Giants, Dragons and Hernias: You were expecting, maybe Lord of the Rings?

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OK, so you don't want to hear about my surgery. I get that. Old men love to tell all about surgeries as if they were noble battles, slaying giants and dragons, the stuff of epic poems to be sung by troubadours. But nobody listens to troubadours anymore. Hardly anybody knows what a troubadour is anymore. (You could look it up.)

So, I'll spare you the gory details. But I should tell you why I dropped off the radar for over a month.

After I felt sick for a few days, my wife took me to the doctor. He shipped me off with Hatzalah EMS to the emergency room to be hydrated. He told them to take me to Maimonides hospital because "They have good doctors."

A few hours and a bunch of tests later, they sent me for a CAT scan. After the radiologists read the scan, the scene turned into a hospital suspense thriller. Suddenly, they started careening down the hall with my gurney, knocking people and furniture out of the way, rushing me to the operating room.

I had a strangulated hernia and needed emergency surgery. I found out later that the surgeon on call is known as top in the field, and her team all consider themselves privileged to work with her. In the elevator, my wife asked the surgeon if she knew what Psalms are. She didn't. My wife said, "Psalms are part of the Bible. And they protect you. Have you read the Bible?"

She said she did when she was a little girl. Then she added, "But before every surgery, I say a prayer."

My wife kissed her.

Part of the surgeon's expertise was knowing when to stop because my AFib (irregular heartbeat) made it dangerous to continue. Two days later, they completed the surgery.

The next weeks, I spent in Maimonides' surgical CU. I've read the ongoing discussions in Hamodia about Maimonides. I claim no expertise on the legal and political issues. One thing I do know is that anything Rabbi Aaron Twerski says is gold standard by me. I had no contact with management, only the surgical and nursing staff.

And excellent is a lame word for the treatment I got. It was careful care and caring care.

I also didn't gossip for four days. I couldn't badmouth anybody with a ventilator down my throat.

I said I wouldn't tell you the gory details. And I won't. But I do want to tell you about my art. I use that term because what I was creating made me think of NFT digital art — non-fungible token art that only exists online, but some of which brought heavy prices of cryptocurrency. (Don't ask me to explain NFTs or crypto; neither makes any sense to me.)

I'm not bragging, but my art was even more rare than NFTs. They could be shared online. My art, nobody could see it but me. It reminded me of a spoof of mail order advertising that became a favorite of mail order copywriters.

(I confess to having plied that trade for years.) The spoof was an article in The New Yorker by Bruce McCall. It was a kaleidoscopic ad for a product so rare you can't buy it.

"Dear Eminent Patron of the Mail Order Arts,

Imagine a collector's item so exquisitely detailed that each is actually invisible to the naked eye. Think of an heirloom so limited in availability that when you order it, the mint especially constructed to craft it will be demolished."

My art started with seeing what looked like a robot winking at me. It took a while to figure out that it was just a reflection of the monitor next to my bed. The winking was the flashing readings reflected on the black screen facing my bed.

Soon, I started seeing other things. They weren't dreams. I was awake. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw images forming. Some were discarded broken bits and pieces of plastic toys. Some were large scraps of machinery, strewn in some kind of junkyard. But they weren't in an open field. They were in dank chambers, down in subterranean levels. But they weren't caves. They seemed like forgotten underground levels of an abandoned parking lot.

Sometimes, the images were grotesque and frightening.

But they disappeared when I opened my eyes. Then I started seeing images with my eyes open.

At one point, superimposed over the other images, I saw a fuzzy image of two chassidishe guys. On impulse, I thought of trying to speak with them. Then I caught myself. If I actually engaged with any of my apparitions, I was afraid that I might step into a different realm, and who knows if I would ever make it back?

"There is a fine line between genius and insanity," Oscar Levant said. Then he added, "I have erased that line."

Thank Heaven, I am not close enough to either side of that line. And I don't intend to go there.

I'm writing this in rehab now. But I knew I was safely normal when I tasted the hospital coffee. (I found out it was all decaffeinated. I was shooting with blanks.) I was coming back to myself again. I trotted out the old line (that Lincoln never said):

"If this is coffee, I want tea. If this is tea, I want coffee."

(COMMENT, BELOW)

Mordechai Schiller is an award-winning columnist and headline writer at Hamodia, the Daily Newspaper of Torah Jewry, where this first appeared. His column has won two awards -- so far -- from the American Jewish Press Association.

Previously:
• From sly slurnalism to the big lie
• Are Jews really hardwired to be miserable?
• The Time Machine
• One big happy dysfunctional family
• Why Pay Less If You Can Pay More?
• Are We Having Font Yet?
• Why Smart People Do Dumb Things
• There is nothing so sad as a stupid Jew
• Asking For It