This is the first time I see inside my body: on the left of the operating table is a screen on which is projected an image of my cardiac arteries. What I see reminds me of a branching plant. One very thin, almost transparent twig had begun to grow and lengthen. Behind that growth was an unknown, delicate procedure that the doctor applied to my blocked artery, so as to break through the blockage and enable the normal flow of blood. Instantly I felt indescribable relief. The same procedure was applied to the other artery: I watched as the branch grew before my eyes.

And that was it. The pain in my throat and pressure in my chest disappeared. The moment of liberated breathing was so refreshing that all trace of tiredness left my body. This made me want to straighten up, to get off the operating table and walk.

Full of oxygen.

The theater unexpectedly emptied, for a short time I was alone, and I heard a buzzing but didn’t know what was making the sound. A machine? Or a fly in the air?

Then the room filled up with human voices again. None of them took any notice of me. They were discussing the previous night’s episode of the television series Big Bang Theory.

And they were laughing.

An African American girl leaned over me and asked: “Would you like me to bring some water?”

I said: “Yes, please.”

Someone else in the room was describing how he had spent half an hour that morning stuck in an elevator. The person responsible for the elevator had finally appeared, and when he had been freed, he felt, he said, “like a Chilean miner who had just been brought out of the earth into the sun.”

I drank water out of a plastic cup. And I couldn’t remember when I was last so aware of the taste of ordinary, sweet water.

From the operating theater, lying on a narrow stretcher, I was taken by elevator to the ward. I was accompanied by two young people in hospital coats; they weren’t in a hurry to go anywhere, they were talking, laughing, and easily forgot my presence. They could have been lovers. In their company, I felt my primary characteristics returning to my body. When we entered the elevator, it turned out that my height in a horizontal position was such that they had trouble fitting me into the moving box of the elevator. And when the doors closed, I could feel them rubbing against my feet as we moved.

All the people I meet today disappear. They vanish before I have a chance to say goodbye. Those two young lovers who had been chirruping and laughing in the elevator as they took me from the lower to the upper floors, they, too, left without my noticing the moment of their departure.

In my ward, a new nurse settled me in the bed and said: “Lovely bedspread.”