Coda
“Be careful,” I gasp, settling down onto the bed. “My chest hasn’t stretched this far – it’s hard to breathe…”
“I’m careful,” Gini tells me. She moves slowly, tentatively, sliding in next to me, looking to me for reassurance that she isn’t causing me pain. My sternum was snipped open when they operated on my heart, breaking all my ribs, and as such any weight on my chest is like having them broken all over again. She rests her head lightly on my shoulder, and I sigh.
“Not on – my belly – “I tell her, the pain in the hollow of my throat, moving her arm away from its usual resting place. “Down here. On my thigh. Take my hand.”
She does. “Does it hurt?” she asks.
“Yes,” I tell her. “A little. But it’s worth it.”
Click.
For the first time in two weeks, we are snuggled together.
It’s been hard to be together since the surgery – a held hand, her massaging my feet, an awkward pained hug in the kitchen. We’re a physical couple.
“I can’t believe how sleepy I am,” she says. I stroke her hair, feeling the muscles in her body untense, because her body finally understands what her mind has been trying to tell it: Ferrett is back. “I’m sorry, I know you’re not tired….”
“Sleep, my love,” I tell her. She curls up against me, relaxed in a way she hasn’t been since that first awful text I sent her two-plus weeks ago, pressing up against me, needing me in the way that I have always needed her, and as she starts to snore it is like the pound of sea on the surf, the righteous tide which we are owed, this rhythm of our bodies together again.
"What Women Respond To Is Authenticity"
My friend Dave was very authentic when, flush with excitement, he announced to all of us that he’d discovered a new way to masturbate.
Not that we’d been discussing masturbation, at all. We were in eighth grade and this was the cafeteria at school, and even we knew this was the place to discuss Spider-Man comics and Star Wars. But Dave sat down, bubbly with excitement, to share this new technique, which was news he was certain we’d all be eager to hear. The trick was, he informed us, not to just yank up and down, but to roll it between your palms, like you were trying to start a fire with two twigs. It was, he assured us in no uncertain terms, awesome.
This spurting of information was perhaps the most authentic thing I have ever witnessed. Dave was not excited himself by the idea of us whacking it; he’d never discussed sex before insofar as far as I could recall. No, rather, he was so caught up in this new and wonderful thing in his life that he wanted to share this newness with all of us, so that – touchingly – we could all benefit from this. This was a genuine act of friendship, in that it would have been so easy for him to keep it to himself, but then how could he live knowing that his friends’ lives were so diminished?
So you can imagine how he felt when he immediately acquired the nickname “Dry Rub” and was mocked thoroughly for this overshare until he finally graduated high school and moved to another state. One act of authenticity = five years in the penalty box.
The reason I say this is because I saw a Tweet from an author decrying the Pick-Up Artists’ techniques. “You know what women respond to?” he said. “Authenticity. Do that, and you don’t need any moves.”
That is pure, stinking, liquefied bullshit.
Look, I’m authentic in what I say, and that authenticity is but one tool in my arsenal. A powerful tool. But pure authenticity leads to what women (and people) don’t like – nattering on about your hobbies ad infinitum, saying whatever disgusting things are on your mind, making women uncomfortable because hey, this is a very authentic squeeze on the shoulder. Now, some of you got great instincts down at the Instinct Factory and you know what’s okay to say and what shouldn’t be said… but a lot of guys (and girls) are poor old Dave, working from very authentic and sincere intentions, and sharing all the wrong things.
What most people define as “authenticity” isn’t actually “sincere, heartfelt emotions” but rather “a core suite of sincere, heartfelt emotions run through a rigorous gamut to a) determine whether the audience is receptive to your message, then b) tailored to be of interest to that particular audience, and finally c) delivered, with a considerable blend of skill and instinct, in a way that maximizes your audience’s liking of you.”
But Authenticity itself is maybe 40% of that. We all know nerds who blunder in to tell endless, unamusing stories to helpless crowds of people. They are authentically convinced that these stories are great. They are authentically telling these misogyny-strewn tales, as it represents a portion of their life. They are authentic in that if you asked them, they would honestly answer that they thought they were entertaining and funny and what everyone there wanted to hear.
What they are lacking is that crucial feedback loop that tells them, “No, wait, you’re failing.”
I’m not a big fan of PUA techniques, but I am understanding that there are idiots gifted with excellent instincts where they were trained, either by a good family or genetics, when it’s the right time to say things. And these people, given a privilege that benefits them in a million subtle ways they cannot possibly understand, think that anyone who has to come to these techniques via teaching must be Doing It Wrong. Just do what I do!, said Michael Jordan, leaping onto the court.
