It's Survivor Series Saturday Featuring Rob Grisham

❤️It's Survivor Series Saturday and we are grateful to Rob Grisham for sharing his survivor story.

The day before Thanksgiving 2013 (I was 29) I was working as a Chef at a French Brasserie in Madison, WI, and while I was writing the upcoming schedule at work I began to feel disconnected from reality and said ‘I need to go to the hospital’. I don’t remember anything after that. Thankfully there were two others in the office with me who quickly took me to UW Madison hospital.

I woke up 2 days later with sternal incision, drainage tubes, a femoral incision, and a myriad of other IVs and taped-on tubes.

They had performed an emergency open heart aortic repair. My ascending aorta had an aneurysm that had began to rupture. Dr. Takushi Kohmoto is the one who performed the surgery and I’m forever grateful for his deft skill, team leadership, and hard work it takes to do that kind of thing day in and day out.  

I had a wonderful support group while I was in the ICU, but after 2 weeks I wanted to go home, get a change of clothes, and just be in a comfortable space. After much complaining, they let me go for the day, but I had to return the next day. While at home that night enjoying dinner with my partner and friends, I fully coded out on my kitchen floor. Some of them knew how to do CPR but didn’t want to due to my fresh staples adorning my sternum. I was thankfully 3 blocks from the nearest fire department, and had EMTs in my apartment in less than 4 minutes. They gave me compressions all the way to the hospital where I recovered, but not before being fitted with a Boston Scientific ICD.

I slowly get back to work after about 4 months, and a full recovery later was ready to change my life completely.  So I moved out to Portland, OR. After establishing care at OHSU, I would meet my new surgical team and vascular doctors who would help me with continuing care. It’s now late 2014, and after my first CT scan results come back I’m told by a new surgeon that I would need to have an open thoracic abdominal aortic aneurysm repair. This is a big, big surgery.  An incision from my belly button, all the way up my ribs to nearly the nape of my neck.  I joke now that they opened me up like a can of Pilsbury Crescent Rolls. I digress. 

The doctor performing this surgery was Dr. Victor ‘The Shark’  Rodriguez. I give him that name for the beautiful but extremely large scar I gained from his incredible work. This guy was amazing. He knew his stuff, made it easy to understand, and most remarkably, did a residency at UW Madison years before and knew some of the staff I had met while there. This connection made me feel so lucky to be in his care, and would carry me through the wait between now and surgery time.  Just a few days before Thanksgiving in 2014, almost 365 days exactly from my aortic dissection, I would have the mid section of my aorta repaired with a dacron mesh.

The surgery is a great success! I begin the healing process, go through the cardiac therapy/rehab program, and work on getting back to work.  I would start a small business called Isthmus Dining Company, where I would do pop-ups. Moved to Monhegan, Maine to run an Inn for a summer, and eventually, in 2021, found myself living on-site and working at The French Laundry in Yountville, California. This was a life-changing and affirming moment, and I still remember what it felt like the first time walking into that renowned kitchen.

It was COVID times, and I was feeling under the weather. With my past, I was hyper-vigilant about any weird signs of illness or high blood pressure or whatever it may be, and I went to urgent care in nearby Napa.  My BP was very high, and they were concerned about my history. Not having a huge facility there, they airlifted me to UC-Davis. 

After many tests and scans and opinions from different doctors, they decided they needed to do yet another large open surgery.  This time fitting me with what they called an ‘octopus graft’, which would continue where my last one left off and split down into the arteries in my legs. It was time to meet with the surgeon. To this day I could cry every time I tell it, but wouldn’t you know who walked in the door?  After nearly 8 years since seeing him, Dr Victor ‘The Shark’ Rodriguez enters the room, and without missing a beat (I have a very open sense of humor about my surgeries, and he knows this) he says ‘I’m gonna have to whack you open again, Mr. Grisham!’. He had moved a few years prior and was, from what I remember, head of Vascular Surgery at UC Davis. I was in good hands, and after healing up I was back to work.  I would leave French Laundry after a year and pursue cooking in Portland, OR again.

There’s a lot more in between all of those lines, and the long-term struggle and peaks and valleys of healing from something like that is almost indescribable, but I enjoy sharing the story. I’m currently hoping to open my own restaurant at some point and would like to write a book about my tale and journeys.

Thanks so much for reading!

Best,

Rob Grisham

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