GERARD CHRISTIAN ZACHER: OFFICIAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY SITE

"MY MEMOIRS": PAGE 17: MY HEART ATTACK / OPEN HEART SURGERY / KIDNEY FAILURE

"Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein'" Scene: How I felt when I first woke up in a daze from the heart surgery to find my body all mutilated, sawed open, cut up, stitched up, swollen, and discolored in purple and red through my entire torso, arm, hand, and my legs and feet swollen to human-elephant size and shape, etc. https://youtu.be/UmYEfF3We8M

"Your Little Body's Slowly Breaking Down": https://youtu.be/cstkOZXuVuo

"You Must Love Me": ("Evita"): https://youtu.be/jCSEM5xpIx0

Medically, I have been through hell and back a number of times. First, I have been diabetic for awhile now, even though I have not been obese, etc.. A lot of times, my sugar level gets very low after taking necessary insulin, and sometimes it is difficult saving myself from that. But somehow I manage to. Almost 8 years ago, I somehow wound up with non-hodgekins lymphoma cancer (at a young age) and luckily, the 8 months of brutal chemotherapy and practically living in the hospital all that time (whenever I was released, my body would give out within a day or two, and I'd wind up right back in there for the rest of the month) worked! It took me awhile, but I started to learn to live again and pick up the pieces of a budding career. I realized I had collected a huge number of cosplay costumes (I'm a performer) before the cancer experience, and decided to put them to a more professional business use. I gathered a group of roommates, friends, and new recruits to form a party and event entertainment business. All my costumes are very highly detailed and very accurate to the movies and theme parks the many various characters come from, and we have gotten nothing but several perfect 5-star reviews all along. We even wound up with extremely high profile and VIP clients who loved our costumes and services!



Just as it seemed I could put the cancer / chemo experience behind me after 5 years of remission, I was suddenly struck down yet again. This time by an unexpected (though mild, thankfully) heart attack, despite my young age. I was on my computer working on business projects on the night of April 19th, 2015, when I got this intense pain in my chest that just wouldn't go away. I had to call 911. The came over and took me to Cedars Sinai hospital. I was never told I had any heart problems before. But now it turned out I did! Luckily, I survived the heart attack, but was told I had clogged arteries in my heart and I had to have open heart / double bypass surgery right away. I felt I had no choice but to agree to the surgery as terrified as i was of it. I woke up after the surgery in incredible pain, barely able to move, in somewhat of a daze. The first thing I was saw was my roommate, Joseph's face right there looking at me, and my other roommate, Roland standing behind him. I lifted my head and found my body very mutilated! I was horrified and felt like I looked like something out of a Frankenstein movie - all sliced up, broken open, and sewn back together in various places! Huge stitches all over my upper torso and swollen skin. My entire torso was purple and blue (and stayed that way for a very long time). The inside of my left wrist had been sliced open and stitched back together. There were tubes coming out of my stomach. I was hooked up to another machine. There was a catheter in me pumping into a machine on the ground. The scene when Helena Bonham-Carter's Elizabeth in the "Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein;" movie when she discovers what Victor had done to her near the end comes strongly to mind when remembering how I felt upon awaking from the surgery and seeing what they had done to my body.



Before I had any time to take in what had just happened to me, I felt very "off" all of a sudden, and the next thing I knew, a large crew of doctors and nurses were all over me shoving needles in my neck and arms, tubes down my nose and throat, and hooking me up to what turned out to be a dialysis machine. A complication from the surgery had somehow caused my kidneys to completely fail. Thankfully, it worked. But now my legs had swollen to the size of elephant legs, completely out of proportion to the rest of my body. It was severe edema (water retention) caused by both the surgery and some of the near 20-pills I now had to take twice a day.



The night after the kidney failure, I had a rather strange experience. I felt like I was floating around and watching other people's lives as if I was watching a movie screen. Then I found myself watching the "movie screen" through someone's eyes. The eyes flickered on and off. I got a sense this was too boring and I lost interest in this person and wanted to move on to the next person. All of a sudden, I found myself myself watching a scene through that same pair of eyes again - those eyes of the person I had found boring and had just tried to leave. But the scene was a little more interesting now. There were men in blue scrubs shaking this person and asking questions. Gradually, groggily, I realized the person through whose eyes I was watching this was me. At first I wondered why and how I had found myself "in this body". It turned out these were male nurses shaking me and asking me questions such as, "What is your name?" "How old are you?" "Do you know where you are?" "Do you know what year this is?" "Who is the current president of the United States?" I guessed some of the answers and got most of them wrong at first. I heard one of those nurses ask the others, "Did you see how white his face went?". Another of the nurses said, "I've never seen anyone's heart rate get that high before". The main nurse that had been shaking me told me I had a look of absolute terror on my face. I have no idea what had just happened to me. But apprarently it was something serious that I had luckily recovered from.



