Cardiography: After open-heart surgery

Ben Lerner's (paywalled) essay on his open-heart surgery for The New York Review is something else. Gruelling, but beautiful.

As she removed the tape and cleaned the tips of the wires where they protruded near my lower sternum, I asked her what kind of pain I should expect. I’d been told the wires were “gently tacked” to the outermost layer of my heart wall. She said that patients rarely reported pain. [...] What people report, the nurse explained, is that it feels like mice scurrying in their chest. Wait, more than one patient has said this thing about mice? I asked. Yes, she said. A lot of people have told me that.