Finding It: And Finally Satisfying My Hunger for Life (21 page)

I felt a sudden, sickening surge of dread and anxiety when I got a call that my mom was seriously ill. I was in New York, taping another appearance on the
Rachael Ray
show, when my brother Patrick tracked me down and gave me the news, which was developing so quickly that I felt like a CNN reporter in the field.

My parents had gone on a cruise to the Caribbean and had been at sea for a couple of days when my mom got sick. Her condition worsened quickly; the shipboard doctor determined it was her long-simmering heart-valve condition. From what my brother told me, she was fairly calm as the ordeal developed. I wasn’t surprised, as that is so in my mom’s character.

The ship’s crew was also prepared for such emergencies and kept her stable and comfortable until they got to a nearby island in the Florida Keys where she was taken off the ship and driven by ambulance to a small hospital. There, she was put in a bed in the
emergency room next to a guy who’d been gravely injured in a motorcycle accident. As she watched doctors work on him, she realized her own situation was also serious.

It was like a nightmare. After examining her, doctors pinpointed the problem as her bad heart valve and said she needed surgery. They weren’t equipped to perform such a major operation. They suggested she transfer to one of the larger cities in Florida. My father wanted her own doctors to do the operation in Arizona, which created another problem: how to get her home? None of the airlines would fly someone in her condition. As I said, it was a nightmare.

In the meantime, I was racing through my life in a way that challenged the calendar function on my computer. I kept cramming more and more onto my schedule. Wolfie was also in rehearsals for his school play
Death Trap
; Tony had gotten a job; and Tom was juggling work, me, and trips to Scottsdale to see his kids.

Then, wham-o: my brother called with the news about my mom, and suddenly time stopped. When it started again, nothing else mattered except my mom. I was constantly on the phone with my dad or my brothers, asking questions that didn’t have easy answers. What did the airlines say? Have you talked to her doctor? What do they think? How’s she doing?

Through this rough time of not knowing anything, we constantly sought updates and offered emotional support to my dad, as well as any other kind of support he needed. He was downright heroic. He kept my mom calm, monitored the island doctors, kept my mom’s doctor back home informed, and worked the phones, trying to find a way to get her back to Arizona.

I was unsure of what else to do with them more than three thousand miles away. I coped by cleaning the house and then
straightening up what I had just cleaned. I pushed worst-case scenarios out of my head and spent time thinking about the way my mom had run the house when I was little, making full breakfasts for five people in the morning, having lunches set out, and then making delicious three-course dinners at night. The woman had made chicken four thousand different ways. She had also kept the house immaculate. Her skill and efficiency now seemed implausible to me.

But so did this whole situation. We Bertinellis were slow-moving and fairly conservative. We didn’t have emergencies. As a result, I felt ill-equipped, frustrated for not being able to do more, and impatient. I wanted to do something, but there wasn’t anything that could be done.

I said a lot of prayers. I even prayed that I wasn’t overloading God with too many prayers. I was like that girlfriend who can’t stop calling: “Hey, it’s me again.”

Finally, my brother called with good news. He said that my dad had worked out a way to air-vac my mom to Arizona, where her open-heart surgery was already scheduled. We weren’t out of the woods yet by any means. But all of a sudden I felt hopeful.

My brothers Pat and David picked me up at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport and took me straight to the hospital. We were able to visit with my mom before her operation. She was weak but ready and confident. I wish I could have said the same about me. As we sat with her, my brothers and I tried not to show how scared we were. My dad, despite a brave face, was also frightened.

I understood. He and my mom had been together fifty-plus years. I tried to imagine all the thoughts going through his head.

Funny enough, it was my mom who reassured us that she would come through the operation. She had faith in her doctors, who were very positive. She also reminded us that she had spent the past few years losing nearly 50 pounds and exercising herself into better shape to prepare for this exact procedure, which for years she had known would be inevitable. She gave us the thumbs up.

In that touching little moment, I was reminded of how important it was to learn to appreciate your life before you get to the point where my mom was, lying in a hospital bed and putting your fate in the hands of doctors. My mom was way ahead of me.

As we gathered in the waiting room, I knew that she was going to make it. I wasn’t filled with a dreadful sense of imminent bad news. I trusted that instinct. Nevertheless, I was scared and ready to cry at any moment. I was most unsettled from seeing my dad so worried and vulnerable. He was a man who had always been in charge, and now he wasn’t.

Thank goodness the signs on the wall prohibited food and beverages in the area. I was sure the hospital officials who had put them there knew that most people coped with stressful situations, and especially surgeries, by eating, and if left to themselves, the waiting room would likely resemble a herd of cows grazing in a field of Cheetos and cookies.

I drew support and comfort from being with my dad, my two brothers, and my sister-in-law Stacy. No one goes through life alone, and this was proof of how much we needed one another, especially family. In some ways, it was, if not a bonding experience, an opportunity to re-bond. We told stories from our childhoods, remembered good times, and shared laughs that we might not have otherwise had.

