There had been premonitions. Back before he had had the surgery they had herded him into a room that contained a large medical hoop, plastic and metal, and had inserted him into it-not all of him, just his head and neck. A male nurse, a Croat or a Serb—unless it was an Albanian—had bluntly informed him that they would have to inject his body with contrast and that there was a chance, albeit minuscule, that this would kill him. Please sign here.
He signed. He waited patiently while the nurse attempted to insert an intravenous needle into one arm, failed, tried again, failed, and then called another nurse in to inflict the needle painfully but successfully into the other arm. He lay there as the bench he was on slid jerkily into the hoop, an apparatus within the ring spinning around, whirring. Then the whirring stopped. That's all? he thought, relieved.
But that was not all. As it turned out, that was only the test run.
When he was slid again deep into the hoop and the so-called contrast was injected, he felt a surge of intense, unbearable panic. It didn't last long, only a few seconds, but by the time it was done he was, he felt, no longer the same person. Or, for that matter, even a person at all.