Boom Boom Boom

I came home from the hospital on Friday evening feeling a little dopey.  They'd done what the attending doctor called 'A little light surgery,' with the kind of grin that is intended to make you think he's done this kind of thing so many times before it's like boiling an egg.  As my sister knows, to her cost, boiling eggs is harder than it looks, no matter how many times you've done it before.  Especially when someone has very cunningly syringed all the egg-white out and replaced it with nitroglycerine.  There was very definitely face on her egg by the time she was finished.  But the doctor was keen for me to think that this was straight-forward, and I was keen to get home in time to watch 'Demolishing Property,' an American reality-tv show where they secretly buy people's homes then demolish them in front of them in a series of increasingly unbelievable 'accidents'.  So I may have been a little pre-occupied, as, it turns out, was the doctor.
As the evening wore on, the drugs wore off, and I became a little more interested in what they'd done.  I knew that he was supposed to have been checking my pacemaker, and I prodded the stitches on my chest with the kind of morbid curiosity that causes us to pull scabs off when they're not yet healed.  Especially when they belong to the kids next door, who are guaranteed to scream and run to their parents.  I was surprised to find that it all felt a bit... lumpy under the skin.  And rather more solid than I remembered.  But then Demolishing Property restarted and a tree surgeon managed to 'accidentally' land a tree on the house, causing one of those little jumps in continuity that means they did more damage than they'd intended, and I was engrossed again.
I went to bed shortly after that, feeling suddenly tired and with a little bit of an ache in my breast-bone that I put down to the operation.
I woke up in the early hours of the morning to the drum-beat from 'The Lion sleeps tonight' thudding in my ears.  It's a song I particularly despise, so this was not a pleasant awakening.  As I lay there, wondering which neighbour was so rash as to incur my wrath, I suddenly realised that I couldn't hear anything other than the drum-beat.  And with that realisation came the far more worrying one: what I could hear was my blood.
I calmly placed two fingers on the artery in the side of my neck and took my pulse.  Then I took it again, slightly less calmly.  Without a doubt, my pulse was beating out the drum-line from that wretched song.  I sat up, and immediately felt dizzy.  As I did so though, I felt something shift very slightly in my chest, heard a faint click that might have been my imagination, and the drum-beat in my head stopped.  I leaned back against the pillows, tense and listening to see if it would start up again, my fingers hovering anxiously near my neck, ready to check if this was all just some horrible hallucination.  For long seconds everything seemed still and quiet.
Then the drum-beat from 'Tom Sawyer' started up, and without realising what I was doing, I let out a howl of anguish: Canadian prog-rock!  I checked my pulse and confirmed that if this was a hallucination, it was affecting all of my senses, and then wondered if I could live with myself if I had to listen to these awful songs all the time.
The phone rang then, its ring-tone of the opening of the 1812 overture tinny but welcome as a note of musical taste in my newfound aridity.  I answered it, and the voice on the end sounded surprised.
"Oh!  I thought you'd be asleep!"
"I was, but I was woken by something else.  Something... dreadful."  I can't resist the opportunity to be melodramatic.
"This is Doctor Steves, from the hospital?  We think there may have been a slight mis-adjustment during your surgery today."
"That would explain why I'm awake and near panic," I said.  "What kind of mishap, exactly?"
"Well, we seem to have misplaced my anaesthetist's drum-machine."
"And does your anaesthetist have execrable taste in music?"
"I can't really comment on that, but if it is currently connected to your pace-maker as we suspect, we'd like you to come back in to the hospital RIGHT NOW."
"Don't shout.  What's the hurry, anyway?"
"...He's got two drum-solos in there that reach 180 beats per minute."
I hung up and wondered what my chances of getting to the hospital alive really were.