Graham Higgins Illustration

I’ve begun this paragraph because I’m waiting for surgery to repair an aortic dissection.

More specifically I began that sentence because my friend Philip was surprised I hadn’t started blogging about it – ‘I thought you of all people would be a born blogger’. I’m pretty certain he said blogger.

One reason to write is that it may save time later retelling the story because I hope this operation will clear the way for more interesting topics. Inevitably it’s going to dominate the background for a while though we hope that it will become an increasingly distant background.

If you’re squeamish about the anatomical technicalities, look away now.

Aorta=the big Interstate blood vessel that hairpins off the top of the heart: main distribution-route south with major arterial spurs turning off to the head and limbs.

It’s like a bicycle tyre with inner tube, canvas lining and rubber tread. Aortic dissection is a split in the inner-tube. The outer laters of the tyre will hold for a while so long as you don’t hit a brick on the road. I’m freewheeling on a thin tyre.

The consultants’ descriptions had conjured up a delicate Dorling-Kindersley diagram with the giblets colour-coded in pastel colours. I spent ten minutes Googling around so that I could be the better-informed patient until I stumbled on a photograph of aortic lesions that reminded me that I’m made of meat, packed like the suitcase of a homeward-bound tourist. Enough, I’m out of my depth in there.

Good news is that I have the luck to be living in a historically and geographically fortunate spot where this condition is diagnosable and treatable with understood procedures, free at the point of delivery.

Understood, however, doesn’t imply certainty. In the pre-op briefing I was offered percentage likelihoods of various potential outcomes of the surgery [stroke; cognitive deficit - pronounced ‘brain damage’; partial paralysis] and I asked permission to waggle my fingers in my ears and go la-la-la for the duration. I’m doing just great on denial, thanks, and don’t want my attention brought to any graph half-empty.

The statistic that stuck, though, was that in ‘90%’ of cases the condition’s fatal within days or identified post-mortem. That I’m here to listen to elegantly simplified picture-book stories about My Condition and its treatment is a Positive Indicator.

My blood pressure responds well to oral meds, so I’m discouraged from working and currently living in a very amenable waiting-room, home, with time to kill.

The uncertainties of the situation led one correspondent to raise the bones of Schrödinger’s Cat.

Shrödinger asks you to imagine a sealed chamber containing a cat and a geiger-counter and a lethal gas cannister that will blow if a random atomic particle decays in a given hour.

According to the quantum physics theory he was trying to illustrate, at the end of the hour the cat can be both alive and dead (OK?) but we would discover it alive or dead. This may be expressed: Tuh, you never can tell. Or you could say that it illustrates the paradigm of quantum decoherence and for a fleeting moment you feel as if you know what the blimey you are talking about.

So, imagine an aorta enclosed in a ribcage…

As I wrote that another part of my mind was speculating about Heisenberg’s Mynah Bird, which may or may not say ‘What you looking at?’, causing a shock reaction in the observer; Wittgenstein’s Pet, an indeterminate beast which may equally be dog, cat, tortoise or stick insect with chameleon-like contextual contingency yet categorical integrity; Duchamp’s Bull In A Plumbing Merchant’s which can be simultaneously smashing stuff up and constructing a satirical installation piece using objets trouvés.

I’m looking for the owner of this dog which only appears when you throw a stick for it but which hasn’t brought back the stick for some time.

That’s beta-blockers for you. I accept others’ descriptions of my butterfly mind (‘a man of sudden enthusiasms’ was my favourite euphemism); this tranquil little butterfly is in a constant light breeze, though zigzagging through bright pastures with nectar, nectar everywhere.

So this blog will take or not take.