I will pray for Dick Cheney.
I will pray for him.
Like Dick, I have had my chest cavity opened - breast bone cracked, ribs spread open like a flayed turkey... strange hands bruising through my thoracic cavity, my own veins ripped out and threaded like beaded strings around the blockages in my arteries.
It is not fun. It is traumatic. It was traumatic for me and I kept MY heart...
I imagine what it must be like for Dick. Then I stop and imagine again....
Poor guy is doubtless in severe pain, a pain that the doctors try to cut to a minimum by morpiates, but still there beneath. Every two hours or so the nurses replace the empty bag on the IV, but sometimes the nurses are slow, I remember well.
I imagine that they may well be slow for Dick, for whatever reason. Nurses are professional, but there are distractions. I pause and imagine again.
He will wake every hour and forty five minutes and look down on the skin between his wrinkled nipples to see a new roadway constructed. Black sutures over a pink and red worm with steel staples holding together his brittle and broken sternum.
When they yank the airway from his throat he will want to cough up those plugs formed of blood and mucous that will line his airway. I hope he can do it with a minimum of pain and discomfort. I know how it will be like, a bit, but then I was about half his age when I had my experience. He will have to hug a cheery heart shaped pillow to his old man chest and it will feel like his ribcage wants to jump out of his surgical scar whenever he has to try to cough up the slime, because - actually- that is preciselywhat will be happening.
The oxygen line in his nose will gall. He will be dizzy and disoriented. He will have no appetite for the thick steaks that he used to like to salt on both sides before masticating. He will be bed ridden for days to weeks, depending, and he will have to take medication for infection and pain anti-rejection drugs that will make him nauseous. He will ahve to have help to get to the washroom. He will have to learn to walk.
His chances are not good. He is old. He has a history of other illness. Rumour has it that, besides his heart, his arterial health has also meant a few strokes. He may well not be in his right mind.
And that is truly why I will pray for Dick Cheney. I want him to have a clear mind so that he feels every bit of this. I want him to have a clear mind so that he can also consider that reckonong can be postponed, perhaps, but that payment is going to be due. Since he and I both believe in the same possibility of after life, I want him to have his faculties when he considers what his will be like.
This is what I pray. Does that make me a bad person?