Tag: hospital

Memoir, Personal Essays

Foreward to My New Book

stephenzuckerman

Dear Readers: I realize that it has been a little while since we last connected. There’s a valid reason for that, I assure you: I’ve been hard at work on getting my latest manuscript ready to be published! I’m happy to say that I’m almost there, and that I will be posting clips from that memoir to this blog over the next few months. In the meantime, I’m posting a Foreward by my former editor that will be included in the memoir. This writing dives into the heart of my story, and posits questions to the reader that I hope you’ll find as engaging as I do. It can sometimes be very flattering to read what others think about you, which is certainly the case with this Foreward. I’m very grateful to Stephanie for her lovely piece of writing, and I think it will make a wonderful addition to my new book. Enjoy!

Forward by Stephanie Ericsson

When I began working with Dr. Stephen Zuckerman in 1998 on his first book, it quickly became apparent that his ideas were multilayered, often built upon one another, even, at times, holographic in their dimensions. These were concepts that pummeled at comfortable paradigms to make way for new ways of thinking. Some were not really so new but rather were more complete, or more compassionate, or more far reaching. In this age of the almighty sound byte and TV’s 7-and-a-half-minute-attention-span, the very art of thinking is in jeopardy of becoming extinct. It is easier to think in clichés or stereotypes, especially with the information overload that we live in.

It is the mark of enduring idea when it continues to bear fruit even after many pluckings. Over the years of working with Dr. Zuckerman and his ideas, I am still discovering layers of meaning within his words and concepts that on first, second or even fiftieth glance had escaped me. Many of these ideas are disguised in such simplicity that it is easy to believe one caught the entire meaning right away. Yet again and again, surprising ah ha’s! have burst upon me from ideas that I thought I’d understood in total. The interconnection of one idea to another, or a larger meaning tucked into a goofy word-play or a concept that suddenly offers a new tool for dealing with some private torment of my own—these experiences have captured me as much as a reader as they have as his editor.

No idea of Zuckerman’s was more challenging than his experience of hearing G-d’s voice. Who, in their right mind, would believe such a thing? Certainly no one who values their credibility! Not other doctors, not psychiatrists, not upstanding businessmen in today’s techno-culture. Certainly, it succeeded in getting him incarcerated in his own Kesey-ian Cuckoo’s Nest. But it also proved to be a brilliant co-conspirator, taskmaster, conscience, mentor and spiritual guru. It succeeded in testing the medical legal system, the patience of his associates, and the odds at the racetrack. It outsmarted doctors, judges, and the DMS-4. It forced him to throw his professional and personal credibility to the dogs and literally got him a prognosis so hopeless that he spent 3 months in the kind of state institution where most inmates never leave. Even so, in taking so much from him, it did not leave him bankrupt.

When Zuckerman first described The Voice and the story of his encounter with G-d, I had a difficult time believing that he was fully sane. But over time, I found that there was nothing about him that supported those doubts. Nothing in his past history, his medical or familial history supported the diagnosis of psychosis. He’d lived a life that was relatively unscathed by misfortune—no physical or emotion abuse from childhood that pointed toward the pathological. Nor was he religiously fanatical—or religiously savvy, for that matter. He’d been raised by his parents as a secular Jew—typical of their generation—who attended synagogue once a year on Yom Kippur, held a Seder at Passover and the rest of the time worked long, hard hours to provide opportunities for their children. He’d never been traumatized like so many men of his generation who’d been drafted into the insanity of Vietnam. And although he was passionate about his work, he wasn’t drive to obsession, but rather led a balanced life most people would have envied for its sanity. He had no history of alcohol or drug abuse and he was physically fit and had been healthy his entire life.

His parents loved him and raised him in relative middle class comfort so he wasn’t tormented by the privation of poverty as so many Jewish families had been during and after World War II. His sense of humor and playful nature seemed to make his long hours as a doctor not only bearable, but thoroughly enjoyable. He had endless patience, was quick to forgive, slow to judge and nearly impossible to rouse to anger. Although he was brilliant, his wasn’t a tormented intelligence, as so many highly gifted people suffer from. In short, there was nothing that pointed to Stephen Zuckerman as a nutcase.

