Tell It Like It Is

It’s not unlike in that song “The Future Soon” by the great philosopher Jonathan Coulton:

It’s gonna be the future soon
And I won’t always be this way
When the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away

Except that it’s not quite exactly like that. I’ll get to keep the strange. So, perhaps, RoboCop–the original nineteen-eightysomething version, not that remake–would be a better way to look at it: the alternative is less pleasant.

Not that they’re going to turn me in a robot. Or enhance my sight with X-ray vision, get me all weaponized or cool shit like that. In that way, it’s totally unlike another of mr. Coulton’s songs, “Better”.

What they are going to do, is pop open my chest (no, not quite like in Alien), cut out the section of my aorta that looks like a great big snake that has consumed but not quite digested a goat, and replace it with a piece of what my mind insists on calling a garden hose.

If you’d happen to think that, Jesus jumping Christ on a cracker, that sounds exactly like some major piece of open heart surgery, you’d be right. Because that’s exactly what it is. Some genetic defect haunts my family, and now it seems to have caught me as well.

C’est la vie.

Apart from every now and then when I think about it too much and the whole fucking thing scares the bejeezus out of me and I fall apart, except for those times, the operation doesn’t worry me that much: they turn this particular trick all the time, and the risks of anything (in the broadest sense of the word) going wrong is very small. All I can to do is lie down, count to ten, inhale deeply and wake up on the ICU, say, seven to eight hours later all fixed and stuff. The alternative is waiting till I officially have an aneurysm or it dissects and it all goes horribly wrong. And we wouldn’t want that, would we?

The part that I’m absolutely not looking forward to is the recovery. Reportedly, it takes your breastbone six weeks to grow back together, and during that time you have to take it slow. Like a glacier. Other than that, it is supposed to feel like a very bad case of sore muscles.

Oh, well. By the time this post appears online, surgery should be well underway. I’ll let you know how it went as soon as I’m up to it.