Healing

Hospital in May

The blood blister on my righthand snuff box, caused by a blood test needle pre-op, blackened like a moon’s dark side, lifted into scab and has now dropped off. Pockmarks from similar needles, several a day in intensive, fade as circles inside green bruises, and mauve. I may joke that my arms are lunar landscapes. They are replenished thoroughly by more water than can be found in the Sea of Tranquillity. Rips from round bandaids have pinkified across freckled skin, a jab at a time. Nine days out from the operation, the heart is more in order now than it must have been for some time. Late at night the beat increases, with no fear now that increase will turn into chest pain. Homer’s graphic moments of spearhead cutting bone and live sinew flow in the mind. An invasion can maim or kill, the poet leaving us hanging at the point of the deed. Nothing so dramatic or deadly occurred in the theatre, yet it is necessary to imagine the knife weaving between the chest muscles, tending ever so gently around precious organs, drawing a fine line down the breastbone. It is that rupture to the norm will take the longest time to heal, as bone melds again into bone to hold the ribcage firm. Lungs learn anew how to breathe easy. On the ninth day after the operation it hurts to laugh, whatever the standard of the humour. Finely stitched with thinnest steel, the sternum keeps on doing what it was designed to do, not letting anything out, keeping it all in. A darkening crimson band , part-billabong, now heals from clavicle to navel. The doctors are happy, the surgeon explains how flesh rejoins as it’s designed to do, nurses hover for the latest reading or a cup of pills. Their expressions say everything is healing, swimmingly, without saying a word. Masks cannot hide their friendly eyes. Shock of catheters is in the past. Miracle cannulas have left the bloodstream to resume its banks. Rainbows of wires have gone from the scene. Only a few silk sutures stay in place beneath a strip for time of removal, as hair returns little by little to the shaven chest. Healing is the blood-rich line of the left forearm and healing is the blood-rich line along the right calf. Straight streams firm, billabongs and all. An arm bandage secures the incision that now folds back in on itself, the lost vein reinventing itself as well, as the body will. How this reinvention takes place is ultimately beyond modern medicine, explicable perhaps when sun helped form flesh in a time no machine can tabulate, beeping the odd hours, keeping arteries mobile. The Achilles tendon escaped the blade, thanks be to the perception and skill of the surgeon, the calf soon rebandaged for recovery, with only small winces when pressure is applied upon a slight wrong angle when standing.