Heart Surgery, or, We Live in a Future Utopia

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Well, that was something.

On Friday I arrived at Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore at 5 AM and made my way in. By 7:30 I was on the operating table, and by 1:30 I was the proud owner of a new aortic valve and a repaired aorta.

The first 36 hours after surgery were basically torture, the next 36 utter misery. I remember thinking at some point that if I were presented with this choice again I might just buy a gun and end it. I hurt all over, I felt nauseated, I had to contemplate the 11 separate lines, tubes, and wires sprouting from my body, all of which had to be removed over the next few days, each one an experience. Sleep came at me like waves on a beach, dragging me under and then leaving me stranded on wakeful shores at 2 AM or 4 AM. It sucked.

After that improvement was remarkably fast, and by Tuesday I was bored and longing to go home.

I did have some medical hiccoughs. My blood pressure spiked a couple of times, and one night my heart kept going into atrial fibrillation. But it nothing the team at Hopkins couldn't handle using the vast armada of powerful drugs that have at their fingertips.

By dinner time Thursday I was home. I am still profoundly weak and looking at a months-long healing process, but I am home, and safe, and ready to write.

And I think, what an incredible miracle. What an age of wonders I live in, what a thousand-times blessed life I lead, and what is wrong with humanity that even this cornucopia cannot satisfy us?

I am no kind of special person, just a middle class, middle manager with a regular suburban house and ordinary American health insurance. But when my heart was failing I was whisked away to a temple of science where I received a level of care that did not exist 20 years ago.

Think what a miracle a place like Johns Hopkins is, thousands of people of every ethnicity coming together from across the globe to care for other humans. My doctors had names like Aziz, Shibaz, Ta Jung, and Richardson. My nurses were born on three continents. Not long ago a hospital was a monument to gender roles, but now no one bats an eye at a male nurse and doctors will soon be majority female. Everyone I saw was polite, friendly, efficient and, I think, devoted to helping me. 

All of this is only possible because of things about our world that millions of us hate. I see complaints every day from people who hate capitalism because it forces us to work, but if nobody worked, who would have cared for me? (All of you miserable young folks out there, think about becoming a nurse; it's just a two-year degree and if you are smart and unsqueamish you can earn $100,000 a year actually helping other people.) People complain about competition, but it is competition between scientists, surgeons, and medical companies that has produced all these wonders. People complain about inequality, but I don't begrudge my surgical team what they earn; I know the level of effort and ambition it takes to become a heart surgeon at a place like Hopkins, and if paying them a lot gets the top people to pursue those jobs, why not? Yes, our world is unequal, but as I just wrote, that means an ordinary man like me can get surgical care past kings and emperors could not dream of. Is that not a powerful kind of democracy?

All the things we are really good at, from heart surgery to video games to pop music, are that way because those fields are savagely competitive. Because people work at them from a combination of personal ambition, a desire to get rich, and a desire to be where the action is. That means many people fail. So? Is there some system in which we all get to do what we want that doesn't end up a wallow of mediocrity?

The model of a better world is right in front of us, in hospitals like Johns Hopkins. The key is to focus, not on who people are, but on what they can do.

And now to get on with the rest of my life.