I had not realized this:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney is still in the hospital after heart surgery in early July.

Daughter Liz Cheney says her 69-year-old dad is out of intensive care and hopes to return home this week. She tells “Fox News Sunday” that he’s already planning trips for fly fishing and hunting later this year.

Dick Cheney has been in the hospital for almost a month. I know that his daughter Liz says he’s all spunky are raring to go fly fishing, but she has zero credibility. This doesn’t sound like a normal recovery. Something is definitely wrong with the former vice-president’s overall condition.

After the operation, Cheney said in a statement that he was entering a new phase of treatment for what he called “increasing congestive heart failure.”

There’s definitely something poetic about this next part:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney is recuperating from surgery to implant the kind of mechanical pump now being given to a small but growing number of people with heart failure so severe that they would most likely die within a few months without it.

The pumps are partial artificial hearts known as ventricular assist devices, and they come in various models. Mr. Cheney’s kind is about the size of a D battery and leaves most recipients without a pulse because it pushes blood continuously instead of mimicking the heart’s own pulsatile beat. Most such pulse-less patients feel nothing unusual. But they are urged to wear bracelets or other identifications to alert emergency room doctors as to why they have no pulse.

It’s creepy that a man so many see as undead now is surviving without a pulse. But, for how much longer?

Dr. Frazier said he had implanted a total of 170 such pumps as of June 1, more than any other surgeon. Of those, 24 were in patients 65 and older and 11 of the 24 were in patients older than 70. The oldest was 76. Nine of the 24 have died, and seven of the nine did not leave the hospital. Six of the 15 survivors received heart transplants. The remaining nine are living with the pump. The longest survivor at his hospital had an implant in his 30s and has lived five and a half years.

Maybe a heart transplant can still save his life. Many of us have been recommending that course for a decade or more now.