So, I believed him when he told me that he and G-d had conversed over a period of months just after he’d turned 50. His descriptions, both in conversations and in his writing, were always consistent, never indulgent or dramatic, and just quirky enough to be believable.

But when I decided to ‘believe’ his story, I found that I had to do so on more than just a personal level—I had to believe him on a professional level as well. I had to believe him as his editor, otherwise I would find myself either condescending to him as my client, or entirely unable to work with him. Naturally, the process of writing is an intensely interior one, and in order for an editor to be effective, he or she must enter that concentrated interior with the writer, as an observer, as a guide, as a muse and as a critic. Since the nature of the writing is to express what is seen through the eyes of the writer’s soul, the editor must perform all of these roles invisibly and unobtrusively. An editor must coax the writer’s ideas into maturity while being careful not to inject his own ideas into the process or the message of the writer. Often a writer is unaware at first of what he is trying to say—he is merely being pushed along by some deep compulsion to say it. Words themselves are alive and know exactly where they belong so the writer must discover his role as the vehicle of the message by getting out of the way while at the same time surrendering to the forces that are compelling the message. For this to happen, the writer has to disengage from his own ego, while, at the same time, he must so deeply believe in the idea that he will not give up through its arduous birth.

It is the role of the editor to walk beside the writer through this journey. Believing that Dr. Zuckerman had a three month conversation with God was more of a challenge to me personally than professionally. I had to suspend the part of me that was agnostic. I had to challenge the skeptic modernist in me while calling on the Catholic training of my childhood. I read everything I could find that might lead me to the key. I wrote in my own personal journal about it, and even went back to the church. I meditated on my own and secretly hoped that Zuckerman’s God would pay me a visit too. I spoke to mystics and found that things like visions and apparitions were more of a pain than a blessing and anyone with any sense would not wish for one. St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila had said the same thing, both being infinitely down-to-earth and pragmatic.

Ultimately, it was a matter of letting go of my blocks to believe and having the courage to simply listen to the message. Did it make sense? Did it sound real? Did it speak to me?

These are the questions that anyone who has picked up this book will have to answer for themselves. Some of what Zuckerman describes is supported in scripture, tradition and history and some will be debatable.

And so, Gentle Reader, in the end, it will be as it always has been—a matter of faith.

 

Memoir, Personal Essays, short story

Asylum

stephenzuckerman

This is the first of a three-part essay about my time spent in Brainard State Hospital.  

Asylum: Part 1

“How can it be,” asked the spider of his brother,

“that the fly ensnared only one of us?”

“Good fortune,” lied his brother.

 

For five days I had suffered an overwhelming drug-induced anxiety that didn’t allow me a moment’s respite. I fed my body in five-minute forced spurts, afraid of starving, but unable to alight for a second longer. I hobbled about my prison corridors in a daze, sleep alluding me. I lay down a thousand times, but only tossed and turned in agony.

At some point I hit critical mass and my sweat-drenched body frantically righted itself — fatigued beyond fatigue — pulled on its clothes, shoes and socks to, once again, thrust itself into the openness of those shadowy corridors. The incessant anxiety drove me to pace my confinement: down Corridor A, the suicide protection unit, then through the blue fumes of the Smokers’ Inferno where bleary-eyed lobotomized puffers hid in its smoky recesses. On to Corridor B, rank with the piss- stench of communal toilets. Past the stark 4-bed dormers strewn with other prisoners. Creeping by the cloudy surveillance mirror, I barely recognized my reflection, seemingly headed in an opposite direction. Lastly, I’d reach the padded lock-up room that marked the end of my pilgrimage and the beginning of my next revolution. The only relief from my jangling nervous fits were the 15 or 20 cold showers I took daily, dutifully charted in my dossier by the nursing wardens.

