"Oh Christ! This is terrible."
"It will stop if you will reach for a big breath,"—and I resigned myself. Men who are given the third degree have no stronger will than mine. I knew I was helpless. I must go through. I must surrender to that Circean voice.
I heard the doctor in a commonplace monotone say, "This is an unusual case—"—the rest of this sentence I never heard.
There was a long ray of gray light leading from my bed to my door.
I had opened my eyes. "I had not died." I had come through the
Valley.
"I wonder what he got."
In the broad part of the ray was my wife smiling, and stretching out to that unreachable door were others whom I recognized, all smiling. Things were dim, but my mind seemed definite.
"What did he get?" I had expected eternal mysteries to be unraveled. Either I would know, or not know, and I would not know that I would not know.
"He got a gall-bladder filled with stones and a bad appendix, and now you are to lie still."
Then to this the drama had come, the drama beyond all dramas—a handful of brownish secretions and a couple of pieces of morbid flesh!! Ah me!
I am doing well, cared for well, as happy as can be; have had none of my angina pains since the operation. And as I lie here, I contemplate [making] a frieze—a procession of doctors and nurses and internes, of diagnosticians and technicians and experts and mechanics and servitors and cooks—all, the great and the small, in profile. They are to look like those who have made their pretenses before me during the past year;—the solemn and the stupid; the kindly, the reckless; the offhand; the erudite, the practical; the many men with tubes and the many men with electrical machines. Old Esculapius must begin the procession but the Man with the Knife, regnant, heroic size, must end it.