Opening My Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

the bed, settles in, and is soon sound asleep. I’m usually like that, too, but tonight I’m wide awake, listening to my heartbeats.
How many more will I have?
I get up and wander around the house, do a Sudoku puzzle, then go to my office and reorganize my bookshelves. Out in the kitchen, I open the refrigerator, hunting for a snack, but my usual emotional fix doesn’t work. I can’t eat a thing. I return to bed and see myself stretched out on a table, a magician’s assistant ready to be cut in two. My heart springs out of my chest like a bird popping out of a Swiss cuckoo clock. They snatch it away before it can slide back in while scavengers scoop out my liver, kidneys, and brain, leaving me a hollow shell.
    I spend the entire next day being anxious. It’s all I have time for.
    At night, I set the alarm to wake up so I can take my vital signs – make sure they’re still vital. I drink water so I’ll have to get up to pee, to know I’m still alive, like my father’s corny riposte whenever he received an early morning phone call:
    “No, you didn’t wake me. I had to get up to answer the phone.”
    At 5:00, I’m wide awake, so I go to my office to stare at the books on the shelves. No longer the comforting and treasured friends I usually think of them, now they stand there and seem foreboding, as if they are taunting me with their solid longevity. They will out-live me. I may not get to read them all! Just yesterday I washed the cat’s bowl and now it’s the next day, already time to wash it again. Phoebe sits in the hallway, licking her paws, all of her purported “nine lives” intact.
    I need to learn more about heart disease, specifically cardiac surgery, so I spend the afternoon consulting the experts – Dr. Google and Professor Wikipedia. They provide lots of information, some of it reliable, some not, and have terrible bedside manners. I consider myself somewhat of an expert on Bad Bedside Manner (BBM) because I have seen it all – and not just from doctors. The winner of the Worst BBM Award might be the radiologist who reviewed my patient’s CT scan. A brain tumour was suspected, or possibly a cerebral bleed. “Is it serious?” the patient asked. “Yes,” the doctor answered and then walked out of the room. The patient and I looked at each other in disbelief. A runner-up was the surgeon who came to speak to the parents of a twenty-year-old man. “Bad news,” she said. “The pancreas is dead.” (FYI: When speaking to families, the word
dead
should rarely, if ever, be used, especially when it is the
patient
who is dead.)
    But in a way, bedside manner can be overrated. There’s a specialist I know who is a superb diagnostician and an unerring clinician but is cold and impersonal with patients, arrogant and supercilious with everyone else. She has a chronic case of BBM . On many occasions after she’s spoken with patients or their families, I have had to smooth things over or do damage control. On the other hand, if I ever get a disease related to her specialty, I will be running to beg her to be my doctor. Ideally, you’d get the whole package, but if I have to choose, I’ll overlook BBM in a good doctor.
    I tried to explain this to a friend who needs knee surgery and has been shopping for an orthopedic surgeon he can bond with. “I can’t find the right one,” he complains. “They’re all carpenters. None of them takes the time to get to know me as a person. They just tinker with nuts and bolts.” But a carpenter is exactly what you need! I tell him. A surgeon who is an expert craftsperson will fix your problem and make it work like new. If you want a friend, go somewhere else. Skill is what’s needed, and when you get the personal touch on top of that, consider it a bonus.
    No, there’s not too much hand-holding going on in hospitals these days. Doctors may offer some in passing, but they tend to “come and go, talking of Michelangelo,” a line from a T.S. Eliotpoem that