I am a writer of nonfiction and friends have suggested I should write about my recent heart attack. But write “what” exactly? I was in danger of dying. I had open heart surgery. I spent a long time recovering.
What’s more interesting is that having had coronary bypass surgery I’m not the same person.The cardiologist said it would be six or seven months before I’d begin to feel like myself. What he didn’t say is that there’s never a return to the former body—the one where you got up, bent over, tied your shoes and thought about berries. What he couldn’t tell me is that I’d feel alien in my body evermore, even after the most significant healing.
Because I’m legally blind I have tension headaches. My neck and shoulders and the muscles around my eyes turn hot and then they throb. I thought I knew pain. I thought post cardiac repair-life would be simple once I could walk.
Imagine, if you will, a pipe organ, all those pipes crying out. Inside my chest there’s a set of wires holding my sternum together. Its a compound structure and it sends signals in a kind of nerve damaged partita—a score for solo instrument. My surgical site remains sore. My sternum shifts when I lift a plate. My balance is shot. I drift sideways on the sidewalk. OK. I’m walking in circles with an apple in my hand, testing the waters of the next life. This is a way of being.
So its the metaphysics of post-surgery I’m after. I want post-reductionism. Meanwhile I take a lot of pills.
Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University
