Rhythm
I’m preparing my parents to move into an assisted-living apartment, and I uncover a shoebox of pediatric pacemakers in the bathtub.
There must be thirty of them, ranging in size from an Oreo cookie wafer to a hockey puck.
Miniature dioramas of electronic circuitry and battery stacks englobed in burnished blobs of epoxy like steampunk amber-encased fossils.
Nooks and recesses stained with long-dried residues from kids’ chest cavities.
“What were you planning to do with these, Dad?” I ask. “Well, they might be useful props if I get invited to do another lecture sometime.”
Some have rubberized leads still dangling from their terminals, with surgical-steel tips to probe and monitor, stimulate and sustain a healthy regular heartbeat for years on end.
I’m fourteen now, shuffling homework on the kitchen table, while you are at the end of the telephone cord pulled around the corner into the dining room, softly informing a couple that you don’t expect their kid to survive the night.
The shock of grief, it can taste lemon-electric, like licking a battery terminal.
The heart as an intricate nexus of plumbing and electrical connectivity, designed to clutch and flow, clutch and flow flawlessly over the course of a lifetime.
Of course, we’ve learned that Nature sometimes develops quality control issues requiring intervention and repair.
You have been a been a master electrician in a thigh-length white lab coat.
Let the surgeons be the plumbers.
I’m thirty-seven, back in school for my Master’s in Nursing, sweating through a lecture on 12-lead electrocardiograms, the squiggly calligraphy that is your daily currency, a language in which I know I will never gain fluency.
Lub-dub, lub-dub, that rhythmic baritone snap of ventricular valves that surely must be the origin of iambic meter.
I’m twelve, Saturday afternoons in your lab with the shades drawn, subbing in as anesthetist and scrub nurse while you surgically induce cardiac anomalies in lab rats to advance your research. I’m doping the creatures with a pungent ether-soaked gauze in a tinfoil nose cone; taping them splayed to a surgical tray and then passing you instruments, astonished at your fat-fingered dexterity as you throw miniscule sutures around a pink, pulsing, raisin-sized heart.
The thunk in the bucket under the table of the rats who didn’t make it.
The florid nomenclature of cardiac conditions: aortic stenosis, atrial/septal defect, Mobitz type-2 heart block, and my favorite, Tetralogy of Fallot, which sounds like a spell to be cast in a decisive Dungeons and Dragons battle.
I’m sixteen, rolled out from surgery to remove my ruptured appendix, and you’re waiting there in post-op to sit by my gurney while I come to, unabashedly holding my hand.
I’m forty-nine, and you phone me out of the blue on a Friday afternoon while I’m carpooling a clutch of sixth-graders: “Sorry to say, I have terrible news. It’s Brad.”
My brother’s toxicology report is inconclusive, because he had been down on his apartment floor for at least three days prior to being discovered, but the coroner notes that his major coronary vessels were 98% occluded.
What negligent defect in the Universe allows that a parent could outlive their child?
I’m sixty-four, sitting with you in the ICU after your heart attack, and you whisper to me to twist the monitor around so you can see your tracings. “Oh, that’s not good,” you sigh.
The gift of three stents that expand to perfuse your future.
I’m fifty-nine, and I take you out for a Father’s Day brunch. A woman approaches our table: “It’s Dr. Gamble, isn’t it? I just want to thank you for saving my nephew Bobby’s life when he was a kid. And you should know he’s married now, two kids, a cancer survivor, and though he’s been through some rough patches, he’s basically doing okay.”
If I place my ear on your chest, I could hear the song you have intoned without ceasing for ninety-four years now: “I am, I am, I am, I am…”
