Judy P's Tickle Trunk

I thought it funny how on the day before my procedure that hearts seemed to become a running theme. A box of chocolates had emerged unexpectedly from the folds  of fabric in my craft cupboard as I was hunting for felt. I had hidden them from the kids four years ago and they had remained there, forgotten, until now. I opened the blood red heart shaped box to find that the chocolates had turned an unappetizing chalky white. I discarded them. Earlier in the day while shopping I had seen rows of chicken hearts in styrofoam trays, little miniatures of my own, like they were waiting for the moment when they could be transplanted into tiny chickens. Had Superstore always sold chicken hearts I wondered. Later, folding laundry, I smoothed out Sarah’s tank top on my lap. I had already admired the accuracy of the stamped-on pattern of the the bone structure of the thorax, front and back, but now I noticed that behind the ribs, skewed a little too far to the left, was an anatomically incorrect deep red heart.

I had been told that it was to be a simple procedure. No need for an overnight stay, a small incision and very little pain. Dozens were done successfully every year with very few complications. Very few. But what of those few aberrant ones? Were they just complicated people or had mistakes been made? Was I myself complicated? Seemed everyone knew someone who had had one. “Hey, my girlfriend’s brother had one of them and he turned out just fine…wait… he did have to go back and have it done a second time…didn’t he get a nasty groin infection afterwards…oh I’m sure you’ll be just fine!”

The night before I was scheduled to be at the hospital I dreamt that I was a small child sitting in the middle of a stainless steel waist-high table in a large white room. The table had a small rim like those bins found at used clothing stores. I was a tow-headed rosy cheeked chrerub of a child in a long frilly white night-dress. One leg was tucked under, the other extended with a chubby little foot peaking out from under my hem. I sat perfectly still, gazing placidly into the distance; like I had been lifted right out of a Sargent painting. On an adjacent and similar table was a coral coloured three dimensional tabletop landscape with hollows and humps and little pathways which looked like they had been formed by pressing the surface with the back of a spoon. Small round balls like inflated corpuscles ran over this course in no discernible pattern. Neither were they random though, as they never bumped into one another and they always turned before hitting the table edge and rolled back to the centre of the table along a new circuitous path. All rolling around at exactly the same pace. Watching this table-top activity was a clot of faceless medical personnel; identifiable as such by their white coats. A tall man who exuded authority stood at the centre of the group and I recognized him as my cardiologist. He broke away from the group, stepped up to the table and picked me up like I was his own baby. The cluster of onlookers drew tighter together and leaned forward with coos and aahs as he plunked me down, in the same innocent pose, right in the middle of the landscape table. He turned to the enrapt group and began to explain some fine point having to do with the current set-up, now totally oblivious to my presence behind him. Chaos had broken out on the the table and the rolling red balls began accelerating and zigzagging crazily around me. Two balls collided and the doctor adeptly caught one of them as it flew off the table. He tossed it casually back into the fray but it bounced right back out again, out of his reach, and rolled away across the floor with the other errant balls which were bouncing out of bounds. I was shocked by the carelessness of the the doctor – surely he knew that I, the child, might try and put one in my mouth – there was some risk of choking! And how was order to be restored to the natural flow of balls; many were already missing, others had come to a dead stop. Or was this all what he had intended to happen? The cardiologist’s attention to the process was totally lost now and he was deaf to my small ineffective “excuse me, Sir” as the red balls rolled willy nilly around his feet on the plain white floor.

I awoke in a sweat with my heart beating out a sluggish rhythm in three-four time, missing every sixth or seventh beat like a broken piano key. I arose and packed the overnight bag I was told I wouldn’t need.

 May 2010