NYAB Event - Mike Bayne “Deadpan”

Mike Bayne “Deadpan”

Mulherin

This event has ended.

MULHERIN NEW YORK presents Deadpan, an exhibition of new works by Canadian painter Mike Bayne.

” On October 15th, 2008 my wife, Crista, had emergency open heart surgery. She was 25 weeks pregnant at the time. It was her third heart surgery and second emergency surgery. The first happened two years before and was planned, an inevitability looming over her life for the first 30 years. She had a bicuspid aortic valve where there should have been a tricuspid and she was not getting enough blood and oxygen. This left her winded most of the time. Climbing flights of stairs were a chore. Sports, aerobic ones anyway, were out the question - she used to watch gym class from the bench during her years at school. She needed more blood, more air.

Her first surgery went well until the sutures tore and she started bleeding internally. She sat bolt upright, gasped and passed out when it happened. The doctor, who had performed the surgery, was walking by her room at the time. A code blue went out over the hospital intercom, code for ‘we have a patient who is about to die if we can’t figure out something to do immediately’. The doctor managed to stop the bleeding by cutting open her chest, inserting his hand and pressing his fist against her heart. And so she was wheeled into her second surgery, her first emergency heart surgery, with a doctor sitting on top of her.

The third time she was operated on we had gone to get an echo cardiogram. It was a precaution with her being pregnant. We were taken by the lab technician to review the results with the cardiologist and he started crying when we walked in the room. He told us we were being taken to another hospital were Crista would have surgery the next morning. We later learned that the results of the cardiogram were so bad that the cardiologist had only ever seen one that was worse - a mother of five young children who had died hours after her exam.

We met with a team of surgeons, phlebotomists, interns, emerge docs and obstetricians. They debated in a small room with a neon light hanging overhead about whether to remove the blood clot clogging Crista’s aortic valve with surgery or medication while we sat and listened. Later, we sat and were quiet in our emergency ward cubicle, surrounded by polyester curtains and the sound of ventilators and heart monitors. She was not expected to survive and neither was our baby. She did though. And so did our son. After the surgery the doctor met me in the hallway and told me about how big the clot was and how I had a strong kid. He had never done an aortic valve replacement on a pregnant woman before. He was not alone. We found out it had never been done before in our city.

Crista recovered. I helped pull the chest tubes that were draining fluid out and watched as cardiologists experimented with the electrical pace of her heart. We drove to another city for a high risk scheduled c section. On January 5, 2009, our son, Kjell, was born. I was not allowed to be in the room when he was delivered but was led into a nursery full of incubators, each with it’s own wrapped bundle inside. Two nurses and a doctor and I stood around one of the incubators and they said, ‘this one’ and pointed. I touched his cheek, he held my finger.

Crista had another chance to recover but instead started to bleed internally. She had been put back on too high a dose of blood thinner and writhed through the night as her stomach filled with blood. They told her it must be gas and gave her a suppository. Then, when they realized their mistake, they gave her a $10 000 dollar drug called ‘Factor 7’ to reverse the effects of the blood thinner and rushed her into emergency surgery - again.

Kjell is now six. His interests include: lego, pirates, chopping wood with a hatchet, baby chicks, spies, sleepovers, unicorns, wrestling, Tom Sawyer, and saving mice from cats - though not necessarily in that order and amongst other things. And Crista continues to defy the odds while trying to nurture a family, a community and a world despite having been treated so unkindly by it. We exist. And for now, that’s enough.

All of which is to say, that in the last couple of years leading up to this show, I’ve been thinking more about life than painting.”

- Mike Bayne, 2015