Trapped in unfamiliar and uncomfortable surroundings on Wednesday evening, I had a brilliant idea.
I have written columns like this one in many places, such as cars, airplanes and hotel rooms. It was the perfect time to expand that list by writing from my hospital bed.
Maybe that would have cheered me up a bit. After all, this was the first time in 64 years that I was spending a night in a hospital as a patient. I have been lucky enough to avoid it ever since I was born in 1961. There had been plenty of outpatient procedures, but I always went home the same day.
This was supposed to be a one-and-done, too. It was a third attempt to control my erratic heartbeat, caused by atrial fibrillation.
The first two, in January 2024 and January 2025, were cardioversion electric zaps to get my heart back in the proper rhythm. They worked for a few months but didn’t hold. So the next step was a cardiac ablation.
This isn’t done at the Cardiovascular Institute of Mississippi. But a cardiologist from Mississippi Baptist Medical Center in Jackson comes to McComb to see patients, so I got steered to him.
An ablation is interesting stuff, one of those “how do they do that?” things that the medical world keeps creating.
Here’s how: They run a line into a large vein in your groin, and it travels up to your chest. It goes inside the heart and into the left atrium, where it uses electric pulses to numb nerve endings that are causing the a-fib.
It’s fascinating — till you remember it’s your chest and your heart, which is beating while this work is going on, and you just have to trust the medical people to get it done.
I did, and they did. I was under anesthesia for the procedure. The ordeal that’s worth writing about came during the next 12 hours.
Assuming everything goes well inside the heart, the key to making this an outpatient procedure is down in the groin and the right leg. I had to lie flat for five hours, and if the three small groin and leg incisions looked good, I would be able to go home.
It was a miserable time. I told a couple of the nurses I was like the song at the end of the movie “Shrek:” I’ve got a big butt and I cannot lie. Because of that, lying flat can cause nagging back pain.
So to get a little leverage, I lifted my left knee, and it helped the pain a bit. But it also may have steered blood to the other side of my body.
After five hours, the nurse found that a hematoma, or a pool of blood under the skin, had formed at the incisions. She literally pushed down on the area for several minutes till the blood dissipated, but the doctor said I needed to spend the night. Even worse, the five-hour clock had to be reset.
The nurse, Penny, taped up the incision area super-tight, like I was being kidnapped. “You have to lie flat. And don’t lift your left leg,” she added.
I got moved to a room with a more comfortable bed, but my lower back still hurt. An extra pillow under it provided some relief. I was restless and tired, but couldn’t sleep for more than a few minutes. On the bright side, both my legs stayed straight and flat.
That’s when the inspiration to write a column hit. Unfortunately, it was not possible.
Among the other instructions the medical staff had given me was to quit sending blood lower into my body. One thing to avoid was lowering my chin toward my chest. I couldn’t type lying flat without doing that. Another good idea fails. Maybe it’s best not to write when I’m unhappy.
Mary Ann got me home at 1 p.m. Thursday. The incision area has been behaving.
My lesson from one night in a hospital was easy. Judy Garland had it right: There’s no place like home.
