Convention Schedule Previous Reports Personality of the Week About this Site Search this Site Racing and More E-Mail the Author

Ohayocon - Author's Notes - 2006 Heartblog for Feb. 9: It's cold outside, but it still seemed worth the risk to put on the heavy jacket and walk down the drive, unacommpanied. The last time this writer tried talking outdoors by himself, he woke up in a hospital room after collapsing on a street corner, but there was nothing close to those melodramatics this time. Just a short stroll outside to confirm that there's still some snow on the grass, followed by a retreat to indoor warmth. Nothing would be more welcome than to find the hidden switch you can flip to turn back the clock and get things back to the way they were a month ago, but such things don't exist. An instant return to the strength and stamina that got this writer to all of those conventions won't happen, and it'll take exercise and work to get to that point. One good point is that the author's appetite finally has returned; it disappeared after too much exposure to hospital food. Heartblog for Feb. 3: One of the key gadgets for recovering from open-heart surgery sits on the floor, taking up most of the space in the author's spare room. It's a black-and-grey recumbent air bicycle, bought used at a shop specializing in used exercise equipment. The device was the right item for letting the author fulfill the gradually increasing exercise goals without tearing up the carpet in his brother's apartment by walking in endless circles. Now when it's time to put in 11 minutes of exercise, the author sits on the bike, resets and restarts a stopwatch, starts pedaling and waits until the 11 minutes are over. That pedaling will play a major role in getting the author back to full stamina, and it's the correct no-hands kind of exercise needed after open-heart-surgery. The apartment where the author now lives already has the brother's weight bench, but upper-body weight training is the wrong way to immediately follow open-heart surgery. So the recovery goes well and slowly, with no huge signs of progress, just the feeling that ordinary things such as moving around get a little more ordinary each day. Even the author's appetite, restrained by a need for a bland diet, may gradually be returning, another important point since the author's had been told that a certain amount of eating, balanced by some weight loss, is needed to heal. So the next gadget goal is a reasonably priced scale. Heartblog for Jan. 29.: Was it Marcel Proust who wrote a story about how an elderly woman dealt with her growing infirmities by learning to do less? In the living room of the apartment that serves as the author's post-operative home sits a circular table, three-feet across. The table is a key point toward the author's recovery from open heart surgery, because it lays out the course for this writer's exercise walks. Start a stopwatch and circle the table for six to eight minutes, switching directions every 60 seconds. The writer hadn't felt good for a few days, because he had been skipping the mandatory exercise periods, three walks a day. Catching back up with the schedule made a big difference, which confirmed that it is possible to get too much rest. When the exercise demands increase, we'll start shopping for a simple, expensive stationary bicycle: anyone with good working knowledge of the best unit for the money is encouraged to contact this writer. In the meantime, we've gotten our entertainment from Speed Channel on cable TV, watching big-time race drivers tear up Daytona Prototypes in the big 24-hour sports car race. Heartblog for Jan. 27: The cliche is true: you don't appreciate things you have until after you've lost them. The double heart atacks and open-heart surgery have taken away the stamina and strength that make an ordinary shopping trip tolerable. When it was time to head out on Friday to drop some items in the mail and then get food, this writer stayed in the van while his brother went inside the post office and dropped off the envelopes. A few minutes' standing in line would have been too much for this writer. And when we got to the grocery store, the author walked from the van's non-handicapped parking spot, counting that as part of the day's required exercise. The rest of the trip was spent doing something previous unimaginable for the overproud author, riding in a mobile wheelchair with a shopping basket on the front. It took no urging for the author to take a step he would have once reserved for the "invalid." The shopping trip happened at the precise time the author had hoped to arrive in Austin, Texas for the start of Ushicon. To have the means but not the strength for the trip symbolizes the new, limited life the writer faces until the stamina comes back. Notes updated in a plain room in a simple apartment: One of life's great privileges is to wake up and know exactly where you are, what's happening to you and what you're going to do next. That privilege, along with life itself, nearly was denied to the author of this site in mid-January on a street corner. It came after the author's first adventure with serious heart trouble. On Saturday morning of the Ohayocon weekend, this writer lay on the floor of the Columbus Convention Center and started tallying his symptoms. Extreme chest pain, constant perspiration, pain radiating down the left arm. "Feels like I'm having a heart attack," the writer thought as he tried to get comfortable for a few minutes, then finally realized there wasn't any way to get comfortable under the circumstances. Speaking to the guy at the next artists' alley table over, he said "Sorry to interfere, but I think I'm having a heart attack. Could you call the EMT's?" A few minutes later we were inside a Columbus Fire Department ambulance, where the EMT's confirmed that we had all of the signs of a myocardial infarction. Move ahead an hour in the story and we're in a catherization room of the Grant Medical Center, the major hospital in downtown Columbus, where doctors already had diagnosed the problem, one complete coronary artery blockage and two partial blockages. In the bad old days of medicine, the best solution would have been to head to an operating room, break out the saws and spreaders, and start replacing blood vessels. That process would have been debilitating and expensive - but there's a better way. Open up the femoral artery, send a catheter to the blockage and install a stent, a wire cage that holds the blockage open. The process lasted about two hours, and we can't tell you how it went because we slept through