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Think of the hospital’s Barbara as the germ bouncer, that prima assignment: the patient must arrive scrubbed and anointed clean. What a charming discussion did we have, of the minutiae of bacteria and soap how I, now a grown up, was to do my shower the night beforehand, and the icky antibiotic I’m to swab into the nostrils. Her role in the scheme of things was to reduce to bare minima any bacteria that might travel with me into the operating room. The original hospital had reduced orientation to a bag of soap and a sheet of instructions: “Here, read this over,” and sent me home.
Dr. Leibsohn’s firm recommendation of Wisconsin Heart Hospital was rooted, I would guess, in Barbara’s work. I would have been mad to accept his nudging about surgery but not his opinion about this place. Another “heart” hospital in his opinion was “dirty” - they lost, he said, all their best people.
January 8.
After a biblically precise ritual shower and only a sip of water to down a pill, I rode with Olde Godsil before dawn on a quieted Bluemound Avenue. A row of street lights, guides to my underworld, narrowed to a vanishing point, “this way, Orpheus, is where you will find your Eurydice.”
I was swept into my room - make that My Room for the duration. Equipment is moved in and out like a caterer doing a meeting, rather than moving the patient. The room opened to me as a slightly large Scandinavian-design cherry wood hotel room. The hotel appeared designed to make its every feature pop into view as if it were centered on me. After the surgery I would imagine (can’t remember) there was a stash of equipment behind the bed. Equipment is taken away and the room softens as the patient takes charge of his care. Patient-centered care is on message: you are in charge of your health. The staff works for the patient not for the hospital.
I remember telling Barbara, during orientation, I wanted to have the surgery. I no longer felt someone was wanting to do it to me, as to do it for me. I embraced it, because it made sense. My years of work had helped my America build up a fantastic array of tools to push the outer border of life. It was my turn to take a ride on the medical care system.
Attentive to every detail, watching the magic doors of my underworld fling open as we passed, and gulping a fresh breeze from the “don’t let him change his mind” dash down the hallway, I found myself beneath the two four-foot round overhead disks plugged with multiple blue lights. And I blinked.
Next, my brother, the good George, coaxing my attention.
The staff was dear to all who in their presence came. I asked why they seem to enjoy their work here. One told me “I am allowed to do my job.” I had already started writing this essay by the time I was their guest. So I had questions. I wanted to know everything about life with bypassed arteries.
You’d think we were babes and maybe so. They explained and measured everything, how to cough, how to pee, where to breathe, how to order room-service food (really!). The claustrophobic respirator was gone even before I could ask. The catheter - well, we negotiated the terms.
I finally found out how that thingamajig is held in place - it is not running up the urethra - a puff of air expands a tiny balloon in the tip of the penis. Removal, which I did not want to admit I dreaded, was a nothing. Over, I had to ask “Is that all?”
Removing the two eight inch drainage tubes from inside the chest, however, had drama with her offer of morphine (no, thanks) but fast, feeling a bit like sandpaper, both tubes at once, no worse than that fraction of a second required to remove adhesive tape from skin. The joyful discovery that morphine would have hidden was that the discomfort from the tubes was not an ailing body part Mom gave me, it was the two foreign objects masquerading as body parts supposedly healing. Quick as strike three in the last inning, my body was now my own again. I was ready to pack my bags and go home. Almost.
Night Again
Demon pain came to me once, sending Godsil out to find a nurse. With morphine (yes, thanks) it was exorcised, never to return. They would send me home with more pills than I ever used (Darvocet - for you druggies who plot an invasion of my medicine cabinet - a supersized Tylenol. Help yourself: two every six hours.) Pain medication today is enlightened by purpose: “Use it to get yourself through the normal activities that promote recovery. Take as instructed. Let us know if you need something stronger.”
No “nurse-armed-with-needle” would darken my stay. Their touch reminded me of the glory that “It” was behind me now. But let me warn you about Smiley - the hospital’s evil inhalation therapist. My yoga-bicycling-meditative love of deep breathing was not where I left it. No joy anymore inhaling the universe. “Smiley” quite insisted, indeed forced me to face the fact that it won’t come back naturally. Naturally I was on track for pneumonia not meditation. Her wicked solution was work - inhale and exhale into what appeared to be a “Play Doctor” toy called a Voldyne measuring lung capacity. Cough - the one thing I had to do for myself - or pneumonia.
January 11
The last of the hospital thugs to torture me described my cough as a “little old lady” cough. I was annoyed by his stick but also quite reassured by his carrot that nothing would ‘break’ if I really coughed. His old-lady allusion got me coughing down and dirty. So, with that Voldyne under my arm and instructions to practice (I promised - fingers crossed), they let me go home. Three days, two hours after the blue lights. Godsil and I celebrated with a tour of the city I love and a trip to Amaranth Coffee House where I started my non-stop chatter about a hospital that I came to love, a hospital hip enough to move in across the street from Milwaukee’s bonobos.
On the beauteous Spring morning of May 14, the day after Mother’s Day, I returned with flowers and, on behalf of all my friends, a thank you.
Next: After Ward
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