American Fez

Future Echoes

Recovery is really a dress rehearsal for senility: the slow shuffle to the footlights clad in an ill-fitting costume of dressing gown and slippers, and then the hoarse delivery of your single line soliloquy: "Can someone help me with the toilet, please?"
It's not a great role. Indeed, audience members may be unpleasantly reminded of your previous performance in that other dreary, one-act tragedy: Chronic Back Pain, originally written for Lon Chaney declining years by Samuel Beckett in his most minimalistic mood. Lights, camera, medication.
This imitation of old age is the result of a doctor's stern caution not to exert oneself, coupled with anxious contemplation of the long vertical scar running down the center of your chest. Major incisions take an eternity to mend and are extremely uncomfortable during the healing process, mostly from hourly aches and pains and the tedium of restricted movement. It's like walking around with a Fed Ex address label securely stuck to your breast bone and "Handle With Care" plastered between your shoulder blades. Simple, everyday tasks are now physical problems and frustrations of the most mind-bending kind. Putting on a shirt becomes a course in advanced Tai Chi concentration and technique; threading your legs into underpants is like trying to navigate an M C Escher maze; and wiping one's backside is, well, let's just say that a friend in need is a friend indeed.
Fortunately, being a student of the Stoics, I am not grumpy or downhearted like the aged often are. I strive to play the part of a grand old man rather than a mean old one. As Marcus Aurelius said, "Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear" - which almost sounds Shakespearean, albeit a lecture to his son by the doddering Polonius.

Manna-ism

Lunch in the hospital was served by a silent woman of Arabian aspect, whom I nicknamed The Femme Falafel since the food she delivered usually resembled that Middle Eastern speciality, even though it might actually have been fish cakes or even chicken marengo. It was quite possible, therefore, that the Femme Falafel herself was not really Persian, as I imagined, but Italian or Israeli or quite possibly the progeny of Armenian refugees. She merely nodded and smiled hesitantly whenever I thanked her; uncomfortably aware that she carried consignments of tasteless, anonymous substances containing roughly fifty percent of the recommended daily allowance of gloom and despondency. She probably thought that my thanks were muttered ironically; a sort of gallows gratitude from a condemned man.
There is no reason, as far as I can see, why hospital food should be so shapeless and so bland. Surely it must take a reverse alchemical process of some magnitude to transform golden carrots into base, colorless root vegetables. Incalculable time and effort must be exerted turning the fruits of the sea into the prunes of the kitchen, and yet hospital cooks accomplish such a feat with apparent ease. For pudding there is a choice of transparent sponge or jellied tap water. "Food dolorous food," the patients want to sing, paraphrasing the cast of Oliver despite lacking the energy to dance as well. "Gray cabbage and beige chard."
An old proverb claims of medicine: if it tastes bad then it must be good for you. This is fine for cough syrup and other drugs, but why must the awful flavor be included in the hospital menus also? I suppose I could ask the Femme Falafel, but I assume that she would simply draw a discreet veil over the subject.

Ailing To Byzantium

Male patients gain a great deal of gravitas in hospital. In their cotton johnny gowns, with their ascetic pallors and beatific beard growths, they resemble a council of early Byzantine bishops, temporarily at a loose end while awaiting the latest news from Nicaea.
Obviously, this saintly countenance could simply be a symptom of too much time spent indoors watching the History Channel; or perhaps sixty milligrams of pure gravitas are always included in the array of intravenous drips hanging over the patient's bed; or maybe it's just that the patient's cheeks hollow and lose color because his martyr's diet of shapeless, unappetizing gray hospital sludge makes Jack Sprat's fabled fat-free dinner look like a dazzling smorgasbord of nature's most succulent bounty.
Alas, the physical trappings of holiness do not confer upon patients the ability to perform the miracles of holy men - if they did, the patients could easily conjure away their own diseases with a single incantation: "Take up thy bed and walk," they would announce solemnly to themselves (except, of course, the bed would belong to the hospital and far to heavy and cumbersome to carry).
And so these patient's must languish on those beds, surrounded by floral offering from well-wishers and work colleagues, waiting for test results and consequent medications; and I imagine this is pretty much how the aforementioned Byzantine bishops spent their days; although they waited for complex doctrinal ratifications rather than test results, and for the approved bottles of communion wine instead of medications by the dose. They hid behind the sword of Constantine like we patients hide behind the staff of Aesculapius, neither group really knowing for sure what is going on behind the scenes.

