Historical December 1983 report or notice. Original dates, prices and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
“It’s something like a jigsaw,” the surgeon said, explaining how he had parted my sternum in order to begin the coronary bypass operation. I had seen butchers split chicken breasts, but I knew, in my heart, that at Barnes Hospital surgical technology would be so sophisticated that my chest would probably part itself at the press of a button.
There would be a kind of open-sesame laser, something with the power of Moses confronting the Red Sea and the cunning of a computer that knew a body better than its owner.
But a jigsaw.
This was carpentry.
And in the Intensive Care Unit we had moved on to plumbing. I had sprouted tubes and wires like a porcupine, from the mouth, the neck, the chest, the leg, even a convenience tube that meant I would not, praise the Lord, have to stand in line at the men’s room. Though I would not know it until morning, those of us who had emerged from cardio-thoracic surgery were arranged in curtained stations around a central command unit.
We were the only ones taking it easy.
The nurses moved quickly, talking in what sounded like a military dialect to each other and to me.
This would hurt, but for my own good. I would be a better Marine. “Don’t try to talk.” “I’m just going to put a yard of something down your throat tube.
It will help clear you out.” My only attempt to reverse the power structure failed pathetically. Expecting to be disoriented after the operation, I had asked my wife to tell me the date and time when I first awoke.
She was home now, perhaps offering herself and accepting another two fingers of Scotch.
But she had performed her loving mission. I knew it was after midnight Oct. 13, and the tearoff calendar on the wall said the 10th. I raised my free arm to point to the wall, anxious to show the nurse that I knew something she didn’t. “What’s the matter, Mr. Shea?” She went down a checklist of possibilities and I had to shake my head each time.
When does she get to the part where she admits she doesn’t know what day it is?
As it became clear that I had no life-threatening complaint, she lost interest. “When you feel better, I’ll let you write it down.” Now I’m writing it down.
And in the morning, they took the tube out of my throat, put me in a room with a view and a TV set, and I felt better.
My roommate, I soon learned, had been to the operating room twice.
For some reason his sternum had not held together after the operation: He had to be opened and closed again.
He was retired, diabetic and overweight, and he slept alot.
He had been in the Air Force in World War II, had flown bombing missions over Germany, and had come through unscathed.
I tried to imagine him young, healthy, in uniform, crushing his hat to look like Terry and the Pirates or Smilin’ Jack, patting the fuselage pin-up before he climbed in for another mission.
His snoring, the mood music of his hard-won inertness, interrupted me.
My roommate was more successful than I at resisting the positive spirit of a CardioThoracic Surgical Recovery Unit.
There is, to begin with, the euphoria that comes with survival.
The night has passed and I am alive.
In a few days you discover that the unit’s nurses have taken advanced degrees in how to give positive reinforcement. Blind to your frailties, they compliment every achievement, remark every inch of progress.
The glass is almost empty, and they tell you it’s filling up.
They recite the Olympic records of those who tried hard and.have long since vacated the bed you loll in.
They tell saint’s stories about your surgeon, blessing you by association.
A sense of universal right stuff permeates the place and lifts up the lowliest intern trying in the gloom of early-morning rounds to get interested in the bed-by-bed variations on a theme.
If these men and women are not a team of heroes, I think, the 1927 Yankees never lived.
It should say over the door: Lives saved here. Or made immensely more comfortable, if you will settle for that.
The euphoria doesn’t last.
For a fee, I learn from my TV set that in my absence no one has operated on the world outside. More marines are dead in Lebanon.
Our septuagenarian president says it will be thirty-five years before he can decide whether Martin Luther King was a Communist sympathizer. Crowds in England and West Germany march to tell us that after the next war there will be no Marshall Plan.
There will be no one named Marshall.
We will have no plans. One’s life, renewed by prayers and science and caring strangers, remains a faint and fragile gift after all.
The yen to live is interrogated for its sanity by a world that has given us one Holocaust and promises another, that will make Jews of us all, our homes our ovens, the planet – a death camp.
There is a moment toward the end of the bypass operation when the chilled-down heart, its function taken over by a machine, hesitates to resume.
The heart has its reasons.
A wise friend had given me two mindless detective novels to read before I was ready for nuance.
The next day I read Isaac Bashevis Singer, the story about the Gentile woman in his childhood Warsaw who washed clothes by hand for a few kopecks. Nearly eighty, crossing and recrossing town through a bitter winter, she has little reason to cling to life and in a rich son who will not have her at his wedding, much reason for bitterness. Singer describes the last time she comes to his family for laundry.
The bundle is bigger than usual, and, rising, she sways under it. “But an inner obstinacy seemed to call out: No, you may not fall.
A donkey may permit himself to fall under his burden, but not a human being, the crown of creation.” The family waits two months before the old woman, wasted further by illness, returns the bundle. “The wash would not let me die,” she explains. Then leaves and dies.
The bundle is her globe, and she cleans it so that it can get dirty again.
The world is to carry. Mothers give birth to what can kill them. Longer-lived than their tellers, stories are to write.
The restored heart beats, warming slowly to its task.
Originally published in The Paper, December 1983.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1983_12.pdf, printed page(s) 12; PDF page(s) 12.
