Bypassing and Bypasses

For a while after bypass surgery, you focus on survival. You try to get through your day, bear the pain, run through the cycle of pain meds and the "medicinal therapy" that now will mark the rest of your days. You watch the water they pumped you with, slowly drain. And the tubes and wires get pulled out one by one until you leave the realm of medical miracle and move into the brave new world of survivor.

Next you focus on physical healing, the closing wounds, the knitting sternum, the numbness giving way to tingling, everything distant as if your body belongs to someone else. The enormity of what you’ve been through hovers at your edges and you don’t ignore it as much as tell yourself, “not yet.” I suspect there are people who never go past the physical. They take their new lease on life and go on their merry way, never once harboring dark “what ifs” and “why.” And it’s the whys that get you every time.

My first inkling of this alternate reality, this "what if," came in a hospital dream, the kind they say is inspired by anesthesia. It had the bright, bold, feel of a movie by Tarsem Singh. Surreal doesn’t fit as much as fantastical, true, the way you imagine the world would look if you could tear away the veil of everyday and see it as it really is. I was walking across a landscape, an orange-gold sand, more beach than desert, except for the lack of ocean. Before me, then beside me, then behind me was this enormous, squared monolith that seemed stone, but wasn’t. It was a gateway and I knew if I touched it, it would give way and I would find myself somewhere else, somewhere truer even then where I was. I knew too, that I wasn’t ready for such a place, even as it patiently waited for me.

I circled the block. I walked past but then found myself walking toward. “Not yet, not yet,” I chanted, was still chanting when I woke up to the 3:00 AM nurses call for vitals. The block understood the promise implicit in such a chant, the if not yet, someday, perhaps even soon. The block can be as patient as stone, as patient as space. It knows we have a date, I’ve promised.

They tell me the first month after bypass surgery is spent healing. The second month, they say, is more emotional. I think they might be right. Every now and then I find myself crying, slow thick tears, not at all sure why I’m crying. It ends not long after it started. I come up to the why, feel us touch, but cannot quite bring myself to enter, at least not yet but soon, God help me, soon.