Tubes

Last week Dad took me for a ride along the beaches south of town. When I was a kid living here, those beaches were undeveloped, but in the last 30 years mansions have been built on every square inch. I wondered where all these people came from and how they made all that money. Based on my observation of the medical establishment over the last few months I'd say a lot of that money must have been made in the tube business.

Since I was first diagnosed with Endocarditis the medical establishment has used about five miles of tubes on me. They use a tube attached to the needle when drawing blood and I've given enough blood to fill a bathtub. When I had my portable infusion pump for a month, the tube was changed daily. No one would dare reuse a tube that might have any of that nasty bacteria on it, so a perfectly good six foot tube went into the landfill every day. Don't get me wrong, I loved that portable infusion pump. It had not yet been developed when Lewis Grizzard was treated for Endocarditis so he spent a month in the hospital. I'll kiss the guy that invented that pump if I ever meet him.

But it is in open heart surgery where tubes really get used. Every person in the operating room, except the patient, brings a tube with them and forces it into an orifice. If there are no orifices left, then they create a new one. So when I woke up after surgery I had a tube down my throat, one in my nose, one in each arm, one in a new hole in my neck, two in new holes in my abdomen (drainage tubes they call these), and one someplace I'd rather not mention. Total of 8. Lewis had 15 tubes. Because his surgery ran so long, it overlapped shift change and all the new arrivals brought a tube with them.

The key getting to go home after surgery is to get all the tubes out.

The tube they had in a place I don't want to mention was there all because of Lewis. When he had his surgery in 1994, they must not have used that tube yet. Right there on page 174 of his book he quotes from his (very long) medical chronology, "peed on Dr. Martin's shoes." Since the incident made it into the medical history, some of the best minds in medicine went to work on the problem. After all, we couldn't have Guccis loafers being disrespected this way, and insurance companies were not going to reimburse the doctors. So a new tube was invented. With this new tube in place I couldn't have peed on my doctor's shoes even if I had wanted to, which I didn't.

I suppose it is possible that they did have this tube in Lewis, but it had already taken it out before he peed on his doctor's loafers, but I don't think that was the case. Medical rules say that the patient should be sedated when the tube is inserted (thank God for that) but must be wide awake whenever a tube is removed. I'm sure Lewis would have mentioned that tube removal if he'd been awake. It isn't the kind of thing one does not notice or is likely to forget. In my case, when that tube came out they heard me in the adjacent rooms. Later, when the nurse removed the drainage tubes from abdomen they heard me all the way down in the hospital kitchen. Did you ever see the movie Alien, when the alien bursts out through the guy's stomach. That is what it felt like when those drainage tubes were pulled out.

Poor Lewis had to endure one last tube - that's right the big one. Although he tried to keep it quiet for several days after his surgery, eventually he had to fess-up that he was bleeding during his bowel movements. That type of bleeding is very bad and doctors went to work to find the source of the bleeding. Poor Lewis could not be sedated because of his many complications, so he had to endure the whole undignified procedure wide awake. I really owe Lewis a debt of gratitude for this one. Heart surgeons now insist that patients have that procedure done ahead of time to ensure there is no post-operative bleeding. Unpleasant as it may be, having it done ahead of surgery is preferable to having it when you still have other tubes in you and you feel like hell. So mine was done a few weeks ahead of time and I was heavily sedated, even during tube removal - I don't know how they got away with that rule violation, but I'm not complaining.

So that's what I've learned about the medical profession. Tubes are big business.