The H-Word

"I had three sons," she said. 

I'm nosier than I used to be, because life is too short to not hear wisdom from wise people, especially old wise people.

It was the word had that made me pry. Had: the three-letter summary of enormous and chilling stories. The word had is used for times and people that are gone but cannot be forgotten.  It is used for important things.  If you have six eggs and you drop one, it's probably not important to you that you had six.  You only care that you now have five.  That one egg wasn't special to you.

Not so with enormous and chilling stories. The H-word is important in those. She could have said, "I have two sons," but no: she had three.

She pulled the white blanket around her thin body, over the IV and the small heart monitor box that she said was heavy.  Behind her the IV pump hummed out a rhythm. In front of her she saw memories.  She looked past me, where I had taken a seat on the window ledge for story time. She looked down the six floors to the river, and past Elkhart, all the way to the West Coast. 

He was an ambitious water and power man in California. He worked overtime and had become a supervisor. He was hoping to retire early. 

He was 54 when he walked into a building to inspect a newly installed "thing". She couldn’t remember what it was called, but the installation was faulty.  It exploded.  Her son had just enough time to throw his arm across his face before one side of his body burned to a crisp. 

He didn't die for three weeks. In fact when the doctor's discussed skin grafting, he suggested they make some changes to his nose while they were at it.  Then his wounds became infected. 

"That must have been a hard time for you," I said. 

"Well, even now…." she paused. She was crying.  "It's still hard." 

And I, the statue on the window ledge, was crying too.  I always stare in stunned silence at these noble strangers who share the most difficult moments of their lives in five minutes. 

I've learned two things from these wise people.  They always pick out the good things to focus on. And they don't try to say tacky things about why bad things happen. They don't have pat answers.

"Well, it's the way it happened," she said.  "And I still have two sons."

Help! How do you paint fabric folds?

Quiet Bullet Scars

Progress continues (somewhat feverishly) on the giant heart. 

My patient remembered that he woke up in Japan twice. Both time the bullets had been removed. He supposed by surgery, but he didn't know where or by whom. 

I had been the patient-- I'll call Marine-- if he had any surgeries in the past. His history was drab--the normal bouquet of joint replacements and ectomies of unnecessary parts and a few heart explorations or repairs.

Then Marine said, "I had two bullets taken out of me too." He smiled when my eyes jumped off the computer screen and over to him. He shrugged, like removing bullets was as common as taking off his socks.

He received one in Vietnam and one in Korea.

So I guess everyone with bullet scars talks about them like this, I decided. Marine was the second nonchalant bullet-scarred person I had met on the heart floor. The other was not a patient. He was sitting at the foot of his mother's bed at midnight, just being there for her.  I logged onto my computer and began to chart his mother's condition and information. 

"Do you wear oxygen at home usually?" I asked her. 

"No," Son said.  Mom was a bit hard of hearing.  "I'm the one who should be wearing oxygen," he chuckled.  "Doc told me to wear it 24 hours a day."

"Oh, why's that?" I asked, hitting tab on my keyboard to move through the fields on my screen.

"Lung disease." 

Painting names of local towns.

Smoker, I thought, hitting tab again.  I backed out of the conversation, not wanting to make him confess his smoking problem.

"They took out a piece of my lung," he went on.

"Oh…..cancer?" I asked, striking tab again.  I didn't have time to offer sympathy to a non-patient.

"No, a bullet."

I quit hitting the tab key and turned to face him. 

"Was….the bullet...intentional?" I stammered stupidly.

"Oh yes.  All four of them."

It was over 30 years ago in a 7-11 close to the Mexican border. Son was the lone third shift clerk.  Young people did not carry cell phones back then.  

In this region of the Southwest, the style among gangs was to work their way through town, holding up one gas station after the other.  Even small gains added up by the end of the night. 

The gangster burst in, demanding money from the safe.  He marched Son to the safe at gunpoint.  Son did not know the combination.  He fumbled with the lock. He could feel the barrel nosing his neck.  With a burst of inspiration, he leaped to his feet, twisting away from the gun, which of course went off. Twice. In the scuffle, the gun clattered to the floor, and Son leaped across the room behind the thick walls of the walk-in cooler.  Gangster ran out the door.

The blood was trickling. Son opened the cooler door.  Gangster, angry at the turn of events, ran back in.  Son retreated through the door, but he was weak and slow. 

"Elkhart" is the focal point of town names to symbolize the hospital.

