Here Comes Trouble (13 page)

I took the doctor aside and asked him to explain to me what was going on.

“Your mother’s intestines are shot,” he said matter-of-factly. “We will more than likely need to take a piece of them out.”

“Are you sure that’s necessary?”

“If we don’t get in there, she could go into septic shock. The bacteria trapped in there may have already seeped through the lining of her intestine. This is a common procedure; I’ve done many of them. Shouldn’t take more than an hour or two. She should be fine.”

“Fine? How many of these did you say you have done?”

“I do one or two a year—and I’ve been doing this for thirty-some years. As it is now, I’m all you got ’cause I’m the only one here—and I think we should get going.”

We went back in the room and the nurse brought in some paperwork for my dad to sign. She then asked my mother to sign the consent form.

“Would you sign it for me, Frank?” she asked my dad.

He took the clipboard and signed it, slowly. We squeezed my mom’s hand and told her everything was going to be OK. She assured
us
everything was going to be OK. I fought hard not to cry. They took her away and we went to the lounge to wait for the hour or two.

Four hours later the surgeon had not come out, and a pall fell over the room. Whatever the news was, it wasn’t going to be good.

Finally, the doctor appeared.

“I think it went well,” he said. “She’s recovering fine now. We had to remove about a foot of her intestine. I’d say the chances for a full recovery are about 90 percent.”

Whew. You know how many times you’ve seen that doctor come through those doors—a thousand times—on TV shows and in the movies and it’s rarely good news. He explained to us that she will probably have to stay in the hospital for the better part of the week. He didn’t see any seepage through the intestinal lining and her vital signs were all good. In fact, we could see her within the hour as soon as she woke up.

We thanked the surgeon and, with a sense of relief, headed back to the intensive care unit. Well, there was no “unit” or ward at this hospital. They had a small ICU area with two rooms. That was fine, just fine.
She was OK!

When we went into our mother’s room, she was hooked up to all the standard monitors and IV tubes, but she was awake and alert and very happy to see us.

“Here I am,” she said, stating the obvious. I liked hearing that: first person, present tense.

“Well, the doctor says you made it through with flying colors!” I said to her, as I pulled up a chair beside the bed. My sister and wife and father were equally upbeat in their assessments of her condition.

“You’re gonna be OK, Mom,” Veronica said, giving her a kiss on her forehead. “In fact, you look pretty chipper there!”

Our only concern until this point had been the effects of putting such an elderly person under sedation. We had known of friends with not-good stories of what happened to their parents when knocked out with anesthesia. Sometimes all their memory didn’t return, at least not right away. I decided to give her a pop quiz.

“Hey Mom—you know what day this is?”

“Sure,” she said, “it’s Sunday.”

“Where did you and Dad go on your honeymoon?”

“New York. Boston. Albany.” (I know.
Albany.
Don’t ask.)

And now for the Final Jeopardy question. This was a family that loved to go to the movies.

“Where did you first see
High Noon
?”

“Cheboygan, Michigan. Nineteen fifty-two!” she responded without missing a beat. Wow. Crisis averted, roll credits!

Everyone pulled up a chair, and we spent the next few hours talking about the good times and growing up and Dr. Wall and the time he was “blocked” just before her wedding and how he too had to go to the hospital and almost didn’t make it. Never had discussions about enemas been so heartening.

The doctor and nurses on call would occasionally come in to check on her, change the IV bags, inspect the area where the surgery took place. She would doze off now and then, her body wanting to restore itself after the shock of surgery.

By 9:00 p.m. it was decided that we would take shifts and stay with her for as long as she was going to be in the hospital. I offered to take the first shift until the morning. Veronica and my wife took Dad and the kids back to the house. I got comfortable with a book and my ever-present legal pad, sketching out the final fixes I wanted to make to my film before its release in the fall.

Every now and then my mother would wake up and we would talk.

“I’m very lucky to have the family I have,” she said.

“We’re very lucky to have you,” I told her, patting a lukewarm washcloth on her face like she would do for us, so many years ago.

