Artificial heart

For reasons that were unclear, I had to get an artificial heart. The surgeon first gave me a temporary one, for use until the custom-made one was ready. He said that I had to take it easy as this one couldn’t keep up with heavy exertion. The thing was outside my body, connected by several long tubes. It had to be kept level to work right, and the battery had to be kept charged. I tried not to move around much, but even so, the tubes kept getting snagged on things. If they got caught, they would pull off of a connector, and I’d have to get them hooked up again very quickly. The connectors had valves to keep fluid from leaking out when disconnected.

When I went back to get the permanent one, I was surprised that it actually consisted of two external units, and seemed to have all the drawbacks of the temporary, except that it could keep up with exertion.

When I got home, I immediately had a problem with it; one of the units started leaking some strange thin blue liquid. The doctor said to put it in a bucket, and bring it back in the following week, but I was very concerned about it, and insisted that he look at it immediately. He was pissed off because he was attending the opening performance of a classical concert series directed by his son, and had to leave that to see me.

He looked it over and said that the blue fluid was nothing to worry about, and that it was completely normal. But while I was in his office, it started leaking more and more rapidly. The bucket kept overflowing. The doctor got very impatient with me, and seemed to think that the problem was somehow my fault, but wouldn’t explain what I was doing wrong.