First Miracle

If someone had asked me if I’d seen a miracle, I’d be unsure until the past few weeks. I’ve seen some amazing places and amazing acts, but I couldn’t be sure if they were true miracles. My mother-in-law’s recovery from a quadruple bypass is a miracle.

When the odyssey began, I was heading out to Washington, DC on a business trip. My husband was given the impression that the problem was not as severe as we would all later discover it to be. I had offered to go out of my way on my drive to DC to bring him clothes, preparing for several days away, but he felt strongly that he’d be coming home the next day.

She didn’t just need a stent. My mother-in-law was transferred over two hours from her home, which is already three from ours, to the University of Kentucky. I left DC a day early, at 9:30pm, my home was on the way between DC and Lexington, KY. I was going to make it to Morgantown, sleep a few hours, do a load of laundry, and continue the five or six hours on to Lexington. I wanted to get there quickly to support my husband.

When I arrived in at my in-laws’ home, Chris and his dad were there. Chris’s dad explained how four complete blockages were discovered in my mother-in-law’s heart. He, an accomplished emergency and internal medicine physician, summarizes it best, “it is one hell of a case.”

Chris and I continued on to Lexington. His mother had the surgery only a day earlier. Upon arrival we went straight to the hospital. I had heard terrible stories about how she looked the day earlier, but now, now she was peacefully sleeping in her chair. It was not the horror I had missed while I was hundreds of miles away.

The next morning, Saturday, I had my first chance to talk with her. You’d be hard-pressed to guess she had major heart surgery. Meanwhile, as I walked past the other 35 rooms in the cardiac ICU, I saw many others who were further out from their surgery in much worse condition. According to families in the waiting room, some were still on ventilators days later, others could not seem to get themselves on the first rung of the ladder to recovery. It was clear how difficult recovery from this type of surgery often is. Yet when I’d see Chris’s mom, I saw none of that struggle. She swore that once they removed the chest tubes, the majority of the pain evaporated. It seemed unbelievable.

She had been transferred to the University of Kentucky Hospital on Wednesday, had a quadruple bypass on Thursday, and on Monday she was discharged directly from the cardiac ICU. Meanwhile, the names on many of the rooms hadn’t changed since she was admitted and the condition of many of those hadn’t improved in the perception of my passing eyes.

Our first stop was a Panera on the outskirts of Lexington. Our next stop was her home in Huntington, WV. Once in her own clothing, it couldn’t be underscored enough that you just couldn’t tell. With several years of medical experience, I know it is common to have more pain several days after surgery than immediately afterward--but that shoe never dropped. She got a second chance, increased our awareness of heart health, and is a model of bypass surgery recovery—even though she didn’t really begin the process at much of an advantage over many of the other patients undergoing this type of surgery.

It’s a miracle.

 First stop from the hospital, Panera