Folks, learning to be a compelling person is hard for most people. Luckily, most of us get the majority of our awkwardness out of us in middle school – like Dave, who I’m led to believe runs a successful business and has a lovely girlfriend and I bet if his friends heard of the “Dry Rub” incident would write it off as clumsy adolescence because Dave now is lovable and smooth and knows not to talk about whacking it unless the conversation seems to be turning that way anyway. Yet many are slower than Dave, or learned later in life, or have to work harder to pick up on those cues that tell you, “Oh, hold on, this isn’t going well.”
And you’re not always yourself anyway. Do I like sports or the weather? No. But I can converse on both fluently in small talk, because strangers expect it of me and I’ve learned that they’ll like me a lot better if I can meet them on their common ground. Is that authentic? Hell no. But my desire to be friendly is authentic, and that requires me to do a few phony-ish things to bridge the gaps.
If making friends and lovers was as easy as “Be Yourself,” then every mouth-breathing nerd would be followed by scores of admirers. Instead, it’s the much more complex message of “Be a version of yourself that people will respond positively to”… and that’s a complex dance that takes years to refine, a constantly evolving performance that wavers between inauthenticity and public disgust, a hundred thousand hard lessons learned as smiles wither and conversations shrink into awkward silences. You learn to get around that. You learn very artificial measures to keep a conversation going, you learn when to sit back and let other people tell their tale even thought ZOMG THIS STORY I KNOW RIGHT NOW IS WAY FUNNIER, you learn to develop interests in things you didn’t have interests before.
And if you do all of that right, then people will go, “Man, that dude/ette is authentic.”
They’re not, really. But it’s a helluva show.
So What's It Like, Recuperating From Heart Surgery?
So basically, to fix your heart, they snip through your breastbone, fling your lungs over your shoulders, strip veins from your legs, then stick tubes in your belly. How the hell do you recover from that?
Surprisingly well, as it turns out.
Like any major surgery, your body is at the whims of your healing surges; you will be feeling fine, and then your body will go, “AIGHT, TIME TO LAY DOWN,” and you can’t argue. But you can get up out of your chair, you can lift things up to eight pounds with your arms, and you can totter around.
You acquire a ton of various chest pains, since all your ribs were broken to get at your heart, a pain which reverberates in weird ways. Reaching to scratch the back of your leg can produce mild shooting pains. Twisting? Other crackly pains. You’re terrified some of these are ZOMG HEART PAINS, which you’re told are more pressure-like, but at this point all the pain is chestal since that’s where 80% of your wounds are, and so you’re continually in a mild freakout mode that maybe the heart surgery went poorly and oh hi Ativan, I love you, you calm me.
Walking is weird because, well, they’ve yoinked several large veins from your legs and everything has kinda shrunk around them, so your legs feel literally two sizes too small. Take too big a step and you feel everything go unacceptably taut, like you’re a marionette and someone’s yanking on the reins. So you totter. You’re told that about two weeks into walking suddenly it’ll all feel normal again, and you are counting the days. Until then you feel a little wobbly on your pins, even though everyone says you look fine.
Breath comes slowly, in part because if you breathe in big, oh hello, ribs. Walking around the kitchen twenty-five times will put you out of breath, huffing, your heart pounding more than a heart that’s had surgery should pound – or so you feel, even though the doctors tell you it’s fine.
You’ve had a lot of fluid put into your system, so you’ve been put on a diuretic – which means you’re peeing, copiously, once an hour, seemingly whether you drank any fluid or not. You’re peeing so much they’ve put you on additional vitamins to make up for the ones you’re whizzing into the toilet. Peeing also involves getting up, which is more exercise – except at night, when you finally give in to your body’s needs and use that stupid little plastic thing so you can pee in your sleep chair.
Recuperation: a dignity-free zone.
Truth is, though, you’re slow, and ponderous, but actually pretty functional. You can make your own meals. You can clean your own dishes. There are times when you get too tired, and puppy-dog your family into lifting the chair leg for you, but you’re like a low-weight, slow-motion version of you. You take more naps in the afternoon, and are pained in the evenings after a long day when your friends come to visit, and sleep in a chair, but it’s mostly you. You can talk. You can joke. You can wheeze a bit.
You feel like your old self knitted together by sutures. But it’s better than you thought it’d be. You’re considering to go see a movie with your Mom tomorrow, which is ZOMG OUTSIDE, and your concentration still isn’t up to writing fiction, but it’s there.
You can see the horizon. It’s far away. But you’re getting there. One laborious step at a time.
