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FRANKZEN
I see that among the speculation about the causes of "pump head" is trauma from the surgery - While I don't think I have been too badly affected long-term by the surgery, I feel and felt at the time of my quadruple bypass (Oct 97) that the trauma of the whole thing was being too quickly dismissed by all the doctors involved. My surgeon's view was that " I do 8 or ten of these a week - why should yours be any different ". I felt at the time he would be thinking differently if it were him facing having his chest sawed open and his heart worked on!
Obviously I don't know whether the trauma of the surgery has any effect on "pump head", but it seems to me from personal experience that surgeons tend to dismiss the effects too quickly.
When I was recovering from the bypass in hospital I told the surgeon that I hadn't realized how traumatic the whole thing would be - and that the people involved in preparing the patient might better serve the patient by talking about this aspect of the operation. He didn't seem very interested and one of his colleagues ventured the opinion that I wasn't the first person to ever have a bypass.
Maybe not, but two days after surgery I suffered a weird episode (later explained away as side effects from the anesthesia) in which I was out of bed wandering the hospital hallway unaware I had had bypass surgery! The nurses on duty at the time (6 AM) didn't pay me much attention, until I started pulling off the bandages from my leg where the vein had been removed!
All in all I found the surgery and hospitalization very traumatic, and today feel I would have done much better had the medical staff been just a little more sympathetic.
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