How Clinton Recovered From Surgery

ByABC News
October 28, 2004, 9:15 PM

Oct. 28, 2004 — -- When former President Bill Clinton underwent a quadruple heart bypass operation last month, he says he had some "profound and lasting" visions.

One of those he remembers best "clearly connoted death and images that clearly connoted life," he said.

"I saw like dark masks crushing, like death masks being crushed, in series, and then I'd see these great circles of light and then like Hillary's picture or Chelsea's face would appear on the light, and then they'd fly off into the dark," he told Primetime Live's Diane Sawyer.

It was the first sit-down interview the former president has given in the seven weeks since his Sept. 6 surgery.

Clinton's wife said she was touched when she learned of what her husband saw while on the operating table.

"He said, 'I saw you and Chelsea and saw the darkness, then I'd see you and Chelsea and I saw the light,'" Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton , D-N.Y., told Sawyer. "It meant so much to me."

Sen. Clinton said the night before her husband's surgery was also emotional. But the former president seemed to take it in stride, she said.

"Bill wanted to play games, call friends, talk to [Democratic presidential nominee John] Kerry," she said. Joined by their daughter Chelsea, they played Scrabble and Boggle.

"Chelsea and I would go off and hug each other," Hillary Clinton said. "It was a little surreal."

The tension of the night before surgery was only matched by the relief afterward.

"Bill looked so peaceful when he came out of surgery, not a line in his face, in the deepest sleep I'd known for 33 years," his wife said.

But when he came out of the anesthetic, the former president was in high spirits -- and back to old form.

"I don't remember all this -- but they say I was quite funny," he told Sawyer. "I was giddy, happy I was waving at everybody, calling them by name in the operating room. Lord knows what I did and how embarrassing it is."

Reflecting on that memory, he considers that he may have been hiding his feelings about the operation. "I must have been concerned about it because I was apparently quite happy when I woke up," he said.