I had a septal myectomy, with related mitral valve repair, on July 24, 2025, 23 days ago. I’ll relate below some of what I learned from the surgery.

What follows is a lengthy post, apparently too long for one post on this site, so I’m breaking it into 3 posts, which I hope will work.

This is post 3 of 3.

Here are 10 things I’ve learned from my surgery (items 6 though 10 appear in this post; items 1 through 5 are listed in post 2 of 3):

6. I learned first-hand that days of sleep deprivation post-op (including seemingly infinite hours of barely skimming the surface of sleep) can lead to some strange mental gyrations, and it helps to remind oneself that this, too, shall pass. In my case, first-line sleep aids did not seem to help much and I resisted trying anything stronger. One night while still in the hospital I agreed to Ativan, and while the next day I thought it had helped me finally have four or five hours of continuous sleep, I learned that it had, in fact, caused a precipitous drop in my blood pressure, and there was a period where I was delirious and the ICU night nurse had to sit with me for hours, trying to help return me to an even keel.

That was then. On August 13, at my post-op visit with my septal myectomy surgeon and his team, I told them of my continuing trouble getting to sleep (probably due to anxiety), and after discussion it was decided I should try a low dose of lorazepam, which I had used for a while some years ago to ease anxiety. Surprise! (to me), lorazepam is the generic name for Ativan. The docs were not too concerned that I had had that blood-pressure drop incident in the hospital, so I tried the lorazepam the night of Aug. 13 and Aug. 14, and it helped me drift off to sleep. I did not use it last night, and slept well.

BTW sleep deprivation can contribute to atrial fibrillation, so as I return to my normal sleep pattern that may help reduce my incidence of a-fib.

7. I learned that for me, the post-op chest pain has been minimal. With a little practice, one learns to hug the heart pillow tightly to the chest when a cough cannot be avoided. The pillow absorbs the vibrations and keeps the pain from radiating in the chest. After about 18 or 20 days post-op I found I can cough or clear my throat without the pillow and without much pain (but I generally keep the pillow within reach “just in case”). The prescribed 1000 mg acetaminophen (Tylenol) has generally been enough to dull my post-op pain, and I found after I arrived home that I used it less and less (once or twice a day now).

Also, my appetite has been strong all along. I learned for the first couple of weeks post-op that I needed to eat slowly and mindfully to minimize any coughing or other agitation that might be caused by a spicy bite or an oversized swallow (and again, having the pillow at-the-ready helped absorb any discomfort).

8. I have been practicing mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) for a good number of years, initially as a scheduled daily practice, but now more sporadically (although I consciously practice some MBSR techniques routinely in daily living, even if I don’t regularly set aside a specified period for meditation).

I found that in the initial days after surgery, probably the first 10 days or so, I could not calm down my mind enough to focus on the breath, which is fundamental to the practice of MBSR. Eventually my agita (anxiety/agitation) eased enough to allow me to focus.

For more on MBSR I highly recommend you check out Jon Kabat-Zinn, who has been spreading the word on MBSR since at least 1978 when he started a meditation program for patients and others at UMass Memorial Medical Center, a program that has since been replicated nation- and world-wide. He lays out the theory and the fundamentals of the practice in his book “Full Catastrophe Living.”

9. I learned that the pre-op instruction to plan not to return to work for at least 4 weeks should be taken to heart (so to speak), even by a semi-retired self-employed work-at-home desk jockey like me. You need to focus on taking care of yourself in recovery, walking more and more, resting or sleeping when able, and not dealing with the stress of handling work calls and deadlines. I did have to handle a couple of work tasks over the past two weeks because I had not sufficiently pre-planned a full four-week break from work, but my advice is to avoid work-related tasks for four weeks if at all possible.

10. While no doubt all nurses are angels, I learned that cardiac ICU nursing teams deserve to be ranked as a special order of seraphim, dealing as they must will all manner of agitated, sometimes disoriented, sometimes pain-wracked (not me), sometimes just plain squirrely patients. The varying individuals and teams who were on duty during my inpatient post-op week universally did a great job, each in their own way, to help ease my and other patients’ discomfort and guide patients toward their next steps (figuratively as well as literally – getting patients to take those first few post-op steps in the hallway of the cardiac ICU).

I’m sure I learned more, with more to come, but I’ll stop here for now. It been helpful to me to sit down (and focus and reflect) and write the above; I hope readers find some of it helpful as well.