The cabin air inside Boeing 777-300ER Flight 882, cruising at thirty-six thousand feet above the freezing black expanse of the northern Pacific, carried the dry, recycled smell of synthetic upholstery, reheated catering trays, and twenty-four hours of human exhaustion.
I sat in seat 14A, a window seat on the port side just behind the bulkhead of the business cabin. My eyes burned with the gritty, hot ache that only forty-eight hours without sleep can inflict. I had just concluded a grueling six-day international symposium at the University of Tokyo’s Department of Cardiovascular Surgery, where I had performed two live-broadcast pediatric arterial switch procedures on neonates whose vascular structures were no thicker than wet silk threads. When the wheels of the airliner had retracted into the fuselage at Haneda Airport for the twelve-hour transit to Chicago O’Hare, my only ambition had been to pull down the plastic window shade, recline my seat two inches, and sleep until the descent over Lake Michigan.
