The operation

Perhaps not all public health hospitals are like this, although I suspect they are, in that the one important thing you need to learn is patience.  Imagine arriving at the hospital at 8:30am, having no breakfast and particularly no coffee.  You check in and then you have to wait for your bed to be free.  I was fortunate to have the company of Gabi and Sarah, our younger daughter, who had come to help her dad look after me.  This went out of the window when Bill was rushed into hospital only 5 days before my operation with a heart attack and then needed a triple bypass operation and yes we were in two different hospitals at the same time.  Poor Sarah couldn’t have stopped for the 10 days that she was here, it certainly wasn’t a holiday.  Perhaps I should mention here that one of the hardest things to do was to tell the girls about the cancer.  Bill actually phoned them as I couldn’t face up to it, they knew something was wrong when he phoned; one said “Dad never rings so we knew there was a problem”.  Even though they are both adults I wanted to protect them from hearing bad news.  I needed to find out that although they were still my kids there are adults and as adults they handle bad news far better than we would ever give them credit for.

I was finally given my bed at 4:30; immediately prepped for the op and was probably under the knife by 5:30.  One useful addition was that I had had an appointment to have a mole removed just left of the breast so I asked the surgeon to remove that as well, which he did, saving me a second op; might as well make the most of a bad job.

Before the operation I was told that they would wake me up just to get a response and to check that everything was OK.  According to Gabi, who was there, my only response was “go away and let me sleep”.  I guess I was OK.  The four nights in the hospital weren’t that bad, apart from the food.  I was told that I must have been hungry when I ate breakfast, which was probably the best meal, and then ate both lunch and dinner on the Tuesday.  I knew I was feeling better as each day I ate less as the food wasn’t the best part of the hospital.  I heard later that they bring in a company and Bill and I were getting the same food, poor guy. 


Bill's View

The day after I preached on Romans 8:28, I felt some chest pains.  I had had these before and no harm had come to me, but this time they were particularly persistent.  I was a bit unhappy that the pain spread to my lower jaw, but they went away after a while, so I decided to ask my doctor the next time that I saw her.  However, at midnight they started again and I was in such discomfort that I couldn’t sleep.  In fact, at two in the morning, I woke Tina and said that I thought that I really needed to go to the hospital.  While she was trying to wake up – she’s not really good at that – I sat on the edge of the bed and suddenly the pain stopped.  Tina went back to sleep – so I just lay down and slept peacefully for the rest of the night.

The next morning the same pain started again and I didn’t feel like working. I went to the doctor’s surgery and she gave me some tablets to reduce my blood pressure, which was very high.  Although I didn’t realise it at the time, I had driven to and from the doctor’s surgery while having a heart attack.  I was even sick while I queued for the appointment, which I didn’t know at the time is a classic symptom.   

One of the church leaders is a doctor (although not practicing in Portugal) and when she heard about the pains she sent me an email telling me to go immediately to either the doctor or the hospital – ‘just to get it checked out’.  As I didn’t have any more pain that day, I was trying to think of a way to avoid going, but I knew that Gabi would give me a hard time (she later told me that, as a doctor, she sometimes has an instinct or premonition when things are serious and that she felt particularly worried about me). 

On Wednesday morning the pain started again so I called a friend who speaks better Portuguese than I and drove us both to the hospital.  As we got near, the pain got quite bad and I did think about asking Tim to drive – but I got us there safely.  That was the last I saw of the real world for nearly three weeks!  They looked at me, called the cardiologist and had me undressed, on a trolley and off to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) before I really knew what was happening.  Within less than an hour I was hooked up to all manner of exciting machines and monitors with bells, sirens and buzzers going off all around me!  And there I stayed!  Poor Tim had to drive my car home and explain to Tina that there was some doubt as to whether I could take her for her operation.  In fact Tim and his wife Julie, Gaby (our doctor friend) and all of the church leaders have been great.  During the weeks when I was out of action, I am pleased to say that – the church continued without missing a heartbeat – which was more than I managed – but more of that later.