Brian Doyle - Wet Engine: Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart

My son Liam was born nine years ago. He looked like a cucumber on steroids. He was fat and bald and round. He looked healthy as a horse. He wasnt. He was missing a chamber in his heart, which was a problem, as you need four chambers for smooth conduct through this vale of fears and tears, and he only had three chambers, so pretty soon he had an open-heart surgery, during which doctors cut him open and iced down his heart and shut it down for an hour or so while they worked on repair.

That was when he was about six months old. I dont remember much about that time. It all rushed past like a pain train.

Then when he was about eighteen months old he had another open-heart surgery, during which they did all that again, and what I most remember from that time is his grinning face receding down the hallway as he was carried toward the bone shears by a sweet quiet doctor. Ill always remember that. His face was so round. His face bounced up and down a little on the doctors thin shoulder. He smiled at me at the very end of the corridor, just before he and the doctor turned the corner, and I thought maybe that was going to be the last time I ever saw that big fat face smiling at me, and that was when I saw pain and death leering at me closer than I ever saw them before. That was a cold moment. Ill always remember that.

Well, that wasnt the last time I saw my boy Liam, I am almighty happy to report, and now hes pretty much fine, although hes stubborn as a stone, and a grouch in the morning, and he gets tired more than he admits, and eventually he will have to get a new heart altogether, and he has been told by his genius heart doctor that he shouldnt play football or run marathons, neither of which I think he was thinking of doing anyway, the kid being a basketball nut first and foremost.

Now he is nine years old. Hes one of the most interesting and gentle people I ever met, and I am awfully glad that he didnt die.

His surgeries were years ago now, and his next surgery, the big one, when they take out his creaky old heart and pop in a new one, is ten or twenty or thirty years in the future. Dont worry about it, says his genius heart doctor, by then well have figured out something waaaay better than transplants.

So I dont worry about it, much. Sometimes I do worry about it a lot but I dont tell my wife because I know she worries too and I have learned there are some things, a lot of things, with which you shouldnt worry a wife.

But the days pass in their swirl and whirl and swing and song, and every day he doesnt die again, and that knocks me out.

So everything seems fairly normal these days. Liam runs around like an insane dorky gawky goofy heron and rides his bike and shoots hoop and skateboards and swings and punches out his brother and snarls at his sister and refuses to make his bed but he does actually set the table every night and help cook dinner sometimes and he does his homework pretty carefully when he doesnt leave his backpack at school and he eats more yogurt and grapes and blueberries than anyone Iever saw and his hair wont stay combed no matter what and hes a really good artist and he makes perfect pancakes and he is almost all the time a cheerful entertaining kind-hearted mammal whose company I really enjoy.

He gets sick and he gets well and his knees are knobby and he just got a perfect score on his spelling test yesterday and the days and nights pass in their magic music, each more beautiful than the last, each one so filled with joy and pain and shouting and sadness and mud and angst and dishes and milk and jam and bills and newspapers and underwear and coffee filters and insurance payments and flat tires and rain and crows that I want to weep with helpless happiness sometimes for no reason that I can understand one bit at all.

But not a day goes by, not one, that I do not think of my son tiny and round and naked and torn open and heart-chilled and swimming somewhere between death and life; and every day I think of the young grinning intense mysterious heart doctor who saved his life; and for years now I have wanted to try to write that most unwriteable man down, to tell a handful of the thousands of stories that whirl around him like brilliant birds, to report a tiny percentage of the people he has saved and salved, and so thank him in some way I dont fully understand, and also thank the Music that made him and me and my son and all of us; and somehow it seems to me that the writing down of a handful of those stories will