What I Did When My Life Was at Stake

Climbing Rock Candy Mountain

I order a tall Americano, sit by the window of the Starbucks on Memorial Drive with a view of the Charles, the river that runs through Boston, my new home. I pull out a five-page document from my bag — a document it has taken me twelve years to request, which I obtained from the Harvard Vanguard doctor I’d just been to see. I raise my coffee, drink a toast, dub him my new life protector.

I smooth out the document on the tabletop — the surgical notes from my second operation in a month — read from page one:

“The patient was taken to the Operating Room and identified. She was placed in a supine position on the Operating Room table …”

Tears prick my eyes. I sniff. Imagine my body on the operating table. Naked? Covered how?

“… Her abdomen was prepped and draped in normal sterile fashion. Her previous midline skin incision was opened sharply.”

Whoa. I close my eyes; picture the surgeon slicing into my belly, re-opening the same eight-inch vertical incision originally made ten days before. Like a “Carbon Valley” whiz kid, he rejiggered what God, what my DNA designed, repaired what had gone awry the night I was grocery shopping at Wegman’s in Ithaca, New York, and felt a stabbing pain so severe I knew something had…