The unmistakable chime of a monitor echoes
Intruding into darkness
Awareness creeps up like a shy kitten
Mewling
I feel chest tubes
Painlessly weird
Opening my eyes I see the nurses’ station
So many devices and displays
It’s like an aircraft control tower
I look at the nurses
They’re looking back at me solicitously
I close my eyes
To dream of other cities and waking up there
A tour of unspoken words
I wake up in every city I’ve ever been in
Slowly drifting in and out of dreamplaces
Places that don’t quite make sense
Finally, I wake up here and I’m present
Alive
There’s less pain than I thought there’d be
But pain is present
I remember I’ve had a heart defense
Accounting for the lines attached to my body
Pings and chimes provide an otherworldy background soundtrack
A nurse comes over
Introduces herself
She shares the name Lisa with my sister
Which bodes well, I think
So did my mother she tells me later
I am extubated, the breathing tube taken out
The first unmooring of several
Breathe in, hold it, exhale
Slip slide upthroating relief slices through incipient nausea
I struggle to catch my breath
I do
Settling into consciousness I am wide awake as possible
Given the circumstances
I survey the lines and tubes attached to my body
I am unsure how many other patients there are on the ward
The man next to me is a loud talker
Voice booming out like a sideshow barker
Somehow I drift back into sleep
Until two patients across the room go into distress
One is a code blue
Gowned shapes appear, passing the foot of my bed
Until they cluster on the far side of the ward
Their ministrations succeed and the chimes stop
For a few moments there is peace
Rare peace
A time that I have come to
In this place
Where I awake
David Trudel © 2013
What Is Truth
If I could talk about beauty today
I’d talk about whirligig seedpods spiraling down from maple trees
Whose leaves lie yellowed and rusted
Beneath the green canopy that has begun its fatal turn
Anticipating the fall
Or the smell of the forest moments after a rainshower
Evoking distant memories
Walking along the trail
My feet play an arpeggio of crunches
But I’m not listening to that song
My mood is as gray and ponderous as the clouds
Massing like warships off the coast
There is little room for beauty
When the ugliness of war is imminent
When the ugliness of violence is prevalent
And the mean spirits of the convinced
Crush any non-conformist view
With the finality of the fallen
Yet even though I ache with empathy
For the lost and beaten
For long lost spirits vanished in genocidal flames
That is not my truth today
My truth is my own pain
The dull ache of bone regenerating
A scabrous tug of congealed tissues beneath a zippered line
Of reddened welts
Ascending my chest like angry punctuation marks
My truth is stolen by my self-absorption
I isolate chaotic messages of a disrupted nervous system
Comprehending metallic intrusions
Listening to the mechanical insistence of the new valve
Then, drained and enervated I fade
Into somnolence
Unable to maintain the illusion of reality
I slumber unconcernedly
Aware of nothing beyond my next breath
Finding a solitary truth
David Trudel © 2013
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Filed under Cardiology, Poetry
Tagged as beauty, blank verse, cardiac surgery, cardiology, creative writing, creativity, free verse, healing, inspiration, metaphor, nature of time, post-op recovery, sadness, self-absorption, social commentary, tranquility, truth, universal peace, war