Heart: A History by Sandeep Jauhar

Author:Sandeep Jauhar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2018-09-18T07:00:00+00:00

9

Wires

And pale and wan, and of all strength bereft,

…

My heart, as with an earthquake, then is cleft,

Which makes my pulse leave all its life behind.

—Dante Alighieri, from Sonnet IX

The old man shuffled slowly into my clinic room. He took off his hat and collapsed into a cracking vinyl chair. I had seen him before, last about two weeks ago. He had never looked this bad.

He leaned forward, a bearded, wispy-thin gentleman in a vintage suit whose bowler and neckerchief lent him an arcane, vaudevillian air. “The shortness of breath is getting worse,” he growled in a raspy voice, not unlike Bob Dylan’s. “The medications you prescribed aren’t helping.”

Jack, as he was called, had been a beneficiary of the pioneering heart surgeries of Walt Lillehei and others in the 1950s. A diseased valve was surgically repaired when he was a child. With no heart-lung machine, the surgeon used his little finger, wedged into the wall of the right ventricle, to free up the motion of the congenitally rigid valve.

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