“I’m thirsty,” she said. She was not allowed to have any food or liquids, not even water, during these first twenty-four hours. All we could do was to let her suck on a little Q-tip that had a tiny moist sponge on its head. I held one up to her lips, and she sucked on it with some desperation.

“I’m parched.” I smiled. No one said “parched” in this century or the last.

“Lemme do this,” I said, as I took another one and rubbed it around her lips. Like an infant looking for its mother’s nipple, she grabbed at the little stick with her mouth, her tongue, her teeth, wanting more, more.

“Thirsty.”

“I think that’s all we can do for now, Mom. I’ll just sit here with you and we’ll do it again in a little bit.”

I sat in the chair next to her bed and got comfortable.

“Here,” she said, as she lifted her head off her pillows and tried to reach for one of them. “Take one of my pillows.”

I could not believe, in the state she was in, that she was worrying about
me
not having a pillow. And that even in her worst suffering, her instincts were still to be a mother, to look out for her son, to make sure he was OK, to allow him to fall asleep, to sleep peacefully and in comfort. On her pillow.

“That’s OK, Mom,” I said with a smile, trying to contain a laugh. “I don’t need a pillow. You keep it.” I arranged the pillow back in place, and her head now nestled in it comfortably.

“I love my kids. I have good children,” she said with a sweet, faint smile.

I put my hand on her face and gently combed her hair back with my fingers.

“We love you, too, Mom.” I felt lucky to have her as my mother.

A moment later the night nurse came in with an aide and said that she needed to give my mother some potassium in her medicine bag and change the top sheet of the bed. For my mother’s modesty and privacy, she suggested that maybe I could “just step out for a few minutes.” The nurse had hair fashioned into a long braid that extended down her back, the kind I guess you might see in a religious community. Her glasses were like something from the late seventies, and they framed a face that seemed frozen in time.

I left the room and went out in the hallway to wait. It wasn’t long before I heard sheer human panic.

“No—move her over. There! Stop! We’ve got a problem!”

I rushed back into the room to see my mother in what I later learned was a cardiac arrest. The nurse was panicked and confused and I suggested we get the doctor down here
NOW.

“Yes, right.” She picked up the intercom phone and paged the lone doctor in the ER.

My mother was struggling to breathe—gasping, gasping,
gasping,
her eyes locked on to mine as if to say,
Please help me!

“Everything’s going to be OK, Mom, hang in there!”

I turned to the nurse and demanded action. “We need the doctor in here now!
Do I have to go get him?
”

The doctor walked in and immediately saw what the problem was. “She needs to breathe! Where is the respirator?”

The little ICU at this small-town hospital did not have a respirator machine in the unit at that moment.

“Grab the portable!”
the doctor shouted. The nurse went and got a small plastic device that she tore out of a plastic bag, then tried to insert it in my mother’s mouth. She had it upside down.

“Here, give it to me!”
the doctor demanded. He took it from her, inserted it into my mother’s mouth, placing the tube squarely down her throat.
“Here, pump it like this!”

Jesus, oh Jesus, what the fuck was going on?
He was having to show a nurse how to bring air into a patient’s lungs?
This was madness. I wanted to jump in, help, do something, do CPR, something,
ANYTHING,
please God this isn’t happening!

While the nurse pumped, the doctor told the aide to go down to the ER and get the hospital’s lone ventilator. He worked on my mother, gave her a shot of something, massaged something, and the only good news in this moment was that the heart monitor never went dead, never flatlined. The heart was still beating, there was oxygen getting into the blood.

I picked up my phone and called the house. My sister answered.

“I think you guys better get here now,” I said, trying to disguise my panic. “Something’s happened. Don’t kill yourself getting here. She’s alive. But struggling bad. Come now!”

The ventilator arrived with another nurse, and the doctor wasted no time jamming the hose straight down my mother’s throat. Her eyes were no longer on mine. They were open, frozen, looking straight up and seemingly unaware of what was happening to her. At that moment a bolt of lightning struck the hospital and it lit up the room. I had not noticed that for the past fifteen minutes a thunderstorm had rolled in and was now in full fury. Deafeningly close thunder exploded, and the lightning continued to flash into the unit. I looked at the clock: 12:45 a.m. For some reason, with all that was going on, it occurred to me that I was born at 12:45 (but in the p.m.). How did I know this? For every year of my adult life, no matter where I was, at exactly 12:45 p.m., my mother would call me to tell me this was the moment she gave birth to me. Now, here I was, crumbling inside, helpless and lost, feeble and useless and impotent in this most critical moment where I was responsible for giving
her
life, or at least saving it. The voice inside my head kept pounding:
YOU made the wrong decision!
Yes, I had chosen the closest hospital,
not
the better hospital where I was certain I would
not be
witnessing a Mack Sennett version of intensive care where the Keystone Cops finally find the only ventilator in the mop closet and wheel it out, asking each other if they know how this newfangled contraption works. I was sick, sick, and I wanted to throw up.

I went over by my mother’s side and put my hands on her. I whispered in her ear: “I’m here. You’re OK. This will be OK. Stay with me. Don’t leave me. Dad and Veronica are on the way!”

I bowed my head and said a prayer and asked God to please spare her, to not take her, to let her live. It was not her time! I asked him to take everything from me, everything I had, all my possessions, my career—
anything
—I would give it all up right now just so she could live. It was a crazy, illogical and unnecessary request. God—or nature or my mother herself—were going to decide if her body could carry on. But I meant it nonetheless, and I would be overjoyed if my offer were accepted.

My dad and sister and wife arrived, slightly shaken by what they said was the worst storm they’d ever driven through. They went to her side and spoke to her, and though there would be the occasional twitch in her eyes, there was no guarantee she could hear us.

Her heart beat through the night and into the morning. Our other sister, Anne, rushed to get on a red-eye from Sacramento and would soon arrive there to be with us. Each hour, our mother’s vital signs would stabilize, then go slightly downward. The night nurse with the long braid left without a word, and a new day nurse came in. She stopped when she saw me, and she didn’t try very hard to contain “that look” I’ve seen a thousand times from those who would rather not see me. Of course, the other nurses and doctors more than made up for her attitude, and they did their best to make my mother comfortable and to keep the rest of us calm. The doctor on duty admitted that if my mom were stable he’d like to move her to another hospital with facilities that might be better for her. But that kind of travel would be too dangerous at this point, he said. We would just have to play the cards we were dealt.

By two in the afternoon (now twenty-four hours since the surgery), her progress continued steadily downward. The blood pressure read 60 over 35. I called Jack Stanzler, a doctor and friend in Ann Arbor, to get some advice, and he in turn called a doctor friend of his in northern Michigan to see if there was anything he could do. Our mother’s eyes remained wide open with little or no movement. We all kept whispering encouraging things to her, hoping it would help.

I took a break for a moment and went out in the hall to the nurses’ station, where I encountered the not-so-happy-to-see-me nurse. She looked straight at me, and with a tone of disgust that she didn’t even have the decency to hide, she uttered the following:

“Why don’t you just knock it off in there? Your mother is dead. And nobody’s got the guts to tell you that. She’s gone and nothing you’re doing is going to bring her back.” And then she walked away.

I thought I had suffocated. If I didn’t know better, it felt as if the nurse’s hand was now on my throat, choking the life out of me.

“Wait a minute!” I yelled, as I found my breath. “
Who are you?!
Why would you say such a thing? You’re sick.
Sick!
”

I broke down. The others in the room heard me, and my wife came out. Sobbing, I told her what the nurse just said.

“Your mother’s not dead. Those monitors don’t lie. I don’t know why she would say that. Come back in the room.”

Instead, I went to the phone and called the surgeon. I told him what just happened. He told me to ignore the nurse and that the doctor on duty was handling things and that was all that mattered. “And your mother is still alive.”

Over the next hour we all took turns spending a few private moments with my mother, saying the things that you would only say if it were just you and your dying mother in the room. Around 4:00 p.m. we all gathered in a circle around her bed, and each of us offered a prayer or a remembrance or a thank-you to this woman who brought us into the world and raised us and took care of us and encouraged us to embrace knowledge and goodness and kind-heartedness and to never back down if we thought that was what our conscience was demanding. No one could get through what they were saying without breaking down.