I now had to be lifted and placed back and forth from the hospital bed to very uncomfortable chairs by the nurses like a broken rag doll (it was always very painful), and I could not stop coughing violently. The coughing was absolute torture and I tried so hard not to cough - to only take the most shallow breaths possible - but to no avail. The coughing made me feel like my heart, lungs, and rib cage were going to burst open with every cough. I'd never felt such pain before, except perhaps when the tumor in my abdomen bothered me back during the cancer days that had me whimpering. This post-surgery coughing experience seemed possibly worse than that had been. To make matters worse, nurses kept coming in to put these sort of gas masks on my face that would spray air into my nose and mouth that made me cough even more - which was the very LAST thing I wanted to do. Every four hours. I could not get comfortable enough to get much sleep. The nurses made me walk every once in awhile with a cart holding oxygen devices. Just walking down the hall at a very slow pace would wear my heart out very easily, and I'd have to go back to my ICU room. Then I kept getting told that my lungs had filled up with fluid and needed to be drained. This scared me, and, feeling worn out from everything else I had been through at this point, I tried to reject permission for them to do this for some days. Finally, they said it HAD to be done, and they stuck me with a long needle in my back. It hurt very much. But, I guess they did what they felt they needed to do. They made me constantly breathe into a device that had three little balls inside of it. The little balls would rise according to how strong the air was that I was blowing into the device. My progress with that device didn't look very good for a long time. My body was not handling this very well. And don't get me started on when they finally yanked the catheter out after 2 months (they had put it in during the actual surgery)! I think the whole hospital heard me. They were going to put it back in, too...this time while I was awake for it. But I talked them out of it, and thankfully it turned out it was ME who made the correct medical decision not to. Turned out I didn't need it back in, thank GOD! I spent an entire 2 months in the Cedars Sinai Hospital Intensive Care Unit before I was finally transferred to a regular hospital room for another length of time. And let me just say this: No matter how hard you try to maintain it, there is NO such thing as keeping your dignity in the Intensive Care Unit! You're not allowed! Just forget about it! LOL!



Meanwhile, again friends visited and called, and again that same film crew who filmed me twice before, just like they did during my previous battle with cancer, came back to film my experience with THIS. The executive producer, has, of course, become a friend of mine. He came and cheered me up by playing the latest "Star Wars" The Force Awakens" trailers for me and filmed my reactions t include in this new documentary chapter. During that time, I was just hoping to stay alive long enough to see "The Force Awakens"! My roommate, Joseph, was there the most. He also helped me run the business when I was there. He had to take crash course. We had no choice. LOL.



Eventually...FINALLY, I was allowed to come home. But I was still barely able to walk, go anywhere, do anything, get on my computer like I used to, eat much, or get any decent sleep for another good two months or so. Then I began to gradually be able to do more things as the months progressed. I had nurses visit my apartment regularly, and a physical therapist would stop by every few days to make me do some exercises.


In the meantime, my entertainment company had been booked for countless dates from present to throughout the rest of the year BEFORE the unexpected heart attack and surgery. So, though I was completely unable to be involved in it, my business HAD to continue. I left my roommates in charge, and they did the best they could to honor all of our bookings in the meantime. They managed to pull it off while still keeping our excellent, perfect professional reputation. Even after I came home from the hospital, I had to accept the fact that I could not physically perform for my company myself for several months at the very least. But I tried to slowly get back into the swing of dealing with the clients online and by phone, etc., at least.



Meanwhile, just as my body was finally starting to function a LITTLE bit, Joseph, again, one of my 2 roommates got a severely swollen leg and was told he would have to have surgery on it. His doctors and nurses did an extensive pre-surgery procedure on his leg, which made him unable to walk for months. This also made it difficult for me to take proper care of myself during my own recovery, because now my roommate was unable to help take care of ME. I now had to take care of HIM even though I wasn't recovered much myself yet. I wound up in the hospital for brief on and off stays often throughout the months that followed my heart surgery. Very recently, that same roommate of mine just found out he has a disease that narrows his spine and neck, causing extreme vertigo, and he is now going to need surgery for THAT as well as his leg surgery. It almost seems as if our household has been cursed or something, despite the fact that we are all very nice people! That is how it is beginning to feel to us! Of course, all of this had set our finances back SEVERELY.



Again, all the while, the business itself still had to go on and we have HAD to honor all of the party / event dates we had been booked for. All of my cast and crew remained loyal and worked very hard all this time - giving the very best performances and keeping all of our clients very happy. We've kept the apartment, utilities, and the business on and going, miraculously, and got them paid but BARELY and by the skin of our teeth. So, since my heart attack, we have been struggling to maintain both our home costs. This has been beyond a really rough time.


Update: My roommate, Joseph, who had the leg injury mentioned has had to relocate to Florida. Still great friends and he still helps out with my company. I have since fully regained my health...with the exception of tingling and some numbness in my left index finger and thumb and that section of my left hand. My hand still functions fine. But it seems stuck with this tingling, though. I am healthier than ever again otherwise, taking excellent care of myself on every level. I never want to risk going through any of that again! As far as the business goes, as soon as I was well enough to get in the saddle and back in charge again, we had a big growth boom, and wound up with many VIP and high profile clientele since.