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perfect for the job." Then he turned to everyone in the OR, and they bowed their heads. They spoke in such low voices that I couldn't make out what they were saying.
    Eventually, Dr. Mandela turned back to me and continued speaking. As he did so, I recognized the final words of the poem "Invictus" that had empowered him with its message of self-mastery so many times while he was imprisoned at Robben Island Prison.
    ... It matters not how strait the gate,
    How charged with punishments the scroll,
    I am the master of my fate:
    I am the captain of my soul.
    Then he turned to me and asked, "Are you ready, son?" I didn't reply. Instead I held my breath and blinked at him like an animal at slaughter. The knife in his hand suddenly flashed in the glare of the operating table lights. "Well then, let's see what we've got." With that, he raised the knife.
    "Dr. Mandela, no...don't do it!" I yelled. He looked at me one last time with a gleam in his eyes, then plunged the blade below my ribs and ripped me open down to my groin.

    I gasped and opened my eyes. I was cold, shivering despite several blankets laid across me. I looked around, wondering where I was.
    "Hi, hon." I turned my head to the side, and there sat Beth in a chair by my bed. My throat hurt from the airway that had recently been removed from it. I cleared it and tried to speak, but my voice was weak.
    "Where am I?" I croaked.
    "You're in your room. You woke up about four hours ago in recovery. Don't you remember?"
    "No, the last thing I remember was being in prep." It was dark in the room except for a fluorescent light above my bed. The sun had clearly gone down. "How did I get up here?"
    "After you first came around and they determined you were OK, they decided to get you out of recovery. You went back to sleep after that. Everything went well. You didn't have to have a colostomy." I reached down and felt a long, thin pad on my belly, thankful that there was no plastic bag there.
    "Thank God for small favors," I said.
    "Hey, what were you just saying about Dr. Mandela?"
    "Oh, that." I didn't want to tell her the truth—she'd think I'd lost my mind. "It was just something from the movie
Invictus.
I started to watch it last night before surgery but fell asleep partway through. It was pretty inspiring."
    But to me, there was meaning to the dream. It was telling me that there were bad times ahead. If I persevered, everything would be all right—I would be the master of my fate and captain of my soul, but if I did not persevere? There seemed to be no answer to that question. I'd often had such vivid dreams but could never be certain of interpretationsuntil after the fact, so I wasn't about to tell Beth that things were going to get worse before they got better; it already seemed bad enough. Despite my prophetic dream, I couldn't have begun to know at that time how bad it was really going to get.

Chapter 4

    ON THE MEND
    I took stock of my changed surroundings. There were a few new bags hanging on my IV racks. There was also now a tube releasing oxygen into my nostrils held in place by a plastic shield that partially covered my mouth. A rubber band around my head kept the shield in place. It was part of a monitoring system used to measure C02 in my breath, tied into what I called the "Michael Jackson Pump" or "MJP" for short. The MJP was a morphine delivery system that allowed me to dose myself as needed, no more than once every six minutes. On the bed lay a push button assembly, which I could press to inject morphine into my IV. The shield monitored the CO 2 in my breath as I exhaled to make sure I didn't overdose. I called it the "Michael Jackson Pump," because I could envision that he might not have died had he been connected to a system like that: it made a real racket if you stopped breathing or if the CO 2 got too high.
    I noticed something surprising after my surgery: I didn't have any pain. I had a twelve-inch incision, my innards had all been shifted around or cut up