On Christmas day, after a heart valve replacement and a coronary by-pass left my 85-year-old mother, Olga Regush, with life-threatening complications, she began to make an astonishing recovery. There have since been some road bumps and there may be more. Overall, she's slowly on the mend.

In the process, I have become far more acutely aware of what it may take for many elderly (and not-so-elderly) people to survive heart surgery without much harm. And I have learned first-hand what health professionals, family members and friends must do to ensure that every reasonable opportunity is available to improve chances of recovery.

My mother had heart surgery early in the morning of December 5. She didn,t regain consciousness for 11 days. And when she did, she remained in critical condition. It wasn,t until Christmas Day that my wife, Barbara, and I felt that she might have a reasonable chance to survive and perhaps regain some of her lost functions. That day, when we entered the hospital's intensive care unit, she was sitting up in a special chair, and she was able to smile at us. It was an extraordinary gift, one that we had not expected. The doctor in charge of the unit remarked that she was a "miracle lady."

I,ll let others decide whether miracles really do occur, but I can tell you this: It takes a huge effort on the part of many people to keep someone suffering from major complications of heart surgery alive. And it takes another major effort to see them through the recovery process.

What I want to do in this series of columns is give you a close-up view of exactly what these types of efforts require.

I have, for example, learned the following:

*The claimed statistics on complications from heart surgery are out of whack with reality.
*Common medical statements such as "Age is not a factor in heart surgery" is a gross misrepresentation of the facts.
*A person's chances to survive the complications of heart surgery may hinge on the type of medical specialist who heads a hospital's intensive care unit.
*Surgeons should not be counted on to rigorously "follow" their patients even when they are in critical condition and recovery."
*A family's presence and forcefulness is a crucial factor in the type of care a patient receives.
*Good nursing is vital, but in harsh budgetary times, round-the-clock nursing assistants may be the difference in whether the patient lives or dies.

In short, everything that I learned or thought I new about heart surgery has taken a back seat to my experiences with my mother over the past 42 days. The book knowledge, articles that I had read, and the countless interviews that I had conducted over the years with cardiologists basically amount to a hallucination, in comparison with "reality medicine."

TO BE CONTINUED