All Bleeding Stops

Cardiac surgery can be a demanding discipline. Although the physical and technical challenges can be arduous, the mental and emotional demands can be far more draining. A week ago I saw a patient back in the office who had undergone complex heart surgery and had been given little chance of survival given the terrible condition his heart was in before the operation. His wife was with him, crying tears of gratitude that he had pulled through the surgery and was doing so well. That same week, another wife was crying tears of sorrow because we could not save her husband whose heart and body were too weak to make it after a long and difficult operation on a failing heart.

Because we as surgeons must face these issues daily, we must stiffen our resolve and not succumb to the sometimes dreadful realities of heart surgery. One of the worst problems we deal with regularly is bleeding. Patients undergoing open-heart surgery bleed afterwards for a lot of reasons. Many are on blood thinners of one kind or another preoperatively. A lot of them have poorly functioning blood clotting systems, the very system that you and I take for granted when we bleed after a cut or injury. Worst of all, in addition to the tissue trauma of surgery, when we place the patient on the heart-lung machine during the procedure we must give the patient massive doses of blood-thinners to keep the blood from clotting while it circulates outside the body and receives oxygen from the pump, which takes over the function of the heart and lungs while we stop the heart to work on it. Also, the very act of running the blood through the heart-lung machine causes derangements in the blood clotting system. Finally, in many heart operations there are many, many suture lines where we have sewn things together, and these can leak blood as well. For the vast majority of our patients, bleeding is not a problem. We give medications at the end of the procedure to reverse the blood thinners and their blood clots appropriately. However, some patients do bleed after heart surgery and some bleed a lot. In fact, it is accepted that about one to two per cent of the time we will have to take a patient back to the operating room for a second procedure to get the bleeding under control. Very rarely, the bleeding can be uncontrollable if the patient's own blood-clotting system refuses to function normally. Sometimes we spend hours in the operating room trying to get the bleeding to come under control. I had to do this last Friday, as a matter of fact.

So an old saying among heart surgeons, handed down from decades ago, offers the following proverb: "All bleeding stops." It is a dry and sarcastic way of looking at the problem in a dispassionate way. All bleeding will eventually stop. Either you, the surgeon, along with your surgical team and blood products from the blood bank as well as time and carefully placed sutures will get the bleeding under control, or you won't, and the patient will bleed to death. Either way, the bleeding stops.

  Likewise, for the Christian, if you think about it, all suffering stops. For most of us, our trials are for but a season. God, in His infinite wisdom and mercy, knows what He needs to accomplish in our lives with the tests of faith He sends our way, and He knows exactly how much and for how long we must endure. However, for some of us, we will be stricken with a chronic or even terminal form of suffering, which we must endure until we die. As a Christian, we then enter the heavenly realm where there are no more tears.

We must embrace the fact that our time here on earth is but a small fraction of our eternal life. Sixty, eighty, or even a hundred years is a blink of an eye measured against forever. And our sufferings, dreadful as they may be, occur only during that blink. Either God stops our trial or trials while here on earth, or He doesn't. Either way, all suffering stops when we join Him to begin our life with Him. I must end on a somber note. for those who have not accepted Christ as their Savior, the suffering will never end. Forever is an awfully long time to endure. For those we know and love who are not Christians, it is imperative that we preach the Gospel to them that their eternal suffering may be turned to eternal joy.

  Many of us have heavy hearts this week following the brutal slayings in Colorado a few days ago. The bullets that entered the flesh of those poor people that died ended their brief blink of earthly life. Some are in the presence of God Himself, and will never suffer again. In heart surgery, we cannot save every patient, but we try all that we can for those entrusted to our care. Likewise, we will not see all around us saved by faith in Christ, but let us try our all to make sure they know the way of salvation, that one day they will know suffering nevermore.