And so it went again and again.

I existed. Period. My mind was full of mandatory medication and involuntary exhaustion. My bedroom was filled with stifling August heat and three menacing strangers who were also newly imprisoned and besieged by ominous tomorrows.

Like me, my cellmate, Nervous Cat, performed his own yo-yo-like ritual. He’d fling himself violently onto his cot, thrash about amidst his sheets, kick his locker and then curse himself into a frenzy, only to finally bolt upright and disappear down Corridor A, dressed only to the waist, to vent his rage in the Smoker.

My other two roommates were barely visible. We communicated to one another in grunts and gestures — each of us recently trapped, caged and helpless. Our four bare cots were each adorned with black striped mattresses of 2” thickness, a coarse pillow, a sheet that no one bothered using, and a thin cotton blanket. Each cot had matching rickety, green metal lockers, battered by previous inmates as their only legacy — perhaps in hopes someone would remember them. We each had a crude, waist-high dresser with four sticky drawers and no mirror. The two large windows, sans drapes, welcomed in the summer swelter, with only smaller-than-human-girth transoms to prevent suffocation. This was my ‘personal’ space in captivity.

Brainard State Hospital was my fall from grace. At 50-years-old, I’d gone stark raving mad (so some said), to the horror and intrigue of my family, business associates and friends, who had never expected this emotional rock to crumble.

Personally, I sensed why, but how it came about had shocked everyone, including myself. Spiritually, I’d been pregnant for some time with an overwhelming need to change my life. Now this pent up force had taken over. Frightened, but willing (did I have a choice?), I plunged forward.

Those around me, many of whom were in the medical field — psychiatrists included, assumed that I was in the throes of an attack of mania. Not unexpectedly, four months into my evolution, I was arrested by a psychiatrist at the behest of a good doctor friend and my brother, both of whom assumed I was mad. I was locked up in the rather gentile psychiatric ward at the University of Minnesota. My prevailing impulse was to resist any and all treatment offered by my jailers — a common reaction among those like myself who are involuntarily detained.

The psychiatrists’ protocol was to threaten resistors with a court commitment hearing, which almost always resulted in being committed for six months. I was told that if I voluntarily committed myself, I would be treated less harshly. But I firmly believed in myself, my sanity and my purpose for changing. I refused to volunteer.

The ensuing series of unfathomable, legal maneuvers first allowed a doctor to lock me up for 72 hours (actually 120 hours because weekends don’t count), and then be brought before a county mental health judge for a “dual-commitment hearing.” It all seemed like a mad comedy of errors to me, but evidently, it was standard operation for the University Psychiatric Department. In this hearing, the judge would decide not only if I should be locked up for a prolonged period, but also whether or not the psychiatrists could use their frightening neuroleptic drug arsenal on me.

The day of the hearing, my lawyers told me that my chances of avoiding commitment were one in a hundred. But I had done my own research. I hired my own psychiatrist to examine me and testify in my defense. I never allowed the psychiatrists from the University or the county psychiatrist to interview me. In spite of this, both of them testified at the hearing that I was seriously ill and needed commitment as well as neuroleptic medication.

My own shrink came to my defense. He testified that I could easily be treated as an outpatient and expressed his doubts that neuroleptics were necessary. Out of the three expert opinions, none suggested that I was, in any way, a threat to others or suicidal, only that my behavior had become bizarre and was “disrupting” my societal status. A few other witnesses: my brother, my ex-girlfriend, and a close friend gave ragtag testimonies under oath, which, considering their own character twitches, made the hearing more of a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta than a serious decision about my destiny. Not that their testimonies mattered. Apparently, standard procedure dictated that only the doctored-evidence gathered while I was imprisoned at the University and the arresting psychiatrists’ statements would actually be considered by the judge.

