Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Survival


Yes, I've skipped a week, but there is just cause. My editor went temporarily on the fritz, and while I rail occasionally at his changes, they play a useful role in terms of logic and clarity.

Now by my editor, I don't mean the electronic one that comes with my word processing software, and that I trust as adders fanged. No, I am referring to the real one, who during the course of a week-and-a-half endured three types of 'crashes'. First, his computer crashed. Then someone crashed into the side of his parked car, creating a significant dent. Finally, he himself crashed.

This final crash was almost, well, final. In fact, he has informed me that one of the thoughts that went skittering through his mind during this 'crash' was the hope that someone would remember what he had requested be engraved on his tombstone, to wit: "He died, somewhat with a sense of relief."

He didn't.

It is not my role here to give a blow by blow description of what precisely occurred. Suffice it to say that a minor heart attack caused an extreme shortness of breath. This took the doctors involved some time to figure out, in that there was no chest pain whatsoever. A battery of tests, however, established that my editor's lungs had been abetted by his heart, a kind of medical version of Robert Frost's 'way leading on to way'*

It was this Frostian approach that turned a 40 minute angiogram into an angioplasty and then to a blood clot removal (the real culprit behind it all) and the insertion of two stents, stretching that 40 minutes into three-and-a-half hours. The procedure was a total success, and apparently the patient has recovered nicely, and, I might add, in much better health than before. That grumpy German Nietzsche got it right: "What does not kill you makes you stronger."**

So there you are, and a more 'regular' report will follow next week.

* Nice to be back. The line is from his poem The Road Not Taken. -- Ed.

** She WILL not hunt down her sources. This is from Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols. (It's still good to be back). -- Ed.





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