The brightening day beyond another storm

I think God was telling me something. He came at me with snow and hail and freezing temperatures to order my sorry butt back to work, so here I am. If there are three people I don’t mess with, it is God, my wife and the managing editor.

The wind, which had blown calamity into L.A., is still doing a devil’s dance in the high branches of the oak trees that surround our house, whipping about like ballerinas on speed. But the muscular part of the storm is past.

In actuality, I am not egotistical enough or religious enough to believe that a god was doing all of that just for me, but it was a good reminder that chaos exits, and it was time to return to a world of words and a world of you.

Even Ventura Boulevard, not exactly a street of dreams, looked good as Cinelli drove me home from Tarzana hospital past miles of pizza parlors, nail salons and shoe stores. It was already raining slightly, a prelude for what was in store, and the air glistened with an approaching cold front.

Heart surgery, which is what I had undergone, is not exactly a stroll down the Champs-Elysees, but I have come through it, as I somehow manage to survive just about everything. I have pretty much decided that I am meant to die not under a surgeon’s knife but face to the storm, yowling like a wild dog, battered by sticks and stuck with bayonets, but still crawling forward, a sneer on my lips and a growl in my heart.

I was told about eight months ago that my aortic valve needed replacing, that it was only this big (picture tightly encircled thumb and forefinger) when it should have been this big (ditto, only slightly larger). Six months later, we took another test that showed the valve opening to be only this big, and not even that big.

My cardiologist and a surgeon suggested that I get the valve replaced. Put a little pig in my life. I respond to experts the way I responded to gunnery sergeants back in my Marine Corps days, which was without hesitation or even a lot of forethought. Just do it, by God, and don’t look back. So I said OK.

Cinelli was with me all the way, assuring me that I was too stubborn to die and joking that I could just tell my readers I was away for cosmetic surgery or drying out at the Betty Ford Clinic, both of which are popular and acceptable excuses for sudden disappearances in the City of Angles. Taking time off to get a pig valve implanted in my chest just isn’t that sexy.

Surgery was performed with the finesse I had come to expect at the little hospital on the corner. But then for reasons that seemed to escape everyone, air seeped into my system and I inflated like the Pillsbury Doughboy. I had to be deflated before I floated away. So, OK, that was done and I came home.

It is approximately 12 feet from the couch in our house to the bathroom, a trip I can make under normal circumstances, striding and whistling, in just a few seconds. But when I came home, it was a climb up the north face of Mt. Everest, and because of a diuretic I was taking, the climb never ended. So I stopped the pills, in a kind of Walter Mitty “To hell with the blindfold” attitude toward a firing squad.

This contributed to a buildup of fluid in my system that made breathing even harder and sent me back to the little hospital to catch hell for not taking the diuretics.

At one point I had three cardiologists hovering over me, all of them wearing expressions that indicated they were less than happy with me as a patient. It was a scary moment.

Three days later, emptied of the excess fluid and breathing pretty normally, I was rolling down Ventura Boulevard, on my way to recovering the life I had before, 30 pounds lighter from the trauma to my body and an inability to ingest hospital food. I am emotionally incapable of eating at a place where even the chicken doesn’t taste like

chicken. In chromatic terms, it all tasted, well, gray.

I realize that hospitals are not constituted to satisfy gourmet tastes, except for those on the Westside with celebrity suites, but when I couldn’t tell the difference between the cake and the meatloaf, I pretty much gave up eating, except for fruit and Jell-O, thereby ending up with the gaunt appearance of a wartime refugee.

But I am back now to say how much you buoyed my spirits with your hundreds of e-mails, letters and telephone calls, asking that the angry old dog return, snapping and growling and baying at the moon. I will never be able to personally reply to all of your good wishes, but I am indebted to each of you. We connected in my duress.

I know that I have recovered enough to write again because God has stilled the storm and stopped the treetop ballerinas from dancing in the wind, and I am less inclined to even mention Ventura Boulevard ever again in the same breath as the Champs-Elysees. So welcome once more to this noisy little column in this quiet little corner, where clowns dance with kings, and all things are possible.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.