Then he came to shave my chest. And with him, a chill wind that blew away any remaining nonchalance. Practiced and casual, he talked in soothing Dublin tones; yet held something back, expectant, prepared perhaps, for some unwanted confession.
Not much view from this ward, is there? he asserted as the buzzing trimmer stroked my skin, his breath mint-fresh. We both knew the plans for the next few hours started with heavy sedation. The view would be irrelevant. But would the scalpel make one clean incision? How could I not feel it?
Still, you’re better in here on a day like that. Would the battery of the sternal saw be fully charged? Vibrate? Spit out fragments of my bone?
You’re from somewhere north of the Liffey? he joked, brushing the trimmer’s teeth clean, grey hairs falling, collecting on my sheeted lap. How many green scrubs and masked faces would gather around me? All at their day’s work. Tired perhaps?
I spent a summer in Donegal years ago. What a time. How do they stop, and later, start my heart? Slice it open to reveal the damaged flap of my mitral valve? Will the surgeon hold my heart in his hand?
Primed by furuistic story lines, is it a wonder that I floated back into a disturbing brown dystopia, where comfortless and ghostly shapes watched and minded my vitals, as others lay, similarly wired and tubed, in beds held sloped in the octagonal high dependency room; of a doomed space ship stranded light years from home?
A nurse would later laugh – too many sci-fi books.
From the faint dim walls around me, diamond patterns grew into the form of dark heads and faces. They waited motionless, their distant gaze unconcerned, it seemed. Yet they were waiting. Some atonement or recompense? From me? Then left in their own silent time as they had come, morphing back into shadow. Others were to follow with disturbing regularity. Nothing was familiar. Nothing brought comfort. At night, my bed and I toured the wards, as whispering voices curled into loud and absurd conversations.
Then the opiates, too, left in their own time. And with them, the delusions began to fade into the routine of the ward: first steps tentatively taken, that first taste of Weetabix and cold milk, the stunning freshness of the first shower. Yet a dull echo of those opiate dreams remained; until, with some help, they too were gone.
And now, months later, I can write this – feeling some strange sense of nostalgia – with a steady and strong heartbeat. Restored by the magicians: the surgeons and their team.
August 2024
The Curlew's Call 