ometime media and entertainment play a larger and unifying role in things.

I had pretty important surgery today. There was 70% blockage of some of my blood passages in my heart. To make things worse, it’s called “The Widowmaker”. Happy thought, especially since in the week following the diagnosis, I suffered an episode of small but sharp pains right from that area. Of course, like your automobile, by the time I went back to the cardiologist’s urgent care it had stopped and I was fine. No sign of anything.

That made me more than happy to follow the doc’s recommendation and get stents put in.

Day of surgery. I was a bit nervous (anyone who goes into surgery without a bit of nerves is an idiot). Stripped down, got shaved, bid goodbye to my wife. Laid back. Two nurses were in there, one young and one middle aged. Thinking about how they were going to be inserting tubes inside me, coming in from my right wrist, through the heart and over to the left side, I could only imagine how amazingly weird and wonderful this was. No one could have imaged this fifty years ago. And that made me think of…

“Wow – this is better than Fantastic Voyage!”

Of course, since they were young and I am old, they’d never heard of the movie. For the rest of you who might not have, the scifi tale (from 1966, nearly sixty years ago) is one where some sort of critical diplomat is injured in an assassination attempt. To save him, the doctors rely on a new technology, a literal “shrink ray”, shrinking a small team of experts (and Raquel Welch, or at least her breasts) and a minisub down so they can be injected into the body of the patient and repair the damage. It seems ludicrous that this was seen as a solution, but then again, we live in their literal future. No scifi writer ever gets it right.

Anyway, I was starting to explain all this when one of the operating team, a guy just a bit younger than me, comes in and overhears it. “Oh, Fantastic Voyage! Great flick!”

They thought we were nuts but we were laughing about how much things change (in the retrospect of sixty years). As he rolled me off, I chatted (like the nervous chatterbox I am) all the way to the operating chamber. “The submarine’s in the other room, ready to go,” he told me.

After I was moved to the table proper, my name and birthday asked (again), the lights adjusted and the tools and team assembled, the guy who’d transported me suddenly says, “Hey, survey: Who’s seen Fantastic Voyage?”

The young nurse, no. But the two middle-aged docs said yes (with a great deal of laughter, given the circumstances). One guy said that his mom drove him to a library in a neighboring county when he was young, just so he could check it out. And lots of voluptuous wet suit jokes. It was all very warm and inviting and I finally came down from my nervous peak.

Though I was quite surprised when Doctor Jamnadas, a respected Indian cardiologist, came in and heard the conversation. “Oh yes, I’ve seem that film! Wonderful flick!”

Then we settled in an got to work. I looked at the projected cherry blossoms on the ceiling, listened to the chatter of the team.

“A submarine?” the nurse said quietly at my side. “That’s weird.” A gentle laugh.

Me, I could only smile and reflect on what differences sixty years makes.

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