Читать книгу The Vagabond - Frank Rautenbach - Страница 11

A few months after lipstick-gate I arrived home late from yet another party. My genius seventeen-year-old self had already concocted my ‘Sorry, I am late’ speech in my head. I opened the front door and, as I stepped in, my brother grabbed me by the chest and shook me around: ‘Where were you! We couldn’t get hold of you!’

My mother was there, too, speaking animatedly and repeating my brother’s frustrations. I was freaked out and told them to calm down. I had been at a friend’s house, I said. Playing snooker. It took longer than expected.

‘Dad’s had a heart attack,’ my mother said.

It wasn’t possible. He was too young. I stumbled into the lounge and dropped my head into my arms and onto the sideboard. My mother put her arm around me and apologised for shouting. They did not know where I was. Getting home late made matters worse. It was 1989, after all, phone communication was limited to landlines.

It was a very serious heart attack. He was in the local hospital’s intensive-care unit. There were major complications. He was only 48 years old and his life was hanging in the balance.

The next two weeks at home were mayhem. Apart from praying up a storm each day, my mother’s biggest priority was arranging for my father to be transported to the National Hospital in Bloemfontein. Our hometown, East London, did not have the medical facilities to treat my father’s condition.

First, they needed to stabilise him before he could travel. Apart from the heart attack, he was battling pulmonary edema, otherwise known as water in the lungs.

He could not be flown by commercial airline – it was against the law and too dangerous.

My aunt, based in Bloemfontein and legendary for her resourcefulness, managed to arrange a small private plane to fetch him.

In the meantime, my mother pulled out every Psalm she could find containing the word ‘wings’ and prayed up yet another storm.

My grandmother would fly from Bloemfontein to look after us kids, allowing my mother to be at my father’s side. They had no idea how long they would be gone. Whether the operation would end in a lengthy period of rehabilitation, or a funeral.

Despite their fears, my father arrived safely. Later that afternoon, he started experiencing another angina attack. The medical team was extremely concerned, immediately performing a cardiac catheterisation, including an angiogram. The results were not good. One coronary artery was completely blocked; the other two had both narrowed by more than 70%. The cardiologist in charge knew there was only one possible treatment: an emergency bypass operation.

After wheeling my father from the catheterisation theatre back into intensive care, his heart stopped beating within minutes. He had to be defibrillated.

They were running out of time.

The operating theatre was prepped by the seven medical professionals on the operating team.

As they were getting ready for my father’s operation, a new patient arrived at the hospital. It was a 31-year-old preacher who had collapsed on a tennis court earlier that day after suffering a heart attack. My father, also being a doctor, was aware of the established rule of thumb in a hospital: the younger patient gets priority. This was a major setback for him.

His life was hanging on a thread.

Fortunately, for the young preacher and his family, the doctors were able to stabilise his condition without needing to operate.

They shifted their focus back to my father.

Now all they needed was for the blood to arrive from the blood bank so that they could start the operation. By 1 am, the blood had not yet arrived. It later came to light that the blood bank had somehow mixed up my father’s order with the preacher’s cancelled order, causing a delay … and another frustrating setback.

By 3:30 am everything had been resolved. The general anaesthetic was administered. Opening my father’s chest, they exposed his heart and attached the necessary pipes to continue blood circulation during the bypass procedure. At the same time, a second surgeon was removing veins from my father’s leg to complete the bypass procedure. At 5 am, they had sufficiently cooled down his heart and it stopped beating. They were ready to start the bypass procedure.

Both surgeons later remarked how amazed they were by how stable my father’s condition had been up to that point, despite the series of quick-succession heart attacks, which had caused an enormous amount of damage to his heart muscle.

Removing my father’s heart from his chest, the lead surgeon showed it to the operating team: everyone could see how severe the damage was. He described the left ventricle as a blob of jelly, with no resemblance to the muscle it once was. From a medical point of view, it seemed certain that he wouldn’t survive the operation.

Apart from being kept alive by the heart-lung machine, he was as good as dead.

Acting on a gut feeling, the cardiologist advised that they should proceed with the operation regardless. Bypass number one: an hour. After a few more hours, all three were finally done.

Their next major task was to remove my father from the heart-lung machine and to let his heart take over the job of circulating blood through his body again. They persisted and fought for four hours.

He flatlined several times – until, miraculously, the heart started beating on its own again.

The doctors and the operating team were incredibly relieved when it started to stabilise into a normal rhythm.

Later that morning my father started opening his eyes as he came around. The supervising nurse immediately attended to him. She later told my mother that he was smiling and remained very calm as he came to. It surprised her because patients are usually very stressed when they wake up after major operations. He then made gestures with his hands, indicating that he wanted something. She finally figured it out. He wanted to write something.

