After surgery, Fort’s Sehnerts grateful for blessings in life

By Chris Spangler

This is a story about gratitude. The unexpected turns in life’s road, the fear of loss, the power of prayer and the blessings of friends and family. 

It is a story of thanksgiving … and it begins back on July 1st when Tom Sehnert went out for his morning walk followed by nine holes of golf. 

“When I came home, I had a splitting headache in the back of my head, and neck and shoulder pain,” the Fort Atkinson man recalled. “What is unusual with this is I can count on one hand the number of headaches I’ve had in the last 40 years, so for me to get a headache like this is unusual. I knew something was different here.”

When his wife, Patty, came home from work for lunch, she found Tom lying on the livingroom floor. She suggested going to the doctor, but Tom told her, “Let’s not rush into anything. Let me just lie here for a little bit and see what happens.”

About 1:15 p.m., Tom took a 650-milligram Tylenol. 

“Within 15 minutes, the headache was gone; the aches and pains were gone, which was good because I had to work at the food pantry from 2:30 to 6 o’clock,” Tom recalled.

Everything was fine until about 4:30, when the Tylenol wore off and his headache returned with a vengeance. Fellow pantry volunteers offered to give him a ride home, but Tom said he wanted to stick it out.

“I ended up walking back into the warehouse just to look for a quiet, dark place to sit in,” he said, noting that that’s what animals do when they go off to die.

“And then I stopped myself and said, ‘what are you doing, Tom? Get back out there with people.’”

So he started scanning the pantry shelves for painkillers, and sure enough, Tom found a bottle of children’s chewable Tylenol.

“I gobbled down eight of those,” he said. “Tylenol’s never worked for me before, but it was working for me now.”

He weathered his shift, went home, ate supper, watched some television and went to bed about 10 p.m.

“I woke up about 2 o’clock and I had chest pain. And this is when I’m thinking, ‘This can’t be good,’” Tom said.

He and Patty already had decided that Tom would call his doctor first thing in the morning, so he got up, took 650 milligrams of Tylenol and the pain went away.

As promised, Tom called the doctor at 8 a.m. A nurse told him that a chest pain on the righthand side of the sternum probably was muscle strain, not a cardiac event, so he made an appointment for 1:15 p.m.

“I’m feeling fine, so off I go to the golf course,” Tom said. “I put in another nine holes and I walk the course.”

At his afternoon appointment, the doctor did an electrocardiogram (EKG) to measure the electric activity in the heart. 

“I was in the waiting room for 10 to 15 minutes when Dr. (Barry) Cash came out with paperwork in hand and told me that things did not look good,” Tom said.

The EKG had diagnosed atrial fibrillation — an irregular heartbeat. Most people don’t have a big problem with it; it can be controlled, Tom was told. But his was way out of whack.

“’I called the hospital. The ER is expecting you,” Tom recalled Dr. Cash saying. “I’m a little set back by this information; I wasn’t expecting this at all. I drove myself to the hospital and called Patty.”

At Fort Atkinson hospital

He arrived at Fort Memorial Hospital’s emergency room about 2:15 p.m. and the medical staffers were waiting for him. Tom underwent tests until about 4 or 4:30 p.m. and while they felt pretty good about his heart’s rhythm, they wanted to keep him overnight for observation.

“They used drugs as opposed to shock,” he said of the method for normalizing his heartbeat. “They didn’t know how long I’d had this AFib problem, were concerned that blood clots might have developed and didn’t want to shock me and break one of those blood clots loose.”

Once Tom was settled in his room, the hospitalist stopped in and said he wanted to do a CT scan to rule out any blood clots in the lungs. Fifteen to 25 minutes after returning from the CT scan, the hospitalist enters the room.

“He gets a cell phone call and he steps back from the bed and he is talking to someone,” Tom said. “I could tell from the one-sided conversation I’m hearing that things weren’t really good. There was some concern somewhere.

“When he finished with that phone call, he stepped up to the foot of the bed, looked at me and said, ‘Tom, I know that this day has not gone as you would have hoped, but I’ve got some bad news for you. Things just got a lot worse,” he continued.

