The bed is comfortable, sheets new, it has a three way adjustment control panel. Watching television suspended in mid air, waiting for the surgeon. Earlier a nurse has come and checked my veins and burrowed under the skin at the top of my hand and left a tubular device in there. I feel like a cyborg, part man, part machine as the catheter sits there like a periscope. It still is a bit prickly. I hear conversations in the corridor float by on naked footsteps on the linoleum. A feint whiff of antiseptic hangs in the air like sunshine- clean and free.

The surgeon comes in, I haven’t met this one before, he’s Indian, a bit pudgy in face, but full of enthusiasm for a good result. He checks charts and tells me I’ll be wheeled out in a few minutes. It’s a strange experience, lying on a bed, being wheeled down a corridor into a zone you’ve never been before, part fear and anxiety – flicking on and off in your mind like the indicator in a car, part curiousity and excitement wondering how this might taste, this experience. After being in the holding bay a few minutes the last 30 meters are covered. It’s a room full of lights and banks of LCD screens and five or six people standing around in gowns and masks. The bearish surgeon appears above me and explains what’s going to happen, how the probe will move up through my arteries and into my heart, I start to phase out as the anaesthetic kicks in.  There are flashes of disembodied memory occuring. Pictures on the LCD television, almost like an old time photoshoot with the man under the cape and the handheld flash.