shoals. Peace dwells among its wild flowers, rapids, and diving raptors. It’s the ultimate resting place, special to a boy who grew up having to explain the scars on his neck, face, and chest from a terrible accident that gave his mother a mental illness and him a lifelong complex. Scars are my tattoos, not some ginned up cliché or wild abstract signifying nothing.

Scars don’t come to pass during drunkenness and bouts of ego boosting. They come during moments of pain. During tragedies. They document personal history. Cormac McCarthy— “Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real. The events that cause them can never be forgotten, can they?” No, never forgotten is right.

Harry Crews—“There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with.”

No, Harry, you’re wrong. The scar on my chest never healed in my mind. The scar looks as if someone using needle-nose pliers placed a silver dollar fresh from a bed of coals dead center my chest. That scar goes back to infancy. I see it in the mirror each morning. My eyes go right to it and years of longing for an answer take wing like dandelion seeds in a burst of wind. And now that scar and the new scar intersect on my chest. The new kid on the block measures 5.5 inches and runs to the bottom edge of my burn scar. They form a balloon on a slender thread, always rising ... rising into the passage of time.

My burn scar and open-heart scar connect a timeline seven decades in the making. The first scar led to four months in the hospital, transfusions, and plastic surgery before it had a name. The latter-day scar, accompanied by ten other incisions, kept me in the hospital for eight days. What went down is this—Dams blocked three rivers no longer able to nourish my heart. The surgeon split my sternum with a sternal saw. You handymen would call it a saw-saw. Don’t ask me where the bone-dust went. I don’t want to know.

The surgeon fixed me as we say down South, and soon I went to the ICU, that place of three letters that have long dredged up head-on collisions, severe burns, and all manner of catastrophes. You don’t want to hear, “Yes, he ended up in the ICU.” Three letters and two scars at the polar ends of life—the beginning and the wrap as we would say when making films.

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Each day I feel stronger. Each day I feel more like myself, but even though I stood on the “edge of a heart attack” as a nurse told me, I might not choose this route if I had it to do over. You pay a terrible price when you cheat Mr. Death. That night in the ICU, my dream of spending my last day at Anthony Shoals helped me make it through the pain, blackouts, dizziness, and more that has become my lot.

I make a vow now. Before I die, I will wear blue jeans and a white linen shirt and stand by the shoals watching bald eagles nest, osprey dive, and rocky shoals spider lilies dancing upon stems as green as bell peppers once again. The silky song of whitewater will soothe me and I will remember being there long ago with my mother before trouble and fire changed our lives. A surgeon of the soul, I will bypass the ensuing years and render them much different than they were for her and for me. Once I’ve done that, I will be ready. Ready to go.