What Breaks Us Also Weaves Us Together
On the nature of hearts and complications
There have been some complications, the nurse said.
When you’re sitting quietly, waiting for your husband’s medical procedure to be done, this is not the sentence you want to hear. I know this intellectually, because I had read about the risks of the procedure currently being done on Paul, and I know this empirically, because once, years before, when I had woken up in a recovery room, in pain, a nurse had told me the same thing.
There were some complications.
Complications. It’s the “collateral damage” euphemism of the medical world. It can mean anything. It can mean nothing. It can mean somebody did something wrong. It can mean somebody just had some bad luck. It can mean a little bit of both, or a lot. Mainly you don’t want to hear the word, and you don’t want to hear anything that comes after it, but you almost always kind of have to.
“Complications,” I said.
Just a bit over twenty-four hours earlier I’d been sitting in our house, trying to finish some work before I got my sons from their elementary school. I knew that after I did that, the rest of my day would be spent forcing the boys to practice their piano and then pulling them off one another…
