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I recently had open heart surgery that went as planned. They wired my breast bone back together, sutured the chest wound and “super glued” my skin back together. But two days later, while lying in my bed in the ICU, I stopped breathing and my heart stopped beating.

They had to cut my chest back open, snip the wires holding my sternum together and the surgeon hand-massaged my heart back to beating again. After leaving my chest open for the whole day to make sure I didn’t arrest again, they wired me back together the next day but couldn’t close the chest wound up because of the possibility of infection from being opened up in the unsterile ward instead of the sterile operating room.

They put me on what is called a foam vacuum dressing where a piece of foam is cut to the shape of the wound and placed down into the open wound, covered with a special tape and then hooked up to a vacuum pump that seals the whole dressing down tight. It had to be changed every other day. The idea was to bring the edges of the wound together over time and to allow for fluid drainage from the wound into a container attached to the pump. I went two months with this type of dressing until the wound finally closed up enough and I was switched to a wet/dry gauze dressing for several weeks. Eventually, after almost three months, my chest wound is closed and healing up into a scar.

But the wound was inspected closely every time the dressing was changed to make sure no infection was present. I am lucky to be alive and lucky I didn’t succumb to an bad infection in my chest.