Just as we were leaving the courtroom, I was suddenly inspired to tell the judge I had a brain tumor — shooting an arrow into the Achilles heel of psychiatry. The inspiration for mentioning a “brain tumor” is another story.

One evening, months before my commitment, I heard a voice in my deaf ear. Although it terrified me, I was also intrigued by this sudden presence. Over the next four months, an on-going dialogue with The Voice took place and ransacked every nook and cranny of my belief system.

These were not benign conversations. Initially, they were full of The Voice’s threats, accusations and seeming attempts to degrade me. But I soon recognized that The Voice was unearthing all my secret pockets of shame and inadequacies.

The first issue that The Voice had made me tackle was the question of whether or not I was a good person. I insisted that I was. But The Voice responded with a single haunting word: “Evil.” I defended myself with a litany of good deeds, but again, The Voice only said, “Evil.” Again and again, I protested, but the answer I got was the single word: “Evil.” Finally, I succumbed. Maybe I was evil? All the times I had acted selfishly, ignored others in need, lied, came flooding in. But after an agonizing moral inventory, I realized I wasn’t evil. Just human. Full of human frailties. I was not exceptionally good or exceptionally bad — merely perfectly imperfect.

I came to the conclusion that there was no such thing as “Evil” or the “Devil” but rather that everything was about love and God. What we call “evil” I concluded was really the inability to express love. Once I understood this, I felt no further need to focus on my unworthiness. I also felt a contentment that I had not felt before in my life.

Following this, I developed a repartee with The Voice that was filled with humor, delight — even wonder. Each conversation was like an advanced yeshiva on the Big Picture: What is our purpose as human beings on this planet? Did the future already exist? How did spiritual forces give form to the material universe? And always, these were integrated with intimate dissections of my own relationships. I examined the nature of my personal loneliness, which in turn, gave me insight into the loneliness of others.

Check back on the blog next week for Asylum, Part 2!

Humor Writing, Personal Essays

The Baking Soda Acid Test

stephenzuckerman

A tip about stomach acid from a friendly doctor:

Recently there has been described in the literature a simple, inexpensive and safe method for detection and quantification of stomach acid production. This tool should prove most valuable in diagnosing those with hyperacidity (too much stomach acid) and also the effectiveness of antacid treatments such as Tums and Rolaids.

The fundamental principal involved in the acid quantifying procedure involves well understood chemical interactions. Sodium Bicarbonate, Na2HCO3, also known as baking soda, dissolved in water, is ingested by the human subject to be tested. This leads to an almost instantaneous reaction of the dissolved sodium bicarbonate and stomach acid (hydrochloric acid or HCL). The results of this interaction produces water (H20), table salt (NaCl) and carbon dioxide (CO2). The carbon dioxide production leads to eructation (belching). The subject being tested eructates into a scored Zuckerman acid quantifying balloon. The amount of eructated CO2 in the balloon is roughly equivalent to the amount of acid in the subject’s stomach. The subject’s height, weight, sex, age, race have no proven effect on the accuracy of this simple inexpensive test that any person can perform on themselves once they have obtained a carton of baking soda and a scored Zuckerman acid balloon!

Note of caution – suppressing the desire to belch can lead to gastro-explosion, stomach rupture, and ensuing death!

Note – use of baking soda for diagnosis. The baking soda acid test can also be used to help diagnose chest pain. Immediate relief of chest pain symptoms, on ingestion of baking soda, indicates the pain was due to acid indigestion and not angina, heart pain. Many a visit to the emergency room has been avoided by the baking soda acid test.

Memoir, Personal Essays

It’s a Bummer

stephenzuckerman

This is the story of my heart attack, and all the worrying, thinking, wondering, and fear that accompanied it. Enjoy!

I couldn’t believe it: I had a heart attack! Well, I had heart damage, and a leaky heart valve to boot. Suddenly, life was moment-to-moment, with yesterday’s indifference becoming a vanishing Eden. I wouldn’t live to my anticipated 85 anymore, instead hoping for 70 with the constant guidance of a cardiologist incubus on my back.

