And How Was Your Weekend?

I started Friday morning waking up in my own bed. From there my wife accompanied me to the William Backus Hospital (a five minute walk from our house, just past the historic Yantic Cemetery, which I've always assumed was not by design) for a cardiac catherization.

My job was nod off when injected and wake up after it was over. I did swell, almost. I came to but after the part by my cardiologist explaining the "why" of the next step and only caught the what which was an ambulance ride with Cora and Sara to Yale New-Haven Hospital.

I couldn't persuade them to drive on the shoulder of I-95 with the sirens blaring and the lights flashing. I'm thinking I failed for two reasons: it was an incredibly foolish idea and I was still so doped up and cotton-mouthed that no one could understand a word I was saying. Yeah, just like normal.

We hit the emergency entrance of Yale-New Haven (I'm avoiding the Y-NH abbreviation because there's nothing sadder than an aging hipster (in the words of Lenny Bruce)) and up to the fifth floor of the York Building to the cardiac wing over which Stefanie presided as chief nurse.

In the next two days I met scads of superlative people practically all at once or so it seemed to me, to include Doctors Becker and Healy, the former looking like Doogie Howser's stunt double and the latter dressed in the brightest Hawaiian shirt ever-to include the one I suspect in which they buried Don Ho.

The pair spearheaded a seamless team that went in through a smaller than 1/16" incision in a vein in my right wrist and placed two stents in two different arterial chambers in my heart, without incident like they were walking to the corner to grab a  paper and maybe a coffee. Come to think of it, I did smell a coffee.

When Emily came to visit a little after nine on Sunday morning to tell me I could go home, I may have been dressed faster than any one in the history of quick change artists on the Eastern Seaboard. I couldn't wait for the wheelchair and the elevator and headed for the stairs, with her in tow because she insisted I couldn't go by myself.

When we reached the ground floor and she headed to the coffee shop I pointed out the obvious, that I most certainly could walk myself down the stairs. But before she could counter, and I feared she would very effectively, I thanked her and asked her to relay my gratitude to all of her colleagues, for their efforts on my behalf and walked across the lobby and out onto York Street for the best view of Yale New Haven it's possible to have.

From the outside of the building, by a moments-before-released patient who is "a successful outcome" heading home with his son who had just arrived to pick him up and return him to his life, still scattered but already in progress.
-bill kenny