They got him a clipboard with a piece of paper and a pen. He couldn’t sit up and was in considerable pain from having his chest opened. He had numerous drips and pipes attached to his body. He also had an endotracheal tube, for breathing, going down his throat, which prevented him from speaking. He lay flat on his back and, with great difficulty, attempted to write.

He’d write a single letter at a time and then the nurses would tell him what they thought it was. If they guessed correctly, he’d move his head slowly nodding, yes.

In the meantime, they had called my mother to come back to the hospital. She had stayed up the whole night and was trying to catch up on some sleep that morning. She was relieved to see my father awake and present. She looked at the note he had written:

‘Pray for my R-leg. I saw Jesus angel. Wednesday 5 am.’

She was intrigued: he claimed to have seen an angel! But also, he had spent more than 14 days in the Intensive Care Unit and there was no way he could have known what day it was let alone a reference to what time it was. It would be another four days before they finally removed the oxygen pipe from his throat.

He told them that once the anaesthetic was administered he blacked out and obviously had no idea what was going on. He then heard a loud and violent sound. Like a lightning strike. He said he could clearly see himself lying on the operating table. He then realized that he was no longer in his body.

He looked up and saw a very tall being in front of him. He guessed about nine feet tall. He said the being was dressed in bright white clothing and had a beard. He had a resemblance to the Jesus he remembered from pictures in his children’s Bible when he was a child.

So, he asked, ‘Jesus?’

The being replied, ‘No, I am not. I am an angel from Him and I’ve come to tell you that you are going to live.’

My father being a doctor and knowing how grave his situation was, simply said, ‘Thank you.’ He then said he had no idea why he asked the next question, but he asked the angel, ‘What time is it?’

‘The angel replied, ‘It’s Wednesday morning, 5 am.’

After that, he said it was like a curtain came down, like in an old-time movie theatre, and he blacked out again. The next thing he remembered was waking up and gesturing to the attending nurse for something to write on because he was concerned that he was going to forget what had happened to him.

When the doctors and the other operating staff heard his account of what had happened, they were amazed.

The anaesthetist confirmed that it was exactly 5 am when they managed to stop my father’s heart to perform the bypass procedure. The lead surgeon had stood with my father’s heart in his hand and made the decision to continue with the operation – even though they knew that there was not enough healthy heart muscle left for my dad to survive the operation, let alone make a healthy recovery.

In the weeks that followed the operation, the cardiologist performed my father’s final postoperative examinations. The results astounded him. After running the usual battery of tests, he couldn’t explain the elevated functionality of my father’s heart.

He threw his hands up in the air when the test results indicated that my father’s heart was functioning at the same level as a very fit athlete. It made zero sense from a medical point of view. It certainly made no sense to him, either. The only explanation he could give my mother was that they had witnessed a miracle.

My mother, backed up by thousands of prayers from their church community and friends around the country, had walked up and down the corridors outside the operating theatre all night, praying and singing all the praise songs and Psalms she knew. She’d had a showdown with the spirit of death that night. She was a warrior and wielded the sword of God’s Spirit and his mighty Word. She fought with everything she had, for my father and for us as a family.

She trusted that God’s Spirit in her was greater than the shadow of death that hung over my father. That day another part of God’s Kingdom manifested on earth as it was in heaven. As a loving wife and mother, she had prayed with all her heart, and the doctors did everything that was medically possible. But it was God’s amazing grace that brought it all together.

He had breathed his breath of life into my dad’s heart at 5 am, 11 October 1989.

It could’ve so easily been the date he died.

Etched in my memory is the first Sunday that my father went back to church after his operation. I don’t think I had ever experienced an atmosphere so heavenly and pure in my life.

The church was packed as we walked in as a family. Just over a thousand people filling every available chair. As we moved down the centre aisle, people quickly started noticing who it was.

Their beloved physician was back.

Everybody stood up. Some were clapping. Some were putting up their hands in the air, many were crying. Tears of gratitude filled men’s eyes. Spontaneous shouts of praise built into a crescendo of worship and thanksgiving that went on and on. The atmosphere was electrifying, like people really believed that nothing was impossible for God.

It was like the veil between heaven and earth was drawn back for a moment, God’s presence filling the room. Every song that was sung had another level of meaning and was pregnant with the expectation of what God could do.

A few months later, the pastor at the church gave my father the opportunity to share his story with the congregation. I had never seen the church so full. Even some of my Catholic and Jewish friends were there that night. Everyone wanted to hear this miraculous story. People were standing at the back and sitting in the aisles and on the floor. My father spoke well. Afterward, many people wanted to make their peace with God.

I mean, who wouldn’t?

They had just heard about how God had saved a man’s life from death.