Ross Gittins spent 44 days in ICU and almost died. This is his story |
Ross Gittins spent 44 days in ICU and almost died. This is his story
April 6, 2026 — 5:00am
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Don’t worry, the doctors will make sure you don’t die – even if they have to half kill you in the process. Sure, that’s an exaggeration. Doctors don’t set out to do you any harm, and they’re not oblivious to the unwanted side effects of their ministrations.
My medical misadventures began in October, when we were on holiday in Europe and on a cruise up the Danube. When we reached Budapest, I got bouts of uncontrollable shaking. The doctor who came on board said it was bronchitis, but I kept deteriorating and by the time the cruise ended at Vienna I had to be taken to hospital.
I have no recollection of this, but I’m told I insisted we fly back to Oz the next day as planned. The hospital said we should stay, but we went. Back home, my wife asked a doctor relative if she should take me straight to hospital. No, he said, take him to your GP.
Good point. As a member of the doctors’ union, he knew that, when you arrive in the emergency department with a chit from a doctor, you get dealt with immediately. When you arrive of your own volition, you join a long queue.
I was taken to a major teaching hospital named after some long-forgotten royal whose only claim to fame was a failed assassination attempt on a visit to Australia. (At least I didn’t run foul of the deadly fungal outbreak.)
Turned out I’d got an infection which, via my teeth, had spread to my heart, where it started wrecking the joint – literally. I now clean my teeth more diligently than ever before.
I was fortunate to get an illustrious surgeon from Germany who, with two others, worked for eight hours putting my heart back together in a tricky operation known as a commando procedure. The surgeon’s version of it he called an “unidentified flying object”.
It required the use of an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine, which acts as an artificial heart and lung, pumping blood outside the body while the surgeons get on with it. They installed a new plastic heart valve and painstakingly reconstructed two other valves. For several weeks, the ECMO was also used to keep me alive.
The surgeon told me later the operation has a 30 per cent failure rate. So that’s my near-death experience.
‘Property of the health department’
ECMO machines cost up to $300,000 each. If you added up the cost of all the expensive machines, the high salaries paid to the doctors and the modest wages paid to the many nurses, then divided that by the number of people receiving such operations each year, you could say mine cost the taxpayer a massive sum.
That’s true – though remember that, had they decided not to add me to the number of recipients, the saving to taxpayers would have been small. Once governments decide to provide such a service, most of the cost is fixed, not variable.
When I woke up from sedation, I realised I was in hospital after an operation, but it had been successful. So, thanks for your help, I’m off home to my own bed. No, I wasn’t. I was no........