Tom was told he had an aneurysm — weakening of the wall — on his heart’s ascending aorta that had torn and he needed to have open heart surgery that night.

“Everything I had learned is that if you get a tear in your aorta, you’ve got two minutes and you’re dead,” Tom noted. “I’m in a state of shock, somewhat scared, but more numb.”

A worried Patty meanwhile, had experienced difficulty getting up to Tom’s room. Between trying to find parking but deterred by paving in the hospital lot, limited entrances and visitors due to COVID-19 and not really knowing what was going on, it took her a while to find her husband.

St. Mary’s bound

When she did, Patty was told that Tom would be going to St. Mary’s Hospital in Madison via ambulance. 

Tom and Patty had some time together while awaiting the 10 p.m. ambulance ride. Because she would not be able to follow the emergency vehicle traveling with siren and lights on, Patty first went home to pack some clothes and snacks for her wait.

A half-hour ride later, Tom was in a prep room at St. Mary’s.
“Young girls came in and proceeded to take every hair off my body it seemed,” Tom said. “A little while later, another woman came in and was going to put in a urinary catheter. I looked at her and said, ‘you can’t wait until I’m under to do this? And she said ‘No, there’s no time.’”

About 11:15 p.m., the surgeon introduced himself, telling Tom how serious the situation is and how challenging the surgery is going to be.

“When he gets done with his brief conversation, he looks at me and says, ‘I gotta tell you, 50 percent of the people usually do not survive this surgery or three days thereafter,’” Tom recalled. “I literally looked at the doctor and said, ‘I want to see Patty before the surgery.’”

The anesthesiologist came in, and Tom again said that he wanted to wait for his wife.

Patty, meanwhile, was frantically trying to reach Tom’s room. 

“When driving, just trying to get there, I was praying,” she said. “It’s in the middle of the night, it’s busy in town, right before the Fourth of July. I’m trying to Google the street. You do it in the daylight and can see it. Not at night.” 

She parked in St. Mary’s ramp, but didn’t know which level or entrance to go to from there. 

“A woman came by and asked if I needed help. She was on her way to the ER,” Patty said. “I must’ve looked upset, throwing my bag, trying to get my purse and suitcase out of the car, trying to figure out where I was parked.” 

Not unlike the Fort Atkinson hospital, St. Mary’s only open entrance was the ER that night, and the waiting line snaked out the door. 

“There were people that needed help. I could see I needed to get to somebody, but I didn’t look like the other people waiting,” Patty said.

In front of her was a pregnant woman in labor. When the security officer wheeled her away, it finally was Patty’s turn at the front desk.

But Tom was not in the ER and Patty didn’t know where he had been taken.

“I kept saying ‘I gotta get up there, I gotta get up there,’” Patty said. 

An employee who had been triaging patients located Tom’s location via telephone and was told that if Patty did not get to his room in so many minutes, she would not see him before he was taken into surgery.

“She took off her headset and took me up there herself,” Patty said.

Off to operating room

“We had about five minutes together before I got wheeled into the ER,” Tom said. “The first thing I said to her was, ‘I prayed,’ and she said ‘I did too.’ Then we had a brief talk. And then I shared some passwords to accounts that would be important to her if I didn’t make it through the surgery.” 

He added, “I’ll never forget, as I was wheeled into the OR, those huge, mammoth machines and lights that were in the room. I’m looking at them and thinking, ‘oh my god.’”

Patty was experiencing a similar feeling.

“My adrenaline was going. I felt my heart beating and I was on full alert just trying to move fast. And then all of a sudden, it just stopped when they took him away,” she recalled. “That’s the first minute I had to myself.”

There would be many more, as the surgery took six hours. The doctors told Patty it went well, but that she should go home rather than wait for her husband to come out of recovery.

The reason: Patty’s voice or touch might overstimulate Tom’s heart.

She called the Rev. Sara Rabe, who recently had assumed the reins of interim pastor at First Congregational United Church of Christ in Fort Atkinson.

“I called the pastor the next morning while driving home after the surgery and she got me home, she talked to me almost the whole way,” Patty said. “I was reaching out kind of blindly to someone, and she was wonderful. She helped me to stay centered and to drive home and to stay positive.”

