Revisiting my operating room with Miles and Jasper tagging along

Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time, September 10, 2023

(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)

Revisiting my operating room with Miles and Jasper tagging along

Brothers and sisters: owe nothing to anyone except to love one another.

My new heart valve is made of cow tissue. Afternoon visitors were talking about this when Miles and his mom came to the hospital to see me. Andi noticed that my room was just across the hall from where Margaret spent most of July 2021. Everyone sat down, we admired the Tomita artwork, watched the animated video of what had happened inside my heart and ate chocolate ice cream from those cool little cups with the paper lids. Blue Bunny ice cream, made with milk from Iowa cows.

Back at home Miles was showing Jasper the videos and pictures he had made of all the goings-on, including a few echocardiogram pictures that Corey took while they were visiting. “And Grandpa’s heart is full of Kleenex now,” he told his brother. They fixed his heart with tissues that came from a cow!”

Jasper’s eyes were wide of course, as they are in a child full of natural wonder like that boy. He closes his eyes to sleep, but that’s about all. He misses nothing.

The commandments are summed up in this saying, namely, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

I am imagining how the rest of this conversation might have gone.

“Were they poopy tissues?” Jasper couldn’t help it. His mind was taking him astray, and he had to say it. “Cows poop a lot. So does Grandpa.”

Miles laughed. “I don’t know. I hope not. But … maybe … “

“We can ask Grandpa when we see him again.” Jasper sounded hopeful.

“I don’t think he knows,” Miles said. “He was asleep.”

“I poop a lot too,” Jasper exclaimed. His eyes were still open wide.

“But we were talking about Grandpa’s heart, not your poop!” Miles giggled, but I think he was getting kind of grossed out. Where was their mom and dad when he needed them?

“Why was Grandpa sleeping when such an important thing was happening to him?”

Jasper wouldn’t have been asleep.

“They might have hurt him, and he didn’t want to feel it.” Miles thought that sounded about right. Then he was looking ahead.

“Besides, they had to get the cow from Iowa, and bring her to the hospital, and get her on the elevator, and push her down the hall into the operating room, and turn the lights down low so they wouldn’t scare her, and then get her tissues out of her. And Grandpa said it was cold!” Now Miles eyes were wide too. He saw everything passing right in front of him.

“And then they had to push those tissues into a little ball, and … well, look at the video … they pushed them up into Grandpa’s heart, and the cow probably started getting cold and wanted to get out of there and pooped right on the floor …”

Jasper really laughed then, and he picked up the storyline. “And it splashed, and made a pile of poop, and the doctors and nurses had to step around it, and sometimes they missed because the light was shining on Grandpa, not the floor, and they had to really clean up afterwards, right Miles? But what happened to the cow then?”

Miles wasn’t sure. “Well they were probably pretty mad because she pooped right in the middle of everything.

“I think they made a bbq and ate her.”

“Yeah. They would have been really hungry after all that work. But no jalapenos. We don’t like jalapenos! Grandpa likes them, but we don’t, right?”

Miles nodded his head hard.

“I just love Grandpa!”

 “Me too!” And Miles nodded his head hard again.

And Jesus told them, “If two of you agree on earth about anything for which you are to pray, it shall be granted by your heavenly Father.”

(Ezekiel 33, Psalm 95, Romans 13, 2 Corinthians 5, Matthew 18)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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