Essays in Idleness

Let me beg the reader’s indulgence, for I have not been filing these Essays in Idleness every day or so, as I once did, and as some of you had come to expect. I could attribute this failure to “writer’s block,” for on too many occasions I set out to compose what I thought would be a snip, but found appropriate words to be unavailable.

This, in turn, may have had something to do with what Swift called, in his “Verses on the Death of Dr Swift,” to be, “That old Vertigo in his Head.” For in the time since my heart attack, and little adventure in open-heart surgery, I had at least one prompt stroke. It was entertaining, and I enjoyed the drug regime that went with; but since, I have remained dizzy, swirling, physically unbalanced. Indeed, I cannot amble constitutionally, without swaying from one side of the sidewalk to the other, like a common Parkdale inebriate.

The medical professionals, upon whom I try not to comment, keep checking upon me, or summoning me to call upon them. They are exhausting, but they have not been oppressively curious. The clearest account I have received was from one experienced “rehab” nurse who said that, to her experienced view, the surgeons had entirely cured my cardiac condition. Unfortunately, they had replaced it with a neurological condition.

But I am grateful that they left me alive.

My own theory of medicine is the ancient one. Various diseases are miraculously cured, “one fine day” — regardless of medical intervention. Various others prove fatal. I will hope for the first class, in which case, I will resume writing more frequently. If the second,  however, I must write less frequently, or not at all.