One Year On: Under the Knife

T-Minus 1 : January 13, 2021:

Indiana Jones: Meet me at Omar’s. Be ready for me. I’m going after that truck.

Sallah: How?

Indiana Jones: I don’t know. I’m making this up as I go.

This is a narrative experiment .

One year ago tomorrow, on January 14, 2021, I entered a Tokyo hospital for open-heart surgery; specifically, for a valve replacement. Things happened. Until now, I have done little to reflect upon nor write about that experience. It was nothing earth-shattering or profound, really, but perhaps it’s worth recording.

The experiment here is that I’m going to try to write about my experience in what amounts to real time. That is, I’m going to write each day or so exactly one year after it happened. In other words, I’m gong to try to write a serial.

My notes of my time there, if you can call them “notes”, are spotty, so I’m relying a lot upon my memory and some few scraps of documentation I have. This is more an experiment for me, the writer, than it is a reading experience for you, the reader, so you have been warned. This may succeed — from your point of view — or it may fail, but I want to make the attempt. The calendar and timeline imposes a form of discipline that writing about this in an ordinary writing process doesn’t. The readers — you — impose on me a duty to make it actually readable and to finish what I start.

It wasn’t physically possible for me to write like this at the time — I mean, I very well couldn’t post from the O.R. — but maybe I can try to recreate it now.

What Will I Say?

I honestly don’t know exactly what I’m going to say — I have no outline or master plan — but I‘ll let the timeline guide me. Nor do I expect to write anything that hasn’t been said before: millions of people around the world go into hospitals for surgery and recovery every year, so I’m not breaking any new ground here. It is — or was — new to me, though. The fact of being a foreigner in a Japanese hospital might have some interest, though I can’t really compare my experience to a stay in an American hospital, because I’ve never had one of those, but I can tell about my experience in this one.

I’m not even sure exactly what prose form this will take. Writing completely as if it were happening in real time, at the hospital, would be a bit of an affectation, but I suspect I will lapse into that voice and talk about “yesterday” and “here” for convenience’s sake.

I will probably not use people’s names, or at least real ones: maybe I’ll fall into the 17th-18th-century English literature affectation for referring to “Mrs. S — — “ or “Lord M — — — of S — — -“. For the moment, I’ll call the place “Toyosu Hospital”, because that’s where it is.

I’m not even certain how — or if — I’ll tell about what was the most surprising thing I saw: I might wind up violating someone’s privacy, even if I use a fake name. But that’s not something I have to decide just yet,

Why surgery?

I’ve been (relatively) healthy my whole life. Before I was admitted to Toyosu Hospital a year ago tomorrow, I had never in my entire life had any extended stay in a hospital, in the U.S. or in Japan. The closest experience I’d had was an overnight stay a few years ago for laparoscopic surgery, at the same hospital.

But I’ve had an escalating series of cardiac and circulatory problems — I’ll fill that history in later — which led me to this: open-heart surgery, with a mitral valve replacement and tricuspid valve repair in a week and me here, the night before, at home anxiously double-checking my suitcase to make sure I had what I needed per the hospital instructions.

The timetable was set when they scheduled the surgery a month earlier. I enter the hospital on January 14 for a battery of tests and preparation. One week later — or, for the purposes of this narrative, one week from now — on January 20, 2021, I would walk into the operating room lay down on the table and the surgical team goes to work on me, having made all the tests and preparations and other things. If all goes well, I wake up in the evening and lie around the ICU for a few days before bit of general recovery and going home a week or so later.

The fact that I’m writing this should tell you things didn’t go according to plan. You’ll hear about that soon enough.

So let’s begin with some background, shall we? Tomorrow, I’ll enter the hospital, and you’ll hear why I had to go.