Tom said he really does not remember much of anything that happened the next 24 to 48 hours. 

Sitting vigil, Patty could touch his hand, but she would leave the room to make phone calls, again so as not to overstimulate Tom’s heart.

There was great relief when Tom lived through those first three days after the surgery. 

“And then he got through five days. And then through that first morning home,” Patty said.

“Seeing the wires start to go away … that was a big thing.”

Back home again

Tom was released from St. Mary’s after five days, starting what he called “a long and sometimes difficult recovery.”

Originally, the Sehnerts had planned to spend the week with Tom’s brother in Michigan, so Patty already had a vacation week off. Her employer, MasterDrive, gave her an additional four weeks with pay so she could be home to care for Tom.

Dean Care provided home health nurses, rehabilitation staff and assistance with bathing and dressing.

“My biggest problem I was suffering with at the very beginning was sleeping,” Tom said. “I just could not sleep. I would go from my bed to the recliner to the couch to another chair to the bed. This went on all night long.

“It might have been mental, but there also was a lot of physical discomfort. I just couldn’t relax.”

And it didn’t help that Tom, a side sleeper, was told to sleep on his back.

This went on for two weeks after the surgery.

“I can remember two nights sitting on the edge of the bed praying to God to let me sleep,” he said. “It was such a mental problem at this stage of the game.”

He took as many pain medications as allowed and then one night, Tom got 2 ½ hours of sleep and was “tickled to death.” The next it was four, and then six, and his insomnia was over.

But that had not been his only concern. Tom’s second day home, a large lump developed at the top of the scar near his throat. Worried that interior stitches might have broken, he went to the ER at Fort Memorial Hospital. 

He was there for four to five hours, but the staff told him not to worry about it, as it would be OK.

“But I was worried about it and continued to be worried about it for a month or so, but it eventually also dissipated and disappeared.” He said. “Nobody said what it is.” 

Tom’s lungs also were very congested early on, and coughing was extremely painful.

“They give you a cushion pillow that looks like a heart. You keep that near you at all times and when you feel a cough coming on, you hold that up to your chest and you squeeze hard, because when you cough, it is going to hurt,” he recalled. “Eventually, I felt the last productive cough, and it was over.”

Then he needed to work on his strength, endurance and trying to get back his breath.

Prior to surgery, he and Patty already took frequent walks, so one day Tom suggested doing so. Using a four-wheel walker, he started up a very slight incline.

“I made it two houses and looked at Patty and said, ‘I’ve gotta go back.’ I was huffing and puffing after just going two houses,” Tom said.

The next time, he stopped to rest a couple times, but made it to the third house on the top of the hill. The rest of the route was flat and going home always was easy, of course.

Tom’s chest pain remained for a long time, but he started going to cardiac rehab to regain his upper-body strength. However, he did not have a specific program to follow.

“I kind of fell through the cracks because I did not have a heart attack, I did not have stents put in place or bypass surgery,” Tom explained. “Mine was an aortic artery. I went to rehab and did whatever I wanted pretty much on my own. The staff did pay attention to me, took my blood pressure and vitals and checked them as I exercised, as well.”

After six weeks, he was able to start using equipment to work on his upper arms. The first day, he exercised them for 45 minutes and the next, 30. 

“And the day after that, I hurt so bad, I didn’t go in for probably two weeks,” Tom, said. “That probably delayed my recovery time by two weeks because I had overdone it.”

It took a total of four months before Tom was pain free overall. 

Tom also was ordered to cut back on his outside activities for a while.

“The doctor had told me no more golfing this calendar year,” Tom said. “That didn’t surprise me, but I also told him that I bowl in three leagues. He asked ‘what size ball do you use?’ I told him 15 pounds. He said ‘not this calendar year.’

“I like to go deer hunting,” he continued. “He asked, ‘Do you use a crossbow?’ I said yes. ‘Not this calendar year.’

“The doctor asked if I hunted with gun. I said yes, a shotgun for pheasant hunting. ‘No, not this calendar year.'”

Tom continues to live with those restrictions today.

