Wet Engine: Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart

Foreword

1 Foreword The convergence of the professional and personal is never neat or easy. As a nurse now in my fourth decade of professional life, I’ve learned to navigate the rough channel between personal and professional, neatly compartmentalizing my knowledge and responsibilities. The joy of my discipline is that my professional purpose—caring—is deeply connected to my personal values. Beyond that, though, there is endless separation and compartmentalization. Roles, responsibilities, and even language signal my nursing engagement; under it all, of course, is that core of caring. But Brian Doyle does not help at all in this matter. His book about the human heart doesn’t fit nicely in my library, or in how I’ve related to hearts in the past. Brian won’t stick to one script or the other. Nor will he allow us to forget that these boundaries that we erect among who we are in our roles as patient, professional, or parent really don’t work. And, in real matters of the heart, they collide in wonderful and painful ways. The Wet Engine is about all matters of the heart, and it is about one particular boy’s heart—Liam, Brian’s son. The physical and metaphysical are connected here, as are insights about what breaks and heals hearts. For one whose cardiac disease and healing has lived in the realm of health and medicine, these insights require reflection and rethinking. Fortunately, though, TheWet Engine is both manual and map, allowing us to learn the heart’s mechanics, while guiding us on an exploration of the beauty and mystery of what lies within the wet engine 2 each of us. Brian clearly knows—and helps us learn—that all matters of the heart are, indeed, matters of God. At its core, this book is about relationships—with family, God, and our own hearts. It is also about thinking differently about everything we’ve thought of or believed about the subject.For me, the nurse, this book is about wholeness and hearing the beat of the human heart as a whisper of divinity. What a wonderful gift from the deep and generous heart of father and author Brian Doyle. Marla Salmon Dean of Nursing University of Washington Seattle, Washington ...