He woke up on the floor outside the cooler door, with four bullet wounds: one in his knee, one through his arm, one in his upper back and one in his lower back. 

In that era, Elkhart county housewives didn't commonly fly cross-country on short notice.  But Son's mother leaped on the nearest jet and came to sit at the end of his hospital bed. The doctor told Son that he was lucky the bullet was in his right upper chest.  There is no heart in the right upper chest, only a lung, which is somewhat more disposable than a heart.

The gunman was never found.  

Lesson #2: If you have bullet scars, refer to them in an off-hand manner.  :)

I wonder who else in my life is hiding bullet wounds... 

Fiberglass and Flesh: The Story of Hearts

Preface:  New job at the hospital on the heart floor. New project painting a large heart for a hospital fundraiser. Learning lessons from both. My own heart colored by my patients on the heart floor as I color the heart statue.

LESSON ONE: any situation can be made fun.
 
Being in the hospital with heart problems is no one's idea of fun. No one belongs there. 

There are many different kinds of patients on the heart floor. The ones who belong the least are those who were out playing golf, attending a class, washing dishes, or just getting out of bed, when this thing called "chest pain" hit. 

"Chest pain" is a fuzzy term.  If someone's chest hurts, it doesn't mean they are having a heart attack. They might not even be having a heart problem.  It could be that they pulled a muscle or ate something too spicy.

But here's the problem. It could be a heart attack. How do you know?

By the time a patient arrives on our floor, they've been sitting and waiting in the emergency, hoping they can go home. Instead of going home they get told they'll be spending the night in the hospital on the sixth floor and they will have further testing in the morning.  By the time I (the "night nurse") arrive on the floor, it's 11 o'clock at night and family members have gone home to bed. The patients, who were living their normal lives 12 hours before, are alone on the 6th floor of the hospital.  

Maybe they have heart problems.  Maybe they don't. They won't know until morning. 

They are wearing a ridiculous gown.  They have six foamy stickers stuck to their chest, wired to a little monitor box that sits in a special pocket in the front of their breezy gown.  They're told to call the nurse before they get out of bed. They're told to pee in a container and let the nurse flush it.  

All of this is bad enough in a private room.  But if the heart floor is busy, which is almost always, the patient may have a roommate.  There is potential for loud snoring, constant TV shows, or bright lights across the curtain.  Some people refuse to have a roommate and create a scene in the hall until someone finds them a private room.

 ***************************************************
 The 5-foot tall heart made of fiberglass and steel was delivered by two tall well-cologned men in dress pants who probably aren't delivery men in their normal lives.

After nearly trapping their box truck in the alley they returned to the door I didn't want them to use and unloaded the cardboard-swaddled heart. It was raining. I stood in the rain out of loyalty to the cause although I was basically useless from a practical standpoint.   

They told me the hearts were made in Chicago with a special mold. The special mold had been developed by San Francisco General hospital for their heart fundraiser.  I guess they didn't mind sharing the mold and the idea with a small mid-western town. 

**************************************************
One night one of our patients was an elderly gentleman I'll call Jack.

I saw him sitting there at the foot of his roommate's bed when I first arrived. He wasn't my patient. Jack looked like a family member, but I knew he wasn't because he was wearing a gown under his windbreaker, and carting around an IV pole.  I heard that he had developed chest pain during his morning tennis workout.

It was almost midnight but they were just shooting the breeze. Twenty-four hours before, neither one was expecting to be there. Both were scheduled for frightening procedures in the morning. Both were peeing in plastic containers and wearing ridiculous gowns and carrying heart monitors in their gown pockets. They talked for a long time, about their hearts and what they were facing in the morning, about their jobs, about their lives.

I saw Jack out making laps a few hours later, striding up the hall beside his IV pole.

"So you're the tennis player?"

"I've been called a lot of things, but never a tennis player," he chuckled. "I play tennis.  There's a subtle difference."  

I laughed, and he went back to his room.  His roommate was awake. The next thing I saw, there they were again, chatting like it was guys' night out fishing, waiting for a bite. 

I'll probably never see Jack again.  But I learned from Jack that it's possible to go from player on the tennis court to patient on the heart floor-- in a double room-- without losing your chuckle. 

Lesson One: Anything can be made fun. 

******************************************************
After the heart was unwrapped and toweled dry and the box truck and cologne scent had eased away, I corralled my aunt for a trip to Lowe's. Lowe's is a place I definitely don't