Wet Engine: Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart

Introduction

3 Introduction My son Liam was born nine years ago. He looked like a cucumber on steroids. He was fat and bald and round. He looked healthy as a horse. He wasn’t. He was missing a chamber in his heart, which was a problem, as you need four chambers for smooth conduct through this vale of fears and tears, and he only had three chambers, so pretty soon he had an open-heart surgery, during which doctors cut him open and iced down his heart and shut it down for an hour or so while they worked on repair. That was when he was about six months old. I don’t remember much about that time. It all rushed past like a pain train. Then when he was about eighteen months old he had another open-heart surgery, during which they did all that again, and what I most remember from that time is his grinning face receding down the hallway as he was carried toward the bone shears by a sweet quiet doctor. I’ll always remember that. His face was so round. His face bounced up and down a little on the doctor’s thin shoulder. He smiled at me at the very end of the corridor, just before he and the doctor turned the corner, and I thought maybe that was going to be the last time I ever saw that big fat face smiling at me, and that was when I saw pain and death leering at me closer than I ever saw them before. That was a cold moment. I’ll always remember that. * the wet engine 4 Well,thatwasn’tthelasttimeIsawmyboyLiam,Iamalmighty happy to report, and now he’s pretty much fine, although he’s stubborn as a stone, and a grouch in the morning, and he gets tired more than he admits, and eventually he will have to get a new heart altogether, and he has been told by his genius heart doctor that he shouldn’t play football or run marathons, neither of which I think he was thinking of doing anyway, the kid being a basketball nut first and foremost. Now he is nine years old. He’s one of the most interesting and gentle people I ever met, and I am awfully glad that he didn’t die. His surgeries were years ago now, and his next surgery, the big one, when they take out his creaky old heart and pop in a new one, is ten or twenty or thirty years in the future. Don’t worry about it, says his genius heart doctor, by then we’ll have figured out something waaaay better than transplants. So I don’t worry about it, much. Sometimes I do worry about it a lot but I don’t tell my wife because I know she worries too and I have learned there are some things, a lot of things, with which you shouldn’t worry a wife. But the days pass in their swirl and whirl and swing and song, and every day he doesn’t die again, and that knocks me out. * So everything seems fairly normal these days. Liam runs around like an insane dorky gawky goofy heron and rides his bike and shoots hoop and skateboards and swings and punches out his brother and snarls at his sister and refuses to make his bed but he does actually set the table every night and help cook dinner sometimes and he does his homework pretty carefully when he doesn’t leave his backpack at school and he eats more yogurt and grapes and blueberries than anyone I Introduction 5 ever saw and his hair won’t stay combed no matter what and he’s a really good artist and he makes perfect pancakes and he is almost all the time a cheerful entertaining kind-hearted mammal whose company I really enjoy. He gets sick and he gets well and his knees are knobby and he just got a perfect score on his spelling test yesterday and the days and nights pass in their magic music, each more beautiful than the last, each one so filled with joy and pain and shouting and sadness and mud and angst and dishes and milk and jam and bills and newspapers and underwear and coffee filters and insurance payments and flat tires and rain and crows that I want to weep...