To tell you the truth, life had already become a bore, stuck, redundant. I would even go so far as to say I wished this illness upon myself. I’m a physician, so I know that if you don’t croak right out the minions of cardiology have an ever-proliferating number of drugs, angioplasties, surgeries, diet and exercise mantras to keep the sanguine flow pulsating through your coronary arteries and preserve what’s left of your ticker. Sure you become their patsies, subject to daily assaults by yummies of all shapes, colors, and coatings. You have to be on the lookout for side effects, hair color changes, diarrhea, swelling of the end of your nose. It’s all a royal pain in the ass, a strike against manhood, freedom and wilderness adventure. I felt my life contracting like a prune out to dry. On the other hand, my contracting horizons made my life take on value. I had a sudden desire to grovel, to cling to whatever false bone was thrown before me that might push death’s bite back a bit. Even the thought of being filleted open, having my coronary arteries rerouted, a feared adventure in basic plumbing, seemed desirable. The pain, suffering, the zippered chest scar and possible pump head complications was a price that suddenly seemed worth paying.

My mind reeled forward, reconstructing the new me, the cardiac, with my shrunken life horizon. Yes, I was a 60-year-old, too young to quit my job, though who would want to hire a cardiac cripple? I wouldn’t be able to get a new health insurance policy. Forget life insurance. The angiogram was somewhere in my future and I dreaded it, though both my mother and father went through the procedure without complaining and I had sent innumerable patients to the cath lab without a wink.

As for my colleagues, I was a bit older than most – I would become an incubus they might have to ‘carry.’ Of course, my condition might invoke empathy and human kindness. Maybe I could milk that one. I figured as long as I could stand up they’d have to put up with me. The thought made me feel surprisingly safe.

My girlfriend seemed sympathetic, caring, but I suspected she had some hesitations about how to deal with damaged goods. Was I no longer her corporeal hero? She was a winnowy 5’8”, size 4, with a great ass and long, undulating legs that made men sweat when she wore tight jeans or short skirts. Vigorous sexiness was her dial, regularly giving men the glad eye so they would sweat. Would she be repulsed, see me as a cardiac sex invalid (no rough stuff)? Would my money (and her lack of it) help sustain her climaxes or would fear, disgust, or – worse yet – contagion invert her, dry her womb, zero out her lust and chuck us both into impending greyhood? I always told her marriage would be important to me when I had to bow to the necessity of having someone push my wheelchair. Would I marry her now, not out of desire, but out of desperation? Would she marry me and willingly push my wheelchair? I worried that if she left me I would have to seek out that class of women who are devoted to caring for wounded men, men who are safe bets to stay home, faithful and civil.

Once a patient of mine, an old kraut, broke every bone in his body due to a clumsy arthritic fall from a trellis he was repairing. I asked him if this was a clumsy suicide attempt or a way to prove he was omnipotent. He all but died, and when he didn’t he was treated to two months of rehabilitation in a nursing home. His wife wailed to me, saying that his verbal abuse was worse than ever; he blamed her for his prolonged detention in the land of the living dead. With tears streaming she stated, “All my life he has never let me talk. I have no friends. He wouldn’t let me even go to my parents’ funeral because they hated him.” She felt she couldn’t bear to have him come home if his verbal violence remained at the same intensity. I felt she never wanted him back under any circumstances.

We met, the three of us, in my medically sterile cubicle of an office, and went about changing a 50-year marriage in 15 brisk, brutally direct minutes. I liked the old boy’s stiffness, which made slicing him in half all the more of a thrill. The kraut was emasculated. “You either kiss your wife’s ass or stay locked up in the shitter until damnation rings,” I spouted. He kissed the flesh. Perverse as it was, this event registered as an epiphany, an awakening, in the couple’s journey through their married life. Was I to be the next to do some kissing?

