A warning: What’s ahead is probably the very darkest part of this miserable, goddamn, already-dark story. Turn back, if you like; I won’t blame you. My brain, at this point in my illness, was about as useful as a lobster forgotten in a steam pot. Then one of the imaginary cooks would say: “WHO LEFT THIS LOBSTER IN THE STEAM POT? BECAUSE IT’S COMPLETELY USELESS NOW. GREAT.” And he’d be right. In fact, instead of reading this section I suggest finding a quiet ice cream parlor and treating yourself to a bowl of strawberry ice cream. Strawberry ice cream never tastes better than it does in October for some reason. And the creepy guy who works the counter could really use some company this time of year.

Things lighten up considerably after this, promise. Last chance for strawberry ice cream.

Here we go.

The morning of the operation I was wheeled from my room to what seemed to be a very remote part of the hospital. Considering the fact that I was only minutes away from having my chest opened up with a saw and my heart handled by human hands and ogled by human eyes—the first-ever (and last-ever, I hoped) handling-ogling of my heart—the section of the hospital that we had arrived in looked surprisingly gloomy and abandoned. It looked less like a part of the hospital where I could have a heart operation and more like a department store that had been closed for a severe renovation.

The nurse who had guided me and my parents there assured us that we were indeed in the right place. A row of chairs stood in the center of an empty room. The three of us sat down to wait.

My father, not surprisingly, was taciturn as ever. He crossed his arms and stared at the wall across from us, blinking contemplatively every now and then behind the thick lenses of his eyeglasses. He looked like he could have been standing in line at an Arby’s. At the other end of the spectrum was my mother. She looks like a stoic Eastern European woman, like the kind who could skillfully pelt a village stranger with heads of cabbage. But that morning she was crying like she was auditioning for Shirley MacLaine’s role in “Terms Of Endearment.”

As for me, I was content to aimlessly wander through the fog-filled hallways in my mind. Moments of clarity for me were infrequent; when they did happen, they ascended through the foggy void like buoyant barrels coming up from the bottom of the ocean. When I first heard my mother’s crying that day, I knew that another barrel had begun its ascent. When it finally surfaced—splash—it took my impaired synapses a few minutes to understand what it was: to my surprise, it was embarrassment and resentment towards my mother for behaving so foolishly and melodramatically.

I realize that it is selfish and small minded to say that I resented my mother for acting this way moments before my surgery. However, on the plus side, I recognized this as a thought that a healthier me would have almost certainly had. My mother’s crying has always embarrassed me, especially when I’m the reason why she’s crying. And having this familiar kind of thought made me realize that some parts of my throttled brain must indeed still be working after all.

Then I thought what I have always thought when my mother is crying: Let the crying run its course. That’s always best in these goddamn situations. My father, who has also obviously seen and heard my mother cry many times over the years, and, like me, has been the cause of her crying, didn’t do anything that day, either. This dynamic, I would imagine, is commonplace in households like ours, where the mother is the sole representative of her gender. The men don’t cry because they tell one another that the men do not cry, and when the one woman cries, the men, 1. pretend that she is not crying, and 2. hope that the woman stops crying as soon as possible.

A nurse emerged from the operating room doors dressed head to toe in sea-green scrubs. A mask covered the lower half of his face. “We’re ready for you, Scott,” she said.

I’ve searched my brain for months now, but I have no memory at all of saying goodbye to my parents.

On the far side of the doors I was delighted to discover that the operating room was white and very modern-looking and appropriate. After the run-down “waiting area,” or whatever it was, the light in the operating room was clinical and bright, so bright that I had shield my eyes in the glare. This appeared to be the kind of place where my sternum could be sawed open and, yes, my heart could be handled and ogled.

In the center of the room on a raised table was what appeared to be an upside-down inflatable raft. I don’t ask questions in operating rooms, so when I was instructed to get into the raft, I got into the raft. Getting into the raft proved to be a bit of struggle. My leg got stuck on the raft’s rubbery side, despite having assistance from the strongest (and therefore possibly Eastern European) nurses. I kind of fell or rolled into the raft. It was not graceful. Once I was settled, I said, or at least I attempted to say, “I FEEL LIKE I’M IN A RAFT. HA, HA!”

I’ve had a number of operations in my life—surgeries on my weathered knees mostly. (I destroyed them by playing American football for 15 years like an idiot.) The thing I always remembered about the surgeries was the count-backwards-from-one hundred moment. It’s the moment when the doctors first open up the lines of anesthesia, when they always say, “Now count backwards from one hundred for me.” It is a trademark moment for me. And it’s not much more than a genuine moment; you have to be ready to enjoy it to squeeze as much as you possibly can from it. I don’t drink much anymore, but in this moment I feel like I’ve somehow managed to instantly consume 10 Canadian beers. In all my surgeries, I have personally never made it to ninety from the starting point of one hundred. I always drift off in a blissed-out sleep by the time we reach ninety-five or ninety-four at the latest.

But on this day, with this particular procedure and with this particular anesthesia, I don’t remember being told by anyone to count backwards from one hundred at all. My last thought on the operating table was this: Hey, when are you guys going to tell me to do the count-backwards-from-one-hundred thing? Because I’m ready now.

And that was it. Lights out.