My granddaughter, who
dwelt in my home since she was three, recently left us to study at one of our
great universities. We sent her in great
pride and sorrow. No longer can we look
forward to her infectious smiles in the morning and to her lighthearted prater
after the long hours at school. No
longer will we be on the receiving end of her morose countenance by night followed
by her small hints of disapproval.
Truth be told; however,
we’ve not shared her company this past year.
Relations between her and her mother (my daughter) had grown dangerously
acrimonious and so, after her eighteenth birthday on the advice of her therapist,
my granddaughter slipped away in the night to live my oldest son, his wife and
three small boys.
It is with no small
embarrassment that I have to confess that, prior to my granddaughter’s departure,
I had no idea things had gotten so bad between my daughter and herself. (They had!)
The antecedents of those hostilities have now long past into irrelevance
now that she is away at college; but I’m afraid the animosity remains.
I have no memory of all
that follows.
This is a long way of
saying my granddaughter had no way of knowing about my most recent medical adventure. It seems that I went to sleep one night in late
September and didn’t wake up the next day.
After much consternation, my wife summoned help from the fire department
and our personal physician to get me to the hospital. I apparently was with it just enough for me
to object and express displeasure at attempts to move me. The firemen hesitated feeling the need for my
consent; thus the phone call to my doctor.
Somehow, they got whatever assent they thought was needed and off I was
to the E.R.
Once at the hospital, my
condition deteriorated. I was put into
the critical care unit and on a ventilator.
The staff gravely told my wife that it was likely I would not survive
the night and “end of life” questions might need to be addressed early the next
morning.
Dear Cookie Monster:
Imagine
the jolt and bewilderment waking up with three doctors in your face. “Crabby, do you know where you are?” Before you answer, you make note that they
are just as startled as you are. Turns
out, I was at Community East Hospital two days after I last remember going to
bed. “Do you remember
several people talking to you. Trying to get your permission to take you to the
E.R.?”
“I don’t remember
talking to anybody.”
And so it was: my latest adventure in medical custody. The
first thing I got straight with my captors was that I wanted to go home.
“Mr. Dooley, what you
need to understand right now is that you just experienced another episode of
congestive heart failure, and we can’t let you go home right now. Maybe in a
few days; but we’d advise a few weeks at a rehab facility in any case. Right now, we’re working to get all the
excess water out of your body.”
Well…a week later, they
let me go home.
Now, you may wonder why
your grandfather, the old geezer of all old geezers, feels the need to glory himself
by living up to such a cheesy stereotype. “What the hell is so important at home that you
want to get there?”
In short, the answer
is: NOTHING.
So, what’s the big
hairy deal? One must understand the true
nature of hospitals. They say someone “X”
is resting at “St. Bozo’s Medical Hospital.”
When they talk like that you can be confidant they are lying.
The first thing to know
about hospitals is that you cannot “rest” because they will not leave you alone.
Every three or four hours they come in to “take your vitals.” Invariably,
when I am in the hospital, the day begins at midnight as my nurse takes my
temperature, blood pressure, pricks one of my fingers to measure my blood
sugar, take her stethoscope and listen to my heart, and then put a pulse
oximeter on another finger to find out what the oxygen mixture is in blood.
For me, they never like
my first “numbers”; so, they have to do it all again. Invariably, they always like the second
results. This all takes at least ten minutes and often can easily take twice
that much time. Then they say: “You can go to sleep now.” Which usually takes me an hour to settle down
and drift away.
Then at the crack of
four in the morning, they do it all again. FOUR IN THE MORNING! So much for
rest. They do vitals every four hours. If
your doctor shows up, they will do it all again just for themselves.
But the biggest killer
for me is the sheer boredom. Apart from
all the doctor and therapy visits there is nothing to do. My music isn’t there. My computer isn’t there. TV is the worst. (Many of the channels are simply weird) You end
up praying a lot. The first subject of prayer is your health. Obvious, I mean, you
are in the hospital. The second subject of prayer is to go home.
Home. Probably the last place you want to be. At your age, I counted my dorm room as my
home. I loved my mother, but I didn’t
get along with Chuck. He and I always
seem to find a way to butt heads.
Actually, I swore that he came home from work looking for something to
pick a fight over.
One morning, he summoned
me to the bathroom to lecture me over how they were not going to pay for my
auto insurance, and he was never going to allow me to use the car.
“If I tell you not to
go someplace, you just turn around and go there. If I tell you you can’t drive above forty
you’ll drive eighty. You don’t do what I
tell you to, so you don’t get the car.
So how do you like them apples?”
I had no idea where all
this came from. I had never mentioned driving
or getting a car—much less expect Mom and Chuck putting me on their driver’s insurance. I could see the future and didn’t want one more
thing for Chuck fight and bitch over with me.
When I left home for
college August 24, 1971, I was finally free.
I missed you something awful
last year; but I understood. Looking back,
I was just a kid. Hell, when your grandmother
married me, we both were still just kids.
There was still a whole lot we did not understand about the world. But we were free.
Enclosed is a little
something. Use it however you
choose. I know something unexpected
always comes up—especially when you are first starting out.
I love you, Cookie
Monster
Grandpa Crabby