Dr. L, my cardiologist, was a good man: he balanced the business of my heart attack with humor, and a ‘life will go on’ sense of encouragement. He bent wisely to my ‘in denial,’ Cleopatra-like needs. He pushed my diagnoses forward, always supplying me with both the facts and the ambiguities we would likely encounter, and the odds involved in taking action versus sitting on one’s hands. He gave me his home telephone number, which I liked, and didn’t get angry when in a panic I called him at 2 AM, waking and worrying his wife. He was good. Still, as newer diagnostic results revealed or confused my cardiac state, my mind searched for a firm grip and transferred my care to a new bosom friend, a prominent cardiologist who loved me. Years ago I had lived with the Trukese tribesmen who had taught me the magic in the uniting of love and death. I always try to teach this to my patients, and now I was the patient.

But how to share my crisis with my close ones? I’d had a heart attack, but I wasn’t sure where it fell on the scale of seriousness. Was I facing eminent death or was this a minor cardiac event, with me living for many years to come? My girlfriend knew of my evolving concerns. My colleagues were vaguely informed. They all expressed mixed curiosity and apprehension. My work schedule did not change. My compulsive roommate, ten years my junior, was the one who got it right. He demanded all the details. With the ceiling lighting bouncing off his bald head, I felt the heat of his interrogation. He then exclaimed how upset he was. When I asked him why, he blurted out, “I could be next.”

Indeed, three weeks later he landed in the Fairview Southdale Hospital Coronary Care Unit, complaining of chest pain. In the middle of the night he drove himself groggily to the ER, chest pain accelerating with each mile, occupied with impending doom. He only called his soon-to-be frightened out of her wits wife on admission to the coronary care unit.

How vividly I remember the ancient, revered Yiddish cardiologist, Dr. Dressler, admonishing his residents when he was stricken by a heart attack in the far past. At the time I still bore the ignominy of being a medical student at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn. Dr. Dressler’s name was forever attached to the post myocardial infarction syndrome, a cardiac condition he was the first to describe. When told he would be admitted to the newly conceived coronary care unit, of which he was the medical director no less, he declared, “Never! That’s only for the patients.” He croaked two days later, in the wards of Maimonides Hospital, a survivor of Hitler’s attempt to annihilate his people, surrounded by those who had similarly not been annihilated, presumably content with his choice.

Echocardiography is elegant simplicity – sound waves bounce off the heart and are reported as a cinema of cardiac motion. Good hearts move rhythmically and with courageous strokes. Damaged hearts hesitate, flap about, move discordantly. As I watched my heart’s performance in real time, with narration provided by the eager seasoned tech, I was treated to the viewing of a small area of ‘hypokinesia,’ at the inferior margin of my heart. There was also a jet of red, in a sea of blue. “Back flow through a leaky mitral valve,” the tech told me. His matter of fact detailing of my echocardiogram, portraying damage, was not encouraging. I was now truly the patient, the damaged, the sufferer. The tech attempted to sooth me. “I have seen it before,” he said. But no words would make it better. I was the health care deliverer, now on the other side of the fence. As much as I tried to climb back over the fence, the faulty performance of my heart on that video haunted me.

How would my kids deal with a wounded dad, no longer their fearless, faultless defender? The thought crushed me. I needed a good work out. I went home that day, grey with information. I had had a heart attack, a small one, which in itself could be a minor event. The echocardiogram strongly suggested my other heart vessels were okay but my mitral valve structures may have been damaged causing the valve to leak, possibly enough to complicate life for years to come.

The next night, my daughter Gabrielle and I had our usual two week dinner hour at her favorite Sushi Restaurant. She was 28-years-old, her tall, stately body molded more by the menarche suppressing effects of her childhood ballerina training than by parental genetics. She’d had many relations over the years, but she’d avoided marriage, avoided an occupation. Gaby had never avoided life experiences though, and I loved her dearly.

That night, I told her of my heart attack. I cried, she cried. She relieved me of my burden. She wasn’t crushed; my daughter was already sufficiently rooted in herself. The evening went well, and I started to realize that my mortality, my death was okay.

