Lazarus [antikvár]

OneHe was a high man and a hard one. His great beak and his jutting jaw and his dark obsidian eyes gave him the look of an old eagle, imperious and hostile. Yet, faced with the evidence of his own mortality, he felt, suddenly, small and ridiculous.The surgeon, his junior by a quarter of a century, stood beside the desk, drew a sketch on a sheet of crested notepaper and explained it briskly.These are the two arteries on the left side of your heart. They are almost blocked with plaque, which is, in effect, the detritus from your blood stream. It builds up on the walls of the arteries, like scale on a water-pipe. The angiogram which we did yesterday shows that you have about five per cent of normal blood flow on the left side. That's the reason for the chest pains, the shortness of breath, the drowsiness and fatigue you have experienced lately. The next thing that will happen is this . . .'He sketched a dark globule with an arrow indicating the direction of its flow. 'A small blood clot travels along the artery. It lodges here, in the narrowed section. The artery is blocked. You have the classic heart attack. You die.''And the risk of that happening. . . ?''It's not a risk. It's an inevitable event. It can happen any day. Any night. Even now as we talk.' He gave a small, humourless laugh. 'To the pilgrims in St Peter's Square, you're Leo XIV, Vicar of Christ, Supreme Pontiff. To me, you're a walking time-bomb. The sooner I can defuse you, the better.''Are you sure you can?''At a purely clinical level, yes. We do a double bypass, replacing the blocked arteries with a vein taken from your leg. It's a simple plumbing job - the success rate is better than ninety per cent.''And how much life does that give me?''Five years. Ten. More perhaps. It depends on how you behave yourself after the operation.'