HospitalWorld is inescapable, whether for good or ill. This post is a further exploration of its hold on me on the eve of cancer surgery. It contains a few echoes of Chapter Nine’s misadventures, but I hope the story below can stand independently recognizable.
PART 2. WELCOME BACK TO HOSPITALWORLD
Lying in a hospital bed half a century after my tonsillectomy, moments away from colon cancer surgery, I knew I’d behave better than I had as a kid. I’d joke with the nurses, acting as if having my gut cut open and a chunk of my insides removed was no big deal. I would be the ideal patient. Cooperative, accommodating, understanding. Even to the doctors, who wasted not a second of their time promising me anything, even ice cream.
My thoughts turned back to Dr. X. I recognized what a perfect little bastard I’d been to a guy who only wanted to help me. He was the victim of some awful accident who had the courage to climb back in his professional saddle despite his physical “deficits.” I found myself admiring him from across the years. Here was a guy who had manned up and not let anything get him down.
At the same time, the little kid who still resides within me has a visceral memory of the shock and the anger and sense of betrayal I felt the day of my tonsillectomy. Truth to tell, I didn’t feel the slightest regret for how I’d behaved that awful day. If Dr. X hadn’t exactly done me wrong by following the surgical fashion of the day and relieving my parents of whatever it cost to give me a whopping month-long hiatus from the earaches, he was also the man who had introduced me to the kind of intense, shocking pain no eight-year-old should ever have to endure. My eight-year-old self found it as amazing as my grown-up self that so little thought had been given to the misery to which I was subjected that day. Now I was hours away from what I imagined would be a return visit to that world of pain and, feeling quite the little kid, I was once again in no mood for empathy or understanding.
Lying there, I had questions about what to expect, how I would feel, but all I got from the nurses and aides was bustle. It was something they didn’t want to talk about. Or maybe couldn’t talk about. HospitalWorld isn’t big on explanations. It doesn’t worry that you don’t understand a procedure or know what you can expect to experience before, during or after it happens. That attitude owes a lot to actor Alfonso Bedoya’s smirking attitude toward authority when he was questioned by Bogie in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre: seemingly friendly but really kind of hostile, as in “We don't have to show you no stinkin' explanations.”
The thing is, I wasn’t so much afraid of the pain itself as I was of how I would handle the pain. The idea of life without a cancerous chunk of my colon was completely new to me. I didn’t know what to expect and didn’t like that feeling. Would I somehow disgrace myself in some unforeseeable yet unforgettable way? I knew I could be a regular guy going into surgery. But the real question, I realized, was could I be a man when they wheeled me back to my room?
My doubts about how I would handle the pain this time around were compounded by another, far more traumatic memory. In 1964, at the age of 38, my father was diagnosed with kidney cancer. The memory of his first surgery and its immediate aftermath had been seared into my memory with the force of a branding iron. It provided no succor to me as I tried to somehow prepare myself for my own cancer surgery.
I was 14 at the time and as oldest son of a large family and, the designated “man” of the house when the real man of the house was suddenly on his way to the Mayo Clinic. It was decided that rather than stay home, my mother and I would go out there to be with my father. It was the dead of winter and I was as tight and cold inside as the icicles that hung from every gutter in snowy Rochester, MN.
I was at his bedside after the surgery, standing there much the same as he had stood next to me after my tonsillectomy. He emerged from the anesthesia slowly. It was clear he was suffering. His face was squinched up in pain and his head rolled from side to side and he started moaning. The words he chose to express his agony were choice, especially to the Tonsillectomy Kid:
“Man, oh Manischewitz. Maaaaan, oh Maaaniscevitz.”
No cursing at doctors. No resentment. Instead, the popular slogan for a cheap kosher wine of the day. Unlike his son, my dad had heard a few curse words in his day, but you wouldn’t know it to hear him in the recovery room. He was the very model of perfect parental post-op behavior, even in semi-consciousness.
“Man, oh Manischewitz. Maaaaan, oh Maaaniscevitz.”
We weren’t even Jewish.
Dad didn’t seem to know my mother and I were there. All we could do was watch as he lolled his head back and forth, chanting his mantra. After a good five minutes, I began to feel a weird, uncontrollable and totally unexpected urge well up inside me.
I giggled.
I tried my best to swallow the giggle but it wouldn’t be stifled. The more I tried to squelch it, the louder the giggle became. It rose up like a geyser from within until I finally exploded in open laughter. And I couldn’t stop. I was as shocked by my behavior as my mother was. But I couldn’t help it. I had no control. The laughter poured out of me, until I folded over, gripping the bed’s guardrail to keep from collapsing.
I can look back now and see my laughter was all tied up in knowing long days of anxiety-soaked waiting were finally over and now Dad was cured of cancer and we could go home, forget this miserable day and everything that had led up to it and go back to having a regular life free from life-threatening diseases and life-threatening operations and get back to all the ordinary, routine complications that being 14 years old had already delivered to me.
I didn’t know it then, but I was laughing in utter relief that he was alive.
For years afterward, I felt I’d let Dad down with that laughter. He didn’t remember a bit of it and I never reminded him of it during the nine years that remained to him.
So, I wondered, how would I fare when they wheeled me back from surgery and back into my beeping, bleating room? Of course I expected pain. But would I have the same control my dad had demonstrated? Would I give my son or daughter or wife some awful reminder of what a dud of a dad they had?
It occurred to me that some pain—the pain born of fear and nurtured by imagination—might be worse than any of the physical pain I had ever had or was expecting to have.
I finally realized what Dad had given me in that recovery room all those years ago. Hemingway said it best and most memorably: “Courage is grace under pressure.”
Dad had demonstrated what courage was without knowing it. He’d shown me the way, by example. It had taken decades, but I recognized what he’d done, what he was capable of doing. But would I be able meet his mark?
These were questions I took with me into the OR, questions that lurked beneath the waves of nervous banter I spewed while being wheeled down one of the hospital’s endless corridors into a freezing-cold room full of strangers with knives and masks, a room where I’d be tested like I’d never been tested before.
There’s more of HospitalWorld to come, but I’m giving it a rest for now. Please feel free to follow any of the suggestions below. Cheers, despite it all.