Memories of Bayside

"Mending My Broken Heart" is the third chronicle from my book, "True Love."

Following my heart surgery, after I was “Saved by the World," I spent the next six months in what the medical profession calls recovery and what I called “Mending My Broken Heart."

It was a time of euphoria, happiness and overflowing joy. I fell madly in love….. with my surgeons, with my anesthesiologists, with my night nurses and my day nurses, with the older gentleman who wheeled me on a stretcher to my echo-cardiogram, with the young fella who took my chest X-rays and the adorable young men who tucked me in bed with an extra blanket when I felt cold.

Despite the first 24 hours of unbearable pain, made all the sweeter by the triumphant feeling of love and exquisite joy that followed, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I loved being taken care of. I loved the attention – having billions of watts of energy and expertise beamed into me by exceptional people. I loved the view from the window of my hospital room, watching in the early hours of the morning as groups of white-clad men and women, bathed in fluorescent lightening, walked along the balconies as if they were antelopes on some primeval plain of my imagination.

After a lifetime of struggles and striving ambitions that had taken me in so many exhausting directions, I had finally surrendered to something beyond my control and I was supremely happy. Heart surgery had become a metaphor for love. After I was discharged from the hospital, with warnings that depression often afflicts recovering heart patients, my happiness took on physical manifestations.

On three occasions, I became suffused with a bodily sensation of joy as the light and air quivered and shimmered around me - exquisitely modulated vibrations of warmth and love, sculpted out of pure air - taking me back to the summer light of my childhood growing up in Bayside. I was in the bull’s-eye of a rapture.

Behind the backdrop of the period I called “Mending My Broken Heart," this period of jubilation and elation, alongside a very real struggle to overcome my physical exhaustion and build up my stamina, the dynamics of my workplace were shifting, jealousies were taking center stage and on my return to my job, unbeknownst to me, I would be entering “A Den of Vipers." It wasn’t pretty. Stay tuned.

Dear Readers: There are 11 more chronicles from my book, "True Love." If you want to know how an affair of the heart ends this tale, you can order "True Love" from Amazon.com.