“I’m trying to recognize that the sternum was cut in two lengthwise and that the bone is now held together with wires and it will take three or four months for that bone to heal back to its full integrity,” Tom said. “I’ve got to be conscious of that for the first year.”

Lessons learned

That was the first of many lessons the Sehnerts have learned throughout this ordeal.

“Listen to your body. It tells you whether things are right or not,” Tom said, citing another.

And communicate what you are feeling to those close to you, Patty advised.

“If he hadn’t given any clue, I wouldn’t have known what was going on when I saw him lying on the floor when I came home at lunch, or was told he had a headache,” Patty said.

“And then just go with the flow,” she added. “I was getting upset, but I was trying to will myself not to as things were happening. Everything was going wrong, but people were helping me, and I needed to be open for all the things that were out there to help me.”

Patty said that people should not be hesitant to ask for help when they need it. She learned that firsthand while driving to Madison alone, knowing the ambulance was ahead of her.

“It is OK to call and say ‘could you take me, could you drive?’” she said. “At least you wouldn’t be alone with your thoughts. I’m not an ask-for-help person, especially at 10 o’clock on a Friday night.”

And show gratitude. 

“Be helpful and take care of your neighbors. We are so blessed and we just want to help people back,” Patty said.

Tom also advised that people must appreciate what they have in their life.

“There was certainly a time when I was depressed. Here I am 70 years of age and having a lot of fun in my retirement when all of sudden slam, bam, this happens,” he said. “There was a little time when I thought, ‘I am losing six months out of my life here.’ 

“But then I realized that I have yet to golf my best game, I have yet to bowl my best game and I probably haven’t got my biggest dear yet, so there are things for me to look forward to,” he added. 

“I thought God played a role in this. I’m 70 years old, what does he want from me? And I don’t know. I hope to get back to the life I was having prior to this event. I was just having a good time and having fun every day.”

Questions need answering

The Sehnerts had a lot of questions about this health crisis, and Tom tried to find answers in the weeks following the surgery. 

Among them, simply: what causes a weakening of the aorta’s wall? The answers include heredity, high blood pressure, smoking and trauma. But Tom had stopped smoking 15 years ago, has low blood pressure and takes no medications.

“But when the symptoms did present itself, I recognized that something wasn’t right and I knew I needed to go see my doctor ASAP,” he said.

Patty said that because everything happened so fast, there was no time for them to learn what to expect from the open heart surgery.

“To me, one of the most frustrating things was the lack of preparation and scrambling at the ‘nth’ minute,” she said. “But then again, you have all the family and friends, that community around you, helping.”

Community support

Because the COVID-19 pandemic kept visitors away from the hospital, Patty relied on friends and family for support. 

In the wee hours the first night, best friend Janice (Satterlee) Arndt was there for her, helping research information about aneurysms. 

And then there were their wonderful neighbors.

“I remember coming home that first or second day, and the lawn was mowed and grass was trimmed by my 88-year-old neighbor. He also did neighborhood watch,” Patty said.

Food was being dropped off daily, for Patty that first week and both of them when Tom came home. 

“We are very lucky that we live in a small town because of the relationships we’ve built,” Patty said. “We were getting phone calls from all different people in church. At 9 o’clock at night, we’d get a call … ‘we just heard’ and we’d talk to them. But the key is that people aren’t afraid to share that they are supporting you.

“They were praying for him. That’s huge. And we weren’t afraid to ask,” she added. “ ‘What can I do?’ ‘Please pray. Just pray.’”

Tom received a lot of get-well cards, half, if not  more, of them from members of their church. He also fielded many phone calls and visits from well-wishers.

“I received a lot of support and prayers,” he said. “I have a lot to be thankful for. I also consider myself to be a very lucky man, obviously. And I believe God was with me through that event.” 

Now, the holiday season has arrived and their sons, Troy Hartman of Fort Atkinson and Evan Hartman of Madison, will be coming home for Thanksgiving dinner Thursday. 

They are looking forward to that, the couple said, as there is nothing better in life than the love of family and friends.

“Positive energy is what I’m into these days,” Patty concluded. “It is going to be a good holiday season.”