I walked into a restaurant in a small town where I knew several of the people there. People were seated at long tables in an area that was raised about four feet from the entry floor level. Some waved and said hello, and I was feeling self conscious because I was wearing glasses. I walked through the seating area to the back to an area that had a stage curtain mostly open.
Behind it the floor was covered with thick, leather covered cushions – giant pillows three or four feet thick and maybe ten feet square. There were also columns of these same cushions attached to the wall so that the top of each cushion was about 6 feet above the one below. I bounced across the cushions and climbed up the wall level by level. When I was standing on the penultimate level I looked at the top level and didn’t like the way it was attached. There was a string attached to hooks in the wall, but the string looked frayed and the hooks didn’t look very substantial. I looked over at the column to my right and that top cushion, which was up against the ceiling on its right, was attached by a series of tacks that had been pounded into the window frame and the wall. Neither one looked safe. I was probably thirty feet above the floor at this point, so even though the floor cushions were thick, I didn’t want to risk having a wall cushion give way and dump me.
I came back down to the floor level and walked along behind the curtain where I noticed lots of gift baskets sitting on a table. They were filled with flowers and little knickknacks and toys. There was a gift card attached to each one and I recognized my Mom's handwriting on the cards. I was curious whether there was one for me, but there wasn't really anything I wanted in them and I didn't think she would appreciate me snooping, but sure enough, my name was on one of the cards.
Later I was walking through a hallway with concrete floor and ceiling and concrete block walls in the basement of a hospital when I noticed what looked sort of like the cap of a mushroom lying on the floor. It was flat, about an inch thick, and about four inches in diameter, but not perfectly round. I picked it up and it had the texture of a piece of raw meat. I sliced it into little half inch cubes, but didn’t cut all the way through, so they were still all attached.
Then I went into a classroom and a teaching surgeon came in with the thing I had just cut up. He proceeded to talk about the possible ways to reconnect the cut up tissue so that it would work again. He settled on glue, which he proceeded to apply in the cuts. Somehow in this process he reshaped it so it was now thinner, narrower and twice as long. He had a patient already on the operating table with his lower left leg exposed and cut open on the outside of the leg and he put the tissue in it. I couldn’t really see what he did, but he must have been attaching blood vessels to it. Then he closed the incision and stitched it up. He applied electric current a few times and declared that it had beaten on its own up to five times. He said they would continue the treatment and he was confident that it would begin to beat on its own permanently.
I was horrified that I had randomly cut up what was to be implanted as a heart in someone. I thought I should tell the doctor, but I was worried about liability and worse, that I may have prevented someone from being able to recover. The fact that the heart wasn’t working on its own meant the patient had his normal heart or some temporary blood pump working, but the fact that they were doing an implant in his leg obviously meant all was not well up in the chest. I wondered about the implications of having the heart so low in the body. It seems like that would cause the pressure on the heart to be much higher.
I went out into the hallway with the surgeon to tell him what I’d done when I noticed that he was coughing, a lot. He said he thought he had TB and was concerned that several people in the hospital had it. It didn’t seem right that he would be doing surgeries, even wearing a mask, but I wasn’t sure how contagious TB was.
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