it, even though it didn't involve general anesthesia. When we woke up, the pain was gone and we felt as if we ready to head back to the convention, although there was no way any physician would let that happen right after a heart attack. It took another few days of tests and observation before we were cleared to leave, and most of that time between repeated nurse visits and blood draws was spent watching cable TV and wondering how the convention was going. It turned out there was an outpouring of concern at the convention center and online about our condition. The first sign of that concern came when Morgan, the organizer of Youmacon, and another fan showed up at our cardiac care unit room, bearing two posterboards covered with hand-drawn get-well wishes. They emphasized that there had been overwhelming concern at the convention and people wanted to know they were thinking of us. On Monday, an ultrasound operator had just arrived to set up his equipment to get images our our chest when in walked Jan Scott-Frazier, Ryan Gavigan, Robert and Emily DeJesus and other Ohayocon staffers, bearing cards, flowers and a big balloon. We tried to be good hosts while the operator ran the probe over our chest to get cardiac images, and made sure he knew we didn't mind them watching live pictures or our insides. Another balloon and fruit basket came from Tristen Citrine and her husband, and phone calls followed from Corey and Darcy, along with actor Tiffany Grant - who was pleased to learn that the hospital apparently had been named in her honor. Even one of the fire department paramedics who had taken us to the hospital returned during the weekend to check on our condition: it was good to learn that these guys, who deal with more peoples' misfortune in a week than most of us will see in a lifetime, saw us as more than another name on a list. There's an extra story behind the Frazier balloon. It had a large picture of a Mamoru Oshii-style basset hound and a musical chip that played a few bars of "Don't worry, be happy" when it was tapped. The balloon had a label claiming that it was guaranteed to work at least fifty times, and we inadvertently put that guarantee to the test. When we loaded the car for the drive home on Wednesday, there was no good place to put the inflated balloon that didn't block our view of the road, so we stuffed it under the posterboard cards on the back seats. The balloon was positioned just right to sense every big bump on the 180-mile drive, and each time it started playing that song. So, we were serenaded by an unending chorus of "Don't worry, be happy" all the way home, noting there were more bumps on Indiana roads than on Ohio interstates. It's also interesting that Frazier, an animator, chose to buy a balloon that not only had the Oshii reference with the basset hound, but had an "I Sing" label that recalled the name of Rudolf Ising, the great animator who teamed with Hugh Harman to create some of first great animated cartoons released by Warner Bros. Had the stent worked properly, the author's recovery from the first-mild heart attack would have been rapid and we would have missed little of the convention season. Unfortunately, things went wrong. The stent clotted with blood and caused a more serious version of the Ohio heart attack. It happened on a street corner a couple of blocks from the author's home, where he had taken a mandated exercise walk. The author collapsed face-first, his head smashing into a sidewalk, leaving him with a chipped tooth and facial abrasions. This writer didn't understand what had happened until he woke up in a hospital and was told he had fallen, then had undergone emergency heart surgery. It took a while for the reality and seriousness of the situation to sink in. Oddly enough, the most uncomfortable parts of the recovery were the throat tube and the urinary catheter, which hurt more than the broken tooth or even the extensive incision used to open the author's chest. The collapse came a short time after the first version of these notes was posted, a story that put a positive spin on the heart attack and looked forward to a speedy recovery. The second heart attack was far more serious and was handled with more serious means - open-heart surgery rather than a stent, and a double bypass using blood vessels from the author's chest. But while it was more serious, there were far more serious ramifications that did not happen. Blood clots can mean strokes and brain damage, but that did not happen. An uncontrolled fall onto a concrete sidewalk can mean head injury and a concussion, but the author was spared that fate. Even the source of the bypass vessels, from the chest rather than the legs, was the least serious choice. An important factor in our apparent recovery from the second heart attack was fast action in getting us the correct treatment. The collapse happened a few blocks away from the emergency room of Methodist Hospital of Indiana, part of a multi-hospital Clarian Medical Group that includes cardiac care as a specialty. We were sent immediately to the Methodist emergency room, and somewhere in the process the decision was made to treat the author as a critically ill cardiac patient rather than another bum that had fallen out on the street. A week after collapsed, we were about ready to be released - this time to live with relatives for a few weeks who will be able to keep an additional eye on this writer. Thanks to all for the prayers and kind words and wishes: they were needed and appreciated. To say that there was an outpouring of concern would be an understatement. This kind of kindness is the sort of thing that makes the web page effort and more worthwhile. One day we'll have to sit down and count the number of get-well wishes we've seen, and it'll take a long time to do that - very long, if you consider the time we needed to spend answering E-mail messages when we got home and had a chance to use our computer for the first time in four days. There was an equally warm surge of concern when our second hospitalization occurred, powered by prayer. So far, those positive prayers have been answered by our survival and recovery, and we're hoping the good news continues. We're planning to keep heading to conventions, and while we had to call off our Ushicon trip, we're still hoping to get to Katsucon in February. Open-heart surgery removes all of your strength and stamina, and it's going to take some work and hope to get ready for Katsucon, but that's not beyond the realm of possibility. We'll be hoping for an ordinary convention...as ordinary as you can get. Ohayocon Main Page