It was about ten years ago, in
Paris. My eldest granddaughter and I
were walking briskly through the Champ de Mars, the Eiffel Tower looming large
to our left. But there was something
wrong. I realized that I was short of
breath, not feeling well at all, and that the episode of malaise was in fact
only a more extreme version of several others I had experienced in recent days and
could no longer plausibly deny. I told
Sophia what was wrong. She is a very
sensible, no-nonsense young woman.
“That’s not good,” she said. “You
better see a doctor.” Very soon after
that, through the intermediation of her mother, a no-nonsense type on steroids,
I found myself in a hospital consulting room in the presence of an important
academic cardiologist. It was then that
I learned that I had developed atrial fibrillation, an arrhythmia of the heart
that is common among the elderly. The
condition is not in and of itself intrinsically serious, but it increases the
possibility of the formation of blood clots, which in turn can trigger strokes—very
serious indeed. The preventive therapy
there is the use of chemical blood thinners.
Furthermore for some people, including me, the actual symptoms can
seriously impact the quality of daily life.
My doctor, like so many other
European specialists, had at some point spent time in Boston at “Mass
General”—that is, the Massachusetts General Hospital, the largest and most
famous of Harvard’s teaching hospitals. Though
we can’t seem to get it together to have a good national health system, we still seem to be near the top
of high-end boutique specialties. I
don’t know how long he spent there, but it is possible that his English was
better than my French. He certainly
wanted to believe so. The initial results
were, however, not encouraging. After
absorbing the symptoms, he moved confidently to diagnosis. “I zink I know what is wrong with you,” he
said. “Your heart is not working any
more.” After that I switched to French,
enabling blunders of a more amusing sort.
One of his secretaries offered me some “Scotch,” assuring me that they
had plenty in the office. I thought she
was offering me a reinforcing drink. She
was actually proffering transparent tape to seal up a rapidly expanding folder
of papers.
Anyway, it was in this conversation
that I first consciously registered the word ablation. I registered it in
French, of course, and had no idea what it meant, although the exact same word
is in common medical use in English. The
human mind, when faced with the unfamiliar or the unknown does its best to
transfer registers, and to cram the new thing into categories that are familiar
or at least known. What was quite
familiar to me was the oblation. I am after all an Anglican who has from time
immemorial been encouraged, “Let us with gladness present the
offerings and oblations of our life and labor to the Lord" --i.e., put something in the
collection plate. My doctor told me that
uhblation was one of the recognized therapies for atrial fibrillation, but one
that he himself regarded as rather radical and to be avoided when
possible. I was given to believe that,
as with so much else in the opulence of French culture, it was a matter of
local taste and custom. If I were in
Bordeaux rather than Paris, he said, they probably would be uhblating me that
very moment.
Words like ablation and oblation
demonstrate the power of tiny Latin prefixes.
The Latin verb ferre (meaning
bear, carry, or bring, among other things) is a common but troublesome one with
an oddball perfect participle, latus,
which shows up in the –lation part of
the two words. But an oblation is
something offered or brought to,
whereas an ablation is something removed, erased, or taken away from.
You can see, perhaps, why I was initially somewhat confused by my French
medical advice. But I have had ample
time to be brought up to speed during the past decade, and especially during
the past two days, when I was in the New York University hospital having a
cardiac ablation. When it comes to
hearts I am forced to believe that sometimes less can be more. In any event that is why this week’s post is
so self-reflexive, and a few hours tardy.
