When You Are Cut In Half
*In September 2017, I underwent an emergency open heart surgery to correct a congenital defect discovered in a CT scan. It RUINED my Halloween plans.
The process of being bisected is described pretty simply, sort of like a minor procedure on your teeth. You’ll be blessedly unconscious by then (having wept your way into dreamland while lying on a gurney in a hallway, surrounded by sympathetic nurses and dispassionate anesthesiologists.)
Then, they hook you up to a bypass machine so they can shut off your heart and lungs and keep your blood toasty (so toasty, in fact, that you’ll set your ICU thermostat at 55 for the next week.)
Next, they neatly slice you open, right in your non-existent cleavage (this is a good time to curse that lover who once sweetly referred to your breasts, which have always pointed out like they’re trying to expand your peripheral vision, as “European style”) and fix a misplaced coronary artery that could’ve killed you at any moment since your birth, but you just found out about today.
And you will hopefully wake up five or six hours later, groping helplessly for water, coated in a curry-colored layer of iodine, fixed and sewed together like a patchwork doll, to find that Trump is still president and your fundraising campaign for a feature film is well short of its goals.
You will fire up twitter as soon as you stop puking.
Trauma like open-heart surgery is hard to really explain, because it’s trauma at the hands of professionals. Being professionally traumatized, even for a good cause, is a different level of internal panic. I’m terrified of flying, and the most surreal part of any flight for me is to look around in a panic during a hint of turbulence, expecting the group screaming to begin, but instead being met with dozens of people calmly doing sudoku and eating pretzels, as if we aren’t being flung across the ocean in a very large metal milk carton.
Now imagine that scenario where all the other passengers are also pilots, and they not only aren’t afraid of what’s happening to you, they’re mostly bored by the situation.
So while you’re certainly being traumatized, physically by knives and psychologically by every thought on death at once, it’s done in the most anti-personal way. So detached, in fact, that I began to think of myself just as professionally. Looking at my scar for the first time, a six inch scarlet line running down the middle of Belgium, I could only think “hmmm, a bit jagged at the top, will have to stop wearing v-necks.”
It’s hard to know my body went through something so profound without me. I was asleep while bizarre, macabre things were on. I can’t even watch an episode of THE KNICK, my torso was a volunteer in the live re-enactment. It’s made me feel as if I’m living in a shell, separate from myself. “You went through a lot,” my formless snail self whispers to it. “Sorry I couldn’t be there to help.”
THIS WILL FOREVER CHANGE YOU, an awful lot of people, none of them doctors, said to me. Physically, they’re right. I have a scar where I didn’t have a scar, and a right coronary artery finally in the correct place. I have a strange no-memory of being cut in two. Does a magician’s assistant feel all the trauma of possibility when she gets into that box and the sword drops through? Or does her consciousness drop through the false bottom as well, not because she knows it’s safe, but because the show must always go on, even if you end up in pieces?
You will wake up after those few hours of extreme arterial bootcamp, and plead for them to take the tube out of your throat. I kept raising my hands, the nurses told me, trying to reach my throat, trying to take back breathing for myself. As soon as they removed it, I begged for water. My first memory after the surgery is greedily sucking on a tiny scrap of sponge. Breath and water, my first impulses on coming back from the dead. I’m sure Jesus would’ve gone straight to enlightenment and soul-saving, but I took the mortal route. There is nothing more life-affirming than to know your body fights for your survival, even while the formless snail you is still mostly asleep.
You will patch over the crack in your shell, and bring it with you, gliding forward, one centimeter of glistening life at a time.
