I write when I am well. Shall I not write when I am not? 

You know it’s serious when the medical staff asks you twenty times to state your name and birthday within the framework of thirty minutes. I consider changing my answer, either name or birthday or both, to see if my diagnosis and prognosis for prostate cancer can be altered administratively. 

I glance at the octopus-shaped robotic device that will in a few moments become a surgeon’s video game. Oxygen, deep breaths, the beginning of a mild burning sensation in the IV, “You are going to feel sleepy,” the anesthesiologist tells me prophetically.

I blink once and feel like I did in afternoon Calculus class on an Indian Summer day in school, aware of my eyelids closing yet having no power to stop them. 

My foggy awakening notion is that I survived. And that being among the living hurts. Since my birthday quandary has been resolved, my next question is about pain. A natural question to providers but rarely considered when awakening from deep anesthesia. I look at the pain chart, 1-10 if you like numbers, or different progressions of happy to sad faces if you are into art. I’m not feeling the happy face or the saucer-eyes nor do I feel tears streaming down my cheeks. So I choose a bug-eyed number, maybe 7. 

The doctor comes in to greet me and shakes my IV burdened hand. I thought it would be a fist bump, but no, full mano a mano handshake. 

I like my doc.

He says things went well. 

I have time on my hands these days. Five abdominal clear-taped incisions, now one gland shy of my birth quota, tethered to an infernal cath, watching a music documentary featuring the maniacal guitar genius of Chicago’s Terry Kath,  the irony dripping alongside a clear tube. 

I don’t feel like doing anything except binging Yellowstone:1923 or a few Downton Abbey episodes.

Oddly, I’m drawn to poetry. 

Irish poet, Seamus Heaney (1939 – 2013), writes a poem set within The Cure at Troy, a version of a play by the Greek dramatist Sophocles (fifth century BCE) It addresses questions of personal morality, deceit and political expediency, suffering and healing. 

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a farther shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
And lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.