In a way, it was like an answered prayer. I had prayed for
strength and God had delivered a way for all of us to get through this ordeal without breaking down into a million pieces. He’d brought our family together, and the five of us made each other stronger.

After about four hours, my mom’s surgeon walked into the waiting room still wearing his surgical scrubs. He told my dad that Mom had made it through the surgery without a single glitch and was still asleep in ICU. All of us huddled around so we could hear. Then we hugged my dad and each other.

Early the next day, I went for a power walk before going back to the hospital to see my mom. She was on major pain medication, but doing much better than I’d expected, given that it had been less than twenty-four hours since surgeons pulled her chest open, took out her heart, attached new valves, and then put everything back together. Talk about miracles. I needed weeks just to rearrange my pantry.

I also marveled at my mom’s attitude as much as I did at modern medicine. She had never doubted that she would come through, and her belief had provided the rest of us with faith and hope, the two keys to everything. She had lost weight to give herself the best chance of surviving the major operation she knew she had to have—and when it was time, she approached it as if she were going to sail through because she still had a lot of living she wanted to do.

Still, it was jarring to see her hooked up to monitors in the ICU and waiting to be moved to her own room, so after leaving the hospital I finally opened my tear ducts and let myself cry.

Like it or not, all of us are going to reach the end someday. It’s non-negotiable. But we do have a choice about
how
we live. We can
either wait for the end in a gloomy funk, carping and complaining, blaming and bitching; or we can approach each day as if it’s an opportunity to feel good and do better, and to be more patient, forgiving, and helpful.

Less than a week later, my mom was moved into a private room. I stuck around a few more days, then flew home and caught up on everything that I had put on hold. Tom reminded me that I was in time to see all four of Wolfie’s performances in the school play. He saw me grimace and gave me a bear hug.

“It’s going to be great,” he said.

“But how come his father only has to go to one performance and I have to go to all four?”

“Because you’re his mom.”

He was right. My mom had driven me to every rehearsal and taping of
One Day at a Time
for almost six years—until I turned eighteen and didn’t need a guardian on the set anymore. I went to Wolfie’s shows and participated enthusastically in the standing ovation all of the parents and relatives and friends gave after each performance. As Tom can attest, even though I might have complained once or twice and mentioned that I had already seen the original on Broadway, the truth is, I’m a softie—and I enjoyed every minute of it.

Normally I turn my attention to Thanksgiving about a week or ten days before Turkey Day actually arrives. That’s usually enough time to confirm which family members are able to show up, organize who will cook what, and start working out a little harder in preparation for the annual feast. But this year I began thinking about the holiday as soon as I flipped my calendar to November.

As far as I was concerned, I had more to be thankful for this year, starting with my mother’s recovery, which was going as planned. Everybody else was great. My life was moving forward, my weight was still down, and I was about to tackle a new goal that would get me in even better shape. Then there was Obama, who looked as if he was about to become America’s next president. Like so many millions of Americans, I was swept up in the excitement and hope of change.

With all the time I was spending in Arizona, though, I was
careful not to say Barack Obama’s name out loud around my father. My dad had gone through a hard enough time with my mother’s surgery. I didn’t know if he could handle a Democrat in the White House.

I wanted to assure him it would be okay. I really wanted to say, “Don’t worry. He couldn’t do any worse than Bush and Cheney.” But the truth of the matter was, my dad and I avoided the subject as much as possible, which was not an easy task since we spent most of the time sitting with my mother, watching TV. And they liked to watch the news. They knew everything that was going on, from the major headlines to the minor stories and the scuffles that served as filler.

The trouble was, they preferred Fox News. Despite my dad’s long marriage and devotion to my mom, I sometimes felt that he had a stronger relationship with Bill O’Reilly. On the other hand, I preferred reading
The Week
. More than once, I heard my mom say, “Andy, don’t watch Fox in front of Valerie. She’ll put a hex on us.”

The upcoming election was all any of us talked about, but we didn’t do it too much when we were together. With other topics scarce, I told my parents that I was thinking about getting into a bikini in the spring for a new Jenny Craig ad campaign. I even managed to make it seem politically inspired.

“Really?” my dad said.

“Yup…”

“How do you feel about that?”

“It’s a time for hope,” I said.

My mom laughed.

“Good for you,” she said.

Actually I had decided that I wouldn’t start working earnestly
to get into bikini shape until after the election, Thanksgiving dinner (and leftovers), and Christmas. Based on my previous conversation with Jillian Michaels, I suspected that I would have to train like an athlete to get my body into a place where I felt comfortable seeing myself in a bikini, the prerequisite before I stepped in front of a camera; and I didn’t think I could buckle down with the temptation of holiday goodies.