After eight hours or so spent unconscious, I can now modestly claim to know a little something about what being dead feels like. When they finally wheeled me into the recovery room I looked every bit as dead as I felt. The only evidence to the contrary wasn’t heartening: the wires and tubes running in and out of my every orifice, all the original orifices and others newly reamed for the occasion. Moreover, I was lashed to my gurney, my hands strapped down against the likelihood that when I came to I’d try to tear out the tubes that disappeared down my throat. (Everybody tries to do that, said the nurse.) My wife, Betsy, and my daughters, Molly, Joanna, and Laura, took one look at me and they all burst out sobbing.
By the next night, the vivid pictures had given way to an incoherent torrent of words and notions that bubbled up like a clogged toilet and made sleep impossible. A doctor said not to worry about it; hallucinations were par for the course with an agitated liver. And the third night, when I closed my eyes, nothing greeted me but welcome darkness.
The first thing they did at the ER was measure my blood’s clotting capacity, a number known as the INR (for international normalized ratio). A healthy number is one. Before I started taking vitamin K pills (the kale didn’t work) I’d been clocked at eight, but a pill quickly brought it back down. This time my INR was 16, I took two pills, and in the morning it was 12. By injecting me with vitamin K they lowered the INR to 2, but now my abdomen was hurting me something fierce, and I finally felt every bit as sick as I was. I wondered if I’d even live to April 16.
They came to get me at 3, and at 4 AM I was wheeled into the operating room. I looked around. Boy, this is cluttered, I thought. It looks like somebody’s attic. That was my last thought. They put me under, opened me up, scooped out a rank, swollen organ later described to me as really “pus-y,” and laid in a replacement 36 years younger than the rest of the body it was joining.