Too Much Information

After heart surgery, each new day seems like a precious gift; then you get constipated.
Constipation is the sick man's burden; a scatological limbo between light and dark stools; the evil magician's rock that must be abracadabra'd away from the secret cave's entrance before the treasures within can be revealed. If I sold prune juice by the bottle I would brand it 'Open Sesame.'
Laxatives, of course, are essential: bypass patients are not allowed to strain when sitting on the toilet, and so liquid plumber for the stomach must be employed. I prefer milk of magnesia, but only because it sounds like the sort of mythical elixir that Jason and the Argonauts might have sought. The embarrassing phrase "an enema," meanwhile, merely conjures unprepossessing mental pictures of an especially gelatinous jellyfish floating idly in a polluted ocean: not a very promising image when you really want a manic octopus stirring up the sea bed.
But personal comfort is not the only reason to encourage successful defecations. Like ancient Roman priests predicting the future by appraising the entrails of sacrificial beasts, modern doctors examine their patient's bowel movements for biological indicators. The shape, color, consistency and regularity of such human waste apparently reveals a great deal about the health of the humans responsible for evacuating these samples. Please feel free to Google the many possible grisly conclusions that can be drawn from such investigations in your time.
At any rate, it is amazing how smug and self-satisfied a patient feels when, after a lengthy spell of frustrating constipation, he at last regains the approval of his doctors by completing a successful bowel movement. His entire being is suffused with an almost impish glee - break out the toadstool wine, we'll celebrate. Anything is possible now, even that complete recuperation he's often heard the nurses talk about.

Venous and Arterial

It is remarkable how quickly a patient's self esteem evaporates in hospital: his pride is immediately and unceremoniously lopped off like an ingrown toenail; his dignity is burned away as if it were nothing but a troublesome boil; and then, bereft of both body hair and normal clothes, he is displayed on an adjustable bed for medical study and diagnoses. Any casual observer might conclude that the patient resembles a plucked turkey of the scrawniest kind, basted in antiseptic and wrapped in a sort of Amish drag queen smock.
Then there are the interminable examinations: scheduled pokings and proddings into orifices formerly sacrosanct; and repeated interrogations and pointed questions concerning the movement of the patient's bowels, always conducted with an arched medical eyebrow, as if the patient were a disreputable snitch filing false information on the whereabouts of a gang of crooks.
Under such conditions it is no surprise that the patient loses all his inhibitions. He no longer cares to prevent it all from hanging out. There are prostitutes advertising their wares in the windows of Dutch brothels who are more modest. The patient will agree to any outrage, no matter how absurd it may seem. Personally, if the nurses had told me that it was necessary to undergo heart surgery clad in a child's SpongeBob SquarePants costume I would have silently acquiesced. After all, one's mind begins to retreat into immaturity when someone else must wipe one's backside.

Way of the Aspirin

Post surgery, I am confronted by a reflection of my ribcage-cracked, stitched-up self in the bathroom mirror. There is a beatific beard, etiolated limbs, and stoic, agelessly unblinking eyes. I look like el Greco's vision of the crucifixion and wonder why being gravely ill always casts a holy aura across the patient's face. What does this say about illness? What does this say about holy men? Perhaps the most pious and devout of medieval hermits were merely suffering from a slight angina. Perhaps the illusion of spiritual enlightenment is nothing a couple of ibuprofen cannot cure.

Bypass

Well, here I languish, feeling a little like Prometheus tethered to the rock, hoping that his Chiron will canter along before to soon. Many thanks for those who wrote expressing their best wishes. I guarantee that the nonsense is fermenting in my cranial vats: it won't mature just yet but soon the valves will be open. They predict I will be free by Tuesday.

Ivy Drip

I am in hospital for the next week or so, getting some wires rearranged. Consequently nothing new will pear here until Friday at the earliest. After that I will have plenty of time for thinking up new nonsense.