My new cardiologist was a prince of his profession – a philosopher, scientist and discoverer. I brought him the ‘echo,’ the most damaging evidence of heart damage so that he could evaluate for himself its message. Echo interpretation is in the eye of the beholder, art and opinion. In the university expert’s opinion, the video’s quality was suspect, my heart’s performance was even more suspect than previously thought to be. I was chilled. I never hesitated (half ignorance was hell), but the issue now was to directly visualize my coronary arterial system and to end the anxiety ridden ambiguity. ECG’s, echo’s and blood tests are all safe but never definitive – only the invading coronary angiogram settles the issue. It was scheduled for four days hence.

I blocked out the date, tried to stop time, closed my eyes, and let it happen to me. Once again, I had a front row, real-time seat to the main event. Fifteen years before, I had shared the fluoroscopy screen with Dr. Sewell Gordon as he squeezed barium gingerly about my small bowel looking for the devil that had caused me so much pain. We both observed the sentinel marker of incurable cancer at the same moment – in a rush I felt disbelief and belief at the same time. I saw my death and simultaneously exiled my mind from the bedeviled image in the fluoroscope. In the end I survived. But now another moment of fluoroscopic truth awaited me, soon to be self-evident in three to five second segments of a video. This time I was emotionally seasoned and forewarned. One moment I was preparing for a filet job, coronary bypass surgery, the next a much more benign assault on my status quo – angioplasty, weight loss, medications. The angiogram would tell me which life would soon be the real one. I had both scenarios ready to be rolled out, and I found myself shifting between the two, like an uprooted plant waiting to be put back into the ground.

But first came the awkward hospital gown, the shaved right groin accomplished by amateur barbers, a cold slab table, gowned and masked performers, cameras and meters everywhere and three needle pricks in my bared-groin, ready for launch. The placement of the catheter in my femoral artery was accomplished with only a sense of pressure. My view of the 18-inch fluoroscopic screen, eight feet away and up to the left, was unobstructed. A clear view of my destiny.

How many wounds has my mind, my body incorporated into me? Jacob became Israel in his night-long tussle with the angel and limped ever after. Virginhood, the Garden of Eden, both unacceptable to human kin­­d, were only starting points. I could feel the universe, gravity pulling me forward into the light, and fully embracing revelation (or perhaps it was all the sedative?).

The black catheter slipped rapidly through the gray space of my body. Suddenly its tip began to beat rhythmically, then a gush of squid-like ink discovered the mouth of a mighty river. The catheter snaked into the river, the left coronary artery, the major arterial system bringing oxygen and sugar to my ever hungry beating heart. The next second a large gush of black shot out of the catheter and outlined the major river, lighting up all its myriad tributaries. I was enthralled by the river’s marvelously smooth branching esthetics – a clear left coronary! The big one down, one still to go. The catheter snaked into the right coronary artery. Again, a rapid black gush revealed a pulsating river, again what a wonderful branching, pulsating vessel. The chief of the masked men pointed out a blocked distal channel, the culprit revealed. The decision was to open this clogged channel so that in the future it might succor other nearby vessels, if they ever became clogged. The balloon catheter entered the involved area and opened the blocked channel. It caused an aching pain in my chest while it did its duty, and then black ink swarmed freely through the previously blocked channel – a stent was placed and all was back to normal. The ventriculogram – accompanied by a swarm of tasty dye induced heat that traversed through my whole body – confirmed a near normal ventricle. The only blemish was a small limp area caused by the occluded vessel. Forever the limp, but life goes on. My cardiologist said it all: “Now at least you know you are normal.”

In the past, there were times I was deemed insane, depressed, inconsiderate, isolated, insensitive, loved, unloved, cursed, willing to die, fearless, fearful, incapable of controlling my bowels, etc. Now, I welcomed them and all other descriptions I would be called in years to come.

Bring on the rest of my life, I am ready.