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119 illneSS and “i” Malady in the Personal Essay wenty-five years ago on an evening in late February, Kate and I had just finished a dinner of stir-fried pork, hot and sour bok choy, steamed rice, and fresh daikon radishes, so it hardly surprised me that I was burping up the taste of those radishes as she cleared the table and I prepared to take out the garbage. I had, after all, had more than my share of them. Six months later, I came to see those radishy burpings as the harbinger of a radically new kind of life for both of us, since they were, as it turns out, the first signs of a heart attack. A mild attack followed byanother fourdays later, without benefit of daikon, since I was then in the local hospital, followed by an ambulance ride to the nearby university hospital’s cardiac care unit, where the head cardiologist greeted me with a plumb bob and a yardstick, which he would use, he said, to determine the exact location of my heart, followed by an angiogram two days later to discover the exact amount of blockage in my coronary arteries—some crown!—followed by eleven days on intravenous blood thinners, nitroglycerin, sedatives, and other fluids to calm a restive heart and quell a type-A mentality before the crowning insult of a triple bypass. Otherwise known by the flamboyant misnomer of “open heart surgery.” Six months later, when I was teaching again and writing again and beginning to see a connection between those daikon radishes and the Zen of my new existence, I was often so moved by the rush of my recollections that I might easily have written a lengthy and vividly detailed personal essay about my heart attack and its surgical and psychological aftermath. But who would have published a piece detailing the whole gory process—the breast bone sawed completely in half, the ribs pulled all the way back, the heart temporarily stilled, the lungs temporarily shut down, the heart-lung machine set into motion, a mammary artery harvested from one side of the chest and a vein harvested from the entire length of one leg to serve as bypasses around the blocked coronary arteries, up the taste of those radishes as she cleared the table and I prepared T Personae and Personal Experience 120 and then the whole contraption wired and sewn back together again, with drainage tubes coming out of the chest, a breathing tube coming out of the mouth, intravenous tubes coming out of the arms, and God knows what else? And who would have wanted to read about the tears coming out of my eyes some ten hours later at the first faint sounds of Kate’s voice; or about the pain working its way through my chest at the first faint return of neural sensations; or about the fear suddenly coming to mind that one of the bypasses might fail or the whole heart itself go wild, if not right then, then sometime later, in the garden, in bed, in love, on the stool, in class; orabout my first faint awareness that the bypass wasn’t reallya cure or a permanent repair but just a temporary holding action against the inexorable working of the disease; or about my first hazy realization that in body and psyche I wasn’t at all like I had been just a few days before and that for better or worse I would never be the same again? And how would I have managed to produce an exactingly detailed, artfully crafted, and richly significant account of my personal experience, while also confining it to the length of a publishable essay? Questions such as those might have passed through my mind back then, if I had even faintly entertained the possibility of writing an essay about the experience. But the thought of doing so never really crossed my mind. There were, after all, so few essayistic precedents for a personal account of physical or mental affliction, and those by such eminent writers—Didion on her migraines, Fitzgerald on his crackup—that the idea of writing something about my heart attack would have seemed ludicrous to me. Now, just twenty-​ five years later, so many personal essays have appeared about so many physical and psychological afflictions—from anorexia, atrial fibrillation, breast cancer, and multiple sclerosis to prostate cancer, paraplegia, poliomyelitis, and unipolar depression—that a piece about coronary artery disease could surely...

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