Happy Halloween! Hope you're enjoying a spooky evening!
What's with the creepy anatomy, you ask? Well I decided to take my Frankenstein's monster costume to the next level this year, by getting actual surgery. Can't wait to throw the door open to trick-or-treaters, cast my hoodie wide and reveal a bellyful of incisions and surgical tape. The kids love it!
Seriously I actually did undergo surgery for a hiatal hernia last Thursday, a rotten condition surprisingly common among singers. Somewhere along the way, though I really couldn't say how, I developed a tear in my diaphragm, and consequently my stomach was slipping through the hole above to where my esophagus is. It definitely doesn't belong there. The hernia leads to pain, discomfort and acid reflux, which can damage one's vocal cords. Chester Benington of Linkin Park is one of the better known sufferers. He says he was actually vomiting while performing, sometimes the strain was so bad. I never experienced anything that extreme, but it did hurt like a sonofabitch, I'd developed a constant cough and my throat was deteriorating, affecting my singing stamina. Not good.
It took awhile to zero in on the problem, and an even longer while to convince my medical practitioners to do anything. I was ultimately treated by an excellent surgeon, Dr. Teodor Grantcharov, at Toronto's St. Mike's Hospital, but even he needed to monitor the situation for two years before he felt surgery was warranted. Testing was a joy. There's the endoscopy, where you're partially sedated so they can send a camera inside a large tube down your throat to see directly what's going on in your stomach. There's a specific test for acid reflux, where they insert a small tube up your nose, down your throat and into your stomach, attaching to a small wearable tracking computer. This contraption you get to keep running through your schnoz and into your gut for a full 24 hours, while it monitors the amount of acid coming up out of your stomach and into your esophagus. "Just do everything normally," they say. Yeah, uh huh. Oddly this test didn't do much for me, indicating I wasn't experiencing reflux. My aching stomach, sore throat, and acidic belches told a different story, but hey, the computer doesn't lie. After two years of endoscopies my esophagus was starting to look like the inside of a blood sausage. With reflux. So the doctor agreed surgery would be a good idea.
The procedure to fix a hiatal hernia is pretty crazy. It's called a laparascopic Nissen fundoplication. Several small incisions are made in the abdomen, for inserting a camera and surgical instruments. The abdomen is inflated with carbon dioxide gas to give the doctors more room to do their work. They stitch up the tear in the diaphragm, repairing the hernia. Then they wrap the upper portion of the stomach around the esophagus to reinforce the opening, creating more constriction so food and stomach acids stay where they're supposed to. You can end up with a full wrap, where the stomach is wrapped like a scarf around the esophagus, or a partial, where instead of a full 360 degrees one gets 270 degrees of coverage from wrapping the stomach like a shirt collar, pulling it forward from either side of the esophagus but not entirely enveloping it. The partial is probably better for a singer, as the full fundoplication can create strain by stretching the esophagus, making swallowing difficult. I got a partial, as it turns out I've got a big esophagus (ladies, take note!).
Afterward, it's a gradual recovery. I'll be back to my normal routine more or less in a week, which is good, seeing as the band has a gig at the Toronto International Pop Overthrow a week Thursday. I do have to stick to a soft food diet for the better part of a month, slowly reintroducing normal food back into my system. I'm pretty sore right now, but I already feel like the strain my throat was experiencing may be improving. We'll see!
Odd moments and fun facts:
- General anesthetic can cause some nasty reactions after the fact. I had cold sweats and severe nausea. But it was short-lived.
- It takes six people to shift a 400-pound man (one of my roommates at the hospital). It doesn't usually go well.
- Surgery leads to nightmares. Or it has for me, at least. The past two nights I've been at home, I've woken from creepy nightmares where a well-dressed Victorian couple wearing strangely featureless plaster masks were looming over me. I hardly ever have scary dreams, so two in a row is pretty weird.
- They don't like to give you the good pain killers to take home anymore. I got Tylenol 2s. Seriously?
- Finding dried blood in your navel is pretty gross.
- My bassist's wife Grace wished me luck saying "in bocca al lupo", which literally means "in the wolf's mouth". Sort of like "break a leg" is the implied meaning. The traditional reply is "crepi il lupo", which means "to hell with the wolf". Italian's a strange language. I read that the whole exchange may in some way be derived from the Red Riding Hood narrative, where she's swallowed by the wolf and then cut free and is fine. Maybe? Anyway, colourful as hell. And I definitely feel like the wolf chewed me and spat me back up.
So that's the dilly. Pretty sure come next Thursday, November 10th I'll be able to deliver the full rock at the Rivoli. Looking forward to getting back up and singing, reflux free.
