How long is 6 hours?
How long is 6 hours?
How accurately do our brains process time relative to a fixed measure offered by a clock?
When you search your memory for a time when 6 hours felt like twice that, what comes to mind? Perhaps sitting in a middle seat on a transatlantic flight, or waiting for a call about a new job...
My most extreme experience of time behaving strangely occurred recently, on December 2nd 2020. For me a 6 hour time slot on this day felt more like an excruciatingly long 24 hour day. For our 12 year old daughter Sophie, she said it felt like mere minutes.
Sophie’s open heart surgery was described as serious and unusually complicated, not least of which because the conduit that had been created by a prior surgeon appeared in the MRI imagery to have fused to her sternum. That meant to even open Sophie up was going to be an intense challenge, her heart could tear. The head of cardiology at Boston Children’s Hospital, an amazing human, had ensured one of the world’s best cardiac surgeons would manage her case due to the level of complexity and risk.
The surgeon estimated 6 hours for his work alone.
Following our virtual meeting with the surgeon where he showed us a 3D image of Sophie’s heart and patiently guided us through his plan A and plan B for the surgery, I attempted to relay a lighter overview for our five children. To help them understand the weight of 6 hours of surgical time, I encouraged them to imagine standing in the kitchen with a knife and an eggplant, concentrating with a single steady focus on the vegetable for 6 minutes. Pause. And then imagine 60 minutes. Pause. And then try to expand that visualization to 6 hours. It’s an extraordinary thing to conjure up in one’s mind’s eye, it’s an even more extraordinary thing to do. And that’s just an eggplant!
While we waited in the pre-op room, Sophie and my husband played with purple slime the nurse had given us to stay distracted. Where Sophie had been understandably very anxious in the lead up to this moment, the silliness of the slime was sparking spontaneous and almost inappropriately loud hysterical laughter, as a tween girl does best. It was heart-warming.
And then they took her away from sight, and the clock started.
We knew Sophie would be on the heart lung machine for the majority of the time her surgeon worked on her heart, it would take on responsibility for pumping her blood through-out her body. This being Sophie’s seventh heart surgery (her sixth open heart surgery), we were familiar with this - but it made it no less spine-chilling, in fact each time they needed to open her up for heart surgery, the more the risks increased.
In Sophie’s heart journey her first surgery was within hours of birth, she has crashed while in her ICU bed, returned from open heart surgery with her chest still open incase they needed to reenter in an emergent situation at the bed, she has had man-made material used in a repair, this time she received a human donor pulmonary valve. I have slept hundreds of hours (or perhaps more accurately, tried to sleep) in plastic fold out beds beside hers in ICU wards in Australia and now also in America, listening to the monitors beep away reassuringly when they do stay consistent. And as I write those sentences, it feels just impossible to explain what each of those moments have truly been like. Each one of them has felt like the world paused and made time slower and harder.
From the day I found out about Sophie’s medical challenges at my 20 week scan (during my pregnancy), through to the 6 hours on December 2, 2020. This has been a long and challenging journey the depth of which Ill never accurately explain in words. And as the path remains ongoing, unfinished, I admit that I do sometimes struggle to muster up another burst of strength to face the next twist or turn.
But together, Sophie and I always do. And thankfully here we are again, on the much better side of those 6 hours. Phew 💗