And occasionally you think: that shit really happened. It totally did. All that panic. All that love. All that pain. It’s a Thing now, an event now forever embedded in your past, and day by day as the bruises fade it’ll become reality. As it is, it’s still somehow too weird to really encompass properly. 43 and heart attacked? That shit is crazy. Impossible. Not real.
Then you get up and walk and oh, yeah, there’s the reality.
Tell Me Something Good
So I haven’t really been around the Internet in, oh, two weeks.
…what’s up with you?
Tell me one thing that’s recent and awesome in your life. I’d like to know. (And while “Ferrett surviving” is a terribly sweet answer, it doesn’t count. Has to be something else.)
The Scariest Thing I've Ever Done: Fifty-Two Hours, Breathing
I never knew what weak felt like until I was intubated. But with my lungs unable to breathe for themselves, shriveled up like wads of wet cotton balls, my body was desperately starved of oxygen. Moving my hand four inches up to grasp the bedrail was such an ordeal it required ten minutes’ of recuperation.
And I was drowning. The tube, it was kinked, hissing thin sustenance; I was constantly on the verge of blacking out, gasping, like a fish on a dock trying to immerse its gills in a puddle. I needed to tell them that the tube was twisted, it was starving me, but I couldn’t move. Every action consumed all my consciousness.
All the while, that thick plastic ridge of the vent rubbed against my gag reflex. Every breath brought nausea, hours of constant face-fucking by a clear plastic tube, my spit pooling up and being slurped away by automata. I remember puking into the mask, all the air vanishing to be replaced with caustic nothing, sucking and finding to my horror that it was all gone, grasping, dying, as bodiless hands shoved suction tubes into my mouth so deep I threw up again just before I passed out.
That wasn’t the worst bit, though. I kept trying to gesture for a pencil, to tell them that the valve was wrong somehow, making motions to write down “NOT ENOUGH AIR HELP.” And when I did, my father’s hand closed over mine, lovingly, reassuringly, damningly, his gentle squeeze as firm as handcuffs of death to my weakened body.
“You’ll be all right, Billy,” he assured me. But I wouldn’t be. He was killing me with kindness. He was stopping me from telling them how they were strangling me.
———————————————————-
As it turns out, the tube wasn’t kinked; they were tracking my blood oxygen levels closely. It was my lungs, unable to process the oxygen they were flooding me with; my lungs that so damnably refused to start breathing on their own.
Still, in my drugged-out state, I did not know. And after the second vomiting I finally got a pen and wrote “VOMIT FROM TERROR TAKE IT OUT PLEASE” and they got the hint.
Now the hard part begun.
———————————————————
For the next fifty-six hours, breathing was so painful that each breath took a concerted act of will. I could sip in a shotglass’s worth of air before my shattered-and-rebuilt sternum flooded my body with agony and made me release it. Which gave me just enough energy to breathe in again. Which I had to fight to do.
If I stopped, I would die. Or I would be intubated again, which was far worse than dying.
The first ten hours were a chore; my dad and daughter and wife sat by, but I could pay no attention to them. I had no energy. I had to get that next breath in. I sat with my eyes closed, apparently asleep, but locked in a desperate game of survival. I knew they were there, but I could do nothing aside from occasionally wave at them.
I was sweating from the exertion, but my body was still in survival stage. To move my hand up to my face, to brush the sweaty hair from my eyes, would take eight minutes of recuperation. Every movement became a cost-benefit analysis. Was it worth risking it? Eventually, I withdrew to a deep place, merely nodding and hoping at some point the pain would subside enough that I could sleep.
The nurse, it must be said, was not helpful. “I don’t want the Percoset,” I gasped after eighteen hours. “It’s doing – nothing. It hurts so bad.” The nurse, who had only one other patient on his retinue, marked me down as “Patient refused all pain medications” and left me with nothing but occasional intravenous shots. See, to his mind, I was just panicking for no reason, and once I realized how foolish I was, I’d calm down.
He kept telling me that I needed to relax. I kept telling him it hurt so much to breathe that if I relaxed, I wouldn’t be breathing. “That’s because you’re breathing wrong!'” he told me. “Look how shallow your breaths are! Take deep, nourishing breaths. You’re hyperventilating, kid.”
The nurses took blood; my nerves were so starved of oyxgen I didn’t feel the needles. A day in, I eventually convinced them to take chest X-rays (or perhaps it was on the schedule, I don’t know), and a doctor was brought in to tell me that my lungs were still very shrunken. He put me on a CPAP machine to help expand my chest without the effort, which fixed one problem and introduced another; it shoved extra air into my chest, expanding it, but shocking me with such pain that I couldn’t sleep.
Thirty hours doing nothing but breathing.
I told them I needed to sleep or I was going to pass out and become intubated again. They said that I was toying with my phone too much. (I clutched it in my hand in case I had to call Gini.) They pointed out I’d fallen asleep several times – why, they’d seen me with my eyes closed, head down! I told them that I was hideously awake the whole time, shutting down all non-essential processes in my quest for air. Well, anyway, they told me, you had your anti-anxiety drug already and that didn’t help, so it’s all up to you now. Just chill, buddy.
Gini tried to talk for me. At one point, I remember trying to wheeze out a complaint that what I needed were different pain medications and soon, and the nurse kept talking over my each ragged breath, and Gini said, “I think what Ferrett is trying to say is – ”
“Ma’am, I am talking to the patient now,” he snapped, cutting her off.
Thing is, even as low-energy as I was, my body struggled to find meaning in this chore. I couldn’t think quite properly, but eventually I came to understand that I was on a game show, and every wheeze I managed was giving an answer in a foreign language I did not understand but had ascertained correctly. Score boards were rising in my favor. People – or things very much like people – were cheering me on.
At forty-six hours of constant breathing in and out of the CPAP, I began to hallucinate. If I closed my eyes, I was lying before a large green neck as big as a mural, freckles and goosebumps and traceries of aquablue veins apparent. Shadowy figures watched me from the side of the bed, taking bets. When Gini was there, sometimes she’d say things that made no sense, like an argument about Spock’s baby that I knew Gini would not make, and when I verified she told me no such conversation had taken place. Bugs descended from the ceiling in constant waves to drop on their arms, crawl underneath their necklines.
I pointed out to Gini how terribly realistic this all was. I’m a bad hallucinator, I think – I was still comparing it all to the reality I expected, so even though it was vivid as life, there was a part of me like, “That can’t possibly happen.”
Eventually, my doctor came in and he saw me in pain. “You survived a burst appendix,” he said. “I know you. If you say you’re in pain, you are no wimp. I’m going to find someone and fix this.” And a new nurse came on duty, and they found a better anti-anxiety med – Atavan, how I love thee – and they vowed to move me away into a recovery wing.
Yet they would not let me nap without taking one last walk.
“He has to be up,” they explained. “It’s a part of the healing process.”
“He’s been up for two days’ straight now,” Gini told them. “He needs a nap.”
“One nap after he makes a circuit around the bed,” they said, standing fast.
“Fuck the bed,” I told them. “You make me get up, I’mma make the lobby.” And according to Gini, in that moment, the nursing staff watched me stagger to the nurses’ desk, slap it, and come back, and she could see them realize Oh, wait, he’s not fucking around about this. He’s really trying.
They gave me the good drugs, checking in carefully, and then let me have a three-hour nap. And oh my God, was it beautiful.
———————————
Later that night, the nursing staff at the new locale was so attentive and beautiful and caring, they attended to my every need. I remember waking up, in a mild panic, at three in the morning, and I didn’t know where I was. I couldn’t remember why I was there. I just knew I was in trouble.
Those nice people, I thought contentedly. They’re watching over me. They’ll handle it. And I drifted off, trusting, carefree as a boat on a river.
——————————–
This is mostly just writing up the experience; this is how I process things, by converting them to prose. But if you want a lesson, it is this: this was, literally, the worst thing that ever happened to me. The remaining week of recuperation has been fine, but those first seventy-two hours were a literal living hell. I cried when visitors came. I told them I’d rather die than be intubated again. And I would. The terror that spurred each force-drawn breath was not that I’d pass on, but that they’d put the tubes in my throat again, and oh my God I would take a gun and shoot myself in the fucking face before I let them happen… except I’d be too weak to fight it.
I was too weak for anything. It’s a hell. A living hell of frailty and powerlessness.
But if you want a lesson, take this: I lost the genetic lottery, yes – as the doctors admit, no one at the age of 43 should have three clogged arteries, even if they’re chugging bacon grease milkshakes for breakfast – but I also ate poorly. I didn’t pay as much attention to my body. It’s partially luck of a bad draw, but like my teeth, there were things I could have done better.
So listen. Go eat some healthy food today. Get some exercise in. And if you have any heart pains, get to that ER – I went begrudgingly, thinking it’d be a waste of time, but as my doctor said, I did everything in the precise sequence necessary to save my life.
This was bad. Triple bypasses suck, and this was a comparatively good one – a week later and I’m typing furiously, I’m using the bathroom on my own, I’m showering. If you can, avoid this on your own by keeping yourself in shape.
Besides. Keeping yourself in shape will keep one more awesome person around for a bit longer, and I support that. Totes.