In the mirror, my whole face and part of my neck was covered in bright-red lipstick. I looked like a three-year-old who had got hold of his mother’s make-up bag. It was smeared everywhere.
Growing up, I was excited about this new life in Christ I had received after being born again, and the ‘going to heaven’ status that came with the deal. Kind of like Christmas, someone else was born and I got presents. I also loved the idea of Jesus’ victory on the cross. That He ruled and reigned from his heavenly throne. I wanted to take part in that victory or, more to the point, I wanted to share in the benefits. There clearly was space for Christmas and Easter in my theology.
But I didn’t pay much attention to the messy bit in the middle, the actual life I would live from the cradle to the grave, where the Bible talks about, ‘Even though Jesus was God’s Son, He learned obedience from the things He suffered’ (Hebrews 5:8, NLT).
I’VE COME TO TELL YOU THAT YOU’RE GOING TO LIVE
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