Heart Surgery

Last month Tim had ablation surgery on his heart in Charleston, SC. He had a heart condition called supraventricular tachycardia (SVT) that caused his heart rate to go well over 200 bpm while training for and competing in his Ironman and half-Ironman triathlons. While most people would be lying on the floor if their heartrate jumped that high, Tim didn't really experience any other symptoms. He would just have to back off from running or biking for a few minutes so his heartrate could return to normal, and then he could continue.

After meeting with several different doctors earlier this year, he learned that he needed an ablation procedure to burn off the extra tissue in his heart that caused the arrythmias. (While there is medication that can treat arrythmias, they are considered banned substances by athletic governing bodies, so this wasn't an option for Tim.) Through a fellow triathlete he heard about a heart surgeon, Dr. Wharton, in South Carolina who is a highly sought-after specialist for this procedure.

Dr. Wharton and the nursing staff were nice enough to squeeze Tim into an already full schedule for Friday, October 16th. We didn't find out that he would be having the surgery until the day before, so it was kind of a mad rush to get the boys ready to spend a couple nights with my parents and then make the 4.5-hour drive to Charleston.

We checked into the hospital at 10:00 am and waited in pre-op until about 3:50 that afternoon. For Tim, the hardest part about waiting was that he couldn't eat or drink anything after midnight the night before. Because of his crazy high metabolism, 2 hours is a long time to go without food for Tim, so 15+ hours of just lying around without eating was almost painful. He just tried to sleep as much as he could so that he didn't have to think about it.

Pre-op

It was about 5 hours from the time that the nurse rolled Tim away to the operating room to the time I got to see him after the procedure. I had started reading a book as soon as we checked into pre-op, so I killed the time by reading, praying, visiting a nearby Starbucks, making a few quick calls (of course I had to check in on my boys), and praying some more.

One of the OR nurses, Barb, called my cell phone a few times to give me status updates on Tim. The first call was about an hour into the procedure. She told me Tim was doing well (neither Tim nor I knew that he would actually be awake throughout most of the surgery) and that the catheters were in place. They threaded 5 catheters to his heart: 2 in each side of his groin and 1 in his neck. The next time she called was about 1.5-hours later. She told me that they found the extra tissue, the cause of the arrythmia, and burned all around it. She said they would be "mapping" for the next hour or so. From my understanding, mapping basically involved pumping huge amounts of adrenaline into Tim to force his heartrate as high as they could. If they couldn't force an arrythmia, they would know they had done enough burning and the surgery was successful.

Tim's surgery was the last one of the day, so by 6:30, the waiting room in the cardiac wing was completely empty except for me. It was pretty lonely. The last 2 hours crept by without my fellow waiters. If it hadn't been for the Food Network on the TV, it would have been dead quiet. By the time I got my final call from Barb around 8:00 pm, I was pacing up and down the hall and around the waiting room while still reading my book. I had been so sedentary all day, I just felt the need to move around a bit.

I think it was about 8:20 when Dr. Wharton met me in the waiting room to let me know that the surgery was indeed a success. I finally got to see Tim about 20 minutes later, which was such a relief. He was definitely groggy, but he was awake. Even though ablation catheterization is usually an outpatient procedure, Tim was admitted overnight since his surgery ended so late in the day and he still had to lie flat on his back for an additional 4 hours. This was another long wait for Tim because he still couldn't eat and his back was very sore by the time he got to sit upright, which wasn't until about 12:30 am.

The nurse and I tried to take Tim for a walk down the hall, but he was pretty dizzy without any food in his system. Once he finally got to eat for the first time in over 24 hours, he started feeling better.

The entire time we were at the hospital, there was a monitor on Tim's heart. I know that's not surprising since he was there to have heart surgery, but it was kind of funny/annoying because Tim has an extremely low resting heartrate. While we were in pre-op, his heartrate kept dropping below 40 bpm since he was just lying there. Every time it went below 40, the machine would beep-beep-beep. After the surgery, the machine was set to beep every time his heartrate went below 50 bpm. Fortunately one of the technicians lowered the setting because I was having a hard time falling asleep on the pull-out couch with all the beeping.

We checked out of the hospital the following morning with simple instructions. Tim couldn't do any training for 7 days, and he couldn't lift anything heavier than 5 pounds for the same length of time. The restrictions had nothing to do with his heart and everything to do with giving his groin time to heal to prevent bleeding. Not being able to train was definitely hard on Tim, but not having his help with the boys for a week was really difficult for me. =) But, I have to say, it was a small price to pay to know Tim's heart is fixed. Praise the Lord!