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My last post — an angry rant about the commercialization of 2011 Canada Reads — was intended to be my last post, period. I was, at the time, crawling to the finish line of an English degree. Overwhelmed with papers and exams, I didn’t have the time to write for fun, or more importantly, to read for fun, a vital component of my blog’ s theme.

Nevertheless, here we are, and here I am, sending my inane thoughts out into the ether. Why? First, I finished that pesky university degree. Second, I found myself in a situation that demanded a good deal of bed rest and lazing about.

The upside of major surgery is the vast acres of time spent with books. I spent a lot of time over the last two months sitting front of the fireplace, propped up with pillows, drinking tea and eating toast, with a stack of newly acquired novels at my side (mostly gifts from well-wishers, thanks everybody!).

In explanation of why I had surgery, I will try to be brief. I was born with a faulty heart valve, and, for many years, I managed  with this dysfunctional valve, until I didn’t. So I had my aortic valve and part of my aorta replaced with mechanical parts. Yup, I had open heart surgery. The grandaddy of surgeries.

The downside of open heart surgery: the medical team cracked my chest open like a walnut, stopped my heart, took a bunch of stuff out, and replaced it with foreign objects, wired my sternum bone back together, and sewed me up.

If that’s not enough, they put me in a hospital room with a 75 year-old Italian lady with a voice like a Muppet, who never stopped talking, even when she was sleeping, and who did not have the decency to hold the back of her gown together when she took trips to the washroom.

THEN,  after I was discharged, I had to go BACK into the hospital (I got to ride in a speeding ambulance, wheee!) and have a pacemaker implanted to correct a post-op complication called “heart block.” Basically, pre-pacemaker, I had the heart rate of a geriatric sloth.

Prior to this traumatic  experience, I was forced to reevaluate some of my values and beliefs. I knew I was going to have a bit of hospital stay, which meant I would require books. But books are cumbersome, and I never really know what I’m going to be in the mood to read, and I didn’t want to make the husband lug my entire library to my hospital room. So, I bought an eReader. I know. I know! I once wrote a post in which I poo pooed the digital book.

Regardless, I have a Sony Reader Touch and, well, I love it. It’s very compact and light, which I thought would be important. And, it can be easily read one-handed, which really came in handy (ha!) following the pacemaker surgery when I couldn’t really use my left arm because it felt like someone embedded a brick in my shoulder.

eReaders are still relativity new technology, so they are also good conversation pieces. Having the reader with me in the hospital gave me something to talk to the nurses about other than my bowel movements.

Thanks to Sony Corporation, I had lots of literature to keep me amused during recovery. As part of my pre-op preparation, I loaded up my reader with a dozen or so books including Kafka on the Shore by Murakami, Never Let Me Go by Ishiguro (which, in retrospect, was a mistake considering all its references to organ donation surgeries), and the teen sci-fi thriller The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.

Cover of The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games was particularly fun and I finished it in under two days. It’s my favorite genre: the dystopia  universe novel. Just in case the one person who is not familiar with this book is reading this blog, I will give a brief synopsis: North America doesn’t exist anymore , and the totalitarian Capitol rules all. Regions are divided into districts where people are deprived of basic necessities. Every year the government hosts a survivor-type game show in which two teens (aged 12 to 16) from each district are chosen (by lottery) to play. The game involves hunting and killing each other until one kid is left standing. The winner receives a lifetime of spoils (food, clothing, shelter) and his or her district receive extra rations for a year.

As I lay in my hospital bed reading The Hunger Games, a small concern popped into my head. No, I was not worried about hungry teenagers trying to kill me, nor was I worried food shortages, and I was not particularly worried about how I was going to recharge my new favorite toy, the Sony Reader, in the uncivilized world. My thoughts turned again and again to one nagging little question: Who the hell is going to recharge ME after the apocalypse?? Pacemaker batteries only last five years.

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