EXPERIENCING THE MIDDLE, AND CHOOSING LIFE

It has been exactly two weeks since a surgeon opened my chest and replaced four arteries in my heart with a vein from my leg. Before the operation, to convince you everything is going to turn out fine, people will tell you, "they do these operations all the time—they’re wheeling people in and out of the operating room all day long." This may be true except you tend to see things differently when you’re the one looking up from the gurney being wheeled into the operating room. The intrusion into the body was huge, the body’s reaction was huge and so the healing process I’m going through now has to be equal in strength.

The thought of trekking through the Himalayas in Tibet and Nepal with my sons helps me to heal. It is something at the top of my wish list. It has been important for me to hang onto a dream like this—one firmly planted in this world—to help hold me here on this planet. There was a moment following my operation—still dazed and confused by the anesthesia and all the drugs in my system—when I felt like I was balancing on the edge between life and death, thinking the pain from the operation was so great it might just not be worth living. I could feel myself start to slip which immediately warned me I’d better not mess around with thoughts like that. But this taught me something valuable—just how short the distance is between here and there. This image was unmistakable and indelible.