A Breather

Anyone here for sunset and fish stories is in the wrong place, at least for a week or so--though it is a beautiful afternoon, after a day spent swimming all the way beyond the pier and back in the still warm and totally calm sea, spreading chicken shit and building some raised beds for the vegetable garden, and watching some egrets, seagulls and a crow or two fighting over a dead fish on the beach.

Spent most of the day yesterday going over the final operation protocol with the surgeon, getting an ultra sound check-up of my heart to see if it could handle it, and getting the run-down with the anesthetician. There were a lot of diagrams drawn, papers gone over, and everything is very fascinating in a scientific way (You can do that!? Damn!) until, of course, it reaches the last few paragraphs: "Oh yes, this says there's a possibility--a very slight one, of course--that you could die from complications. Could you sign here, please?"

So it's cool and scary at the same time--like a good horror story. It's going to be one of the least intrusive surgeries they can do, making one incision for the cutting and another small incision for the endoscopy camera which they'll watch on a tv monitor (I'd love to get a copy of the DVD) as they cut. The anesthetician was a character, though a horrible sketch artist. I've been going over his drawings, and I'm either going to have two tubes put down my throat to carry oxygen and anesthetic to my lungs, after which the one to my right lung will be turned off during the operation . . . or I'm supposed to make a right somewhere after the road splits just before the convenience store.

Oh yes. The surgeon told me that during their team meeting to discuss the operation, one of the nurses mentioned that she'd been on the team that did my hernia operation at the same hospital five years ago. "So," he said, and spread his hands wide. It was like someone inviting you to a party with the reassurance that you'll know at least one of the people there.

The weird thing is that it did kind of work.