The doctor was giving me a hard time about not taking cholesterol lowering drugs, so I threw up on her. Her assistant didn’t have time to say anything, but I threw up on him for good measure. And, that’s about all I remember of my heart surgery.
Oh, the vomit was black. Deep black. “How much more black could it be? None. None more black” black. I was told that this indicates that there was blood in places in my body where it shouldn’t have been. Fortunately, the human body is very good at getting rid of things that don’t belong in it.
You may be wondering what a 45 year-old man is doing having heart surgery. Well, I had heard that there was a three for one sale on bypasses, and I could never refuse a bargain. (As it happened, I felt kind of gypped, though. When I had my angiogram, I was told that there were at least four serious blockages; I thought I was going to get a quadruple bypass. After the operation, I was told that the surgeon had only actually planned on two bypasses, but, since he was there and I was there and nobody had any plans for the evening, he did a third. Just another case of false advertising.)
The operation was simple enough. My heart was stopped and I was put on a machine that circulated blood through my body while I was under. Snip snip, then get the body started again. So, basically, I died and three hours later was brought back to life.
If anybody makes a big deal of this 2,000 years from now, it will mean they have learned nothing from what I have written, and I will be very, very perturbed. On the other hand…operations like this have become largely routine, certainly more common than 2,000 years ago, so competition for true believers is likely to be fierce. Don’t let those heretic bastards get control, my brothers and sisters!
After the operation, I was a true cyborg, with wires and tubes sticking out of various parts of my body. Eat your heart out, Steve Mann! The most interesting of these were the two metal wires sticking out of my chest that had direct contact with my heart. If my heartbeat became irregular after the operation, a pacemaker would be attached to the wires to regulate it. As it happened, this was not necessary, and a couple of days after the operation, the wires were pulled out of my chest with a quiet “schlump” any science fiction/horror movie fan would recognize.
When you’ve undergone serious physical trauma, or serious medical intervention, or whatever it was that happened to me, your body tends to loom large in your thinking for a long time afterwards. It’s a perspective I was not at all used to, I must admit. I wanted to get righteously indignant about the latest atrocities Israel was committing in Gaza – arresting a third of the Palestinian government seemed like an odd way of supporting democracy. On the other hand, I had a really tough time having a bowel movement after I got back home from the hospital. A really tough time.
Killing dozens of Palestinians because of the hostage-taking of one Israeli seemed to me to be a wildly disproportionate response…and, yet, as the days dragged on, I became concerned about not having a bowel movement. A friend told me that you can actually go about 20 days without a bowel movement without serious damage to your body – small comfort.
Then, he told me a story about a man who went 20 days without having a bowel movement. Doctors had to surgically remove the feces from his bowels. It weighed 25 pounds. According to my friend, the man died after the operation; his body had gotten used to having the feces in it, and having it removed so quickly was a big shock to his system. Smaller comfort.
Anyway, about the air strike on Beirut airport, I…I started regularly eating bran and multigrain bread the moment I left the hospital, but I didn’t have much of an appetite, so I wasn’t filling up very quickly. See, during a heart operation, your body is essentially shut down, and, I was told (by my dad – no point in blaming my friend for everything) that the stomach is slow to get back to work once the body has been restarted. The stomach must have a powerful union.
Anyway…four days and one suppository later, I finally, finally got some relief. As for the Israelis and the Palestinians, well, they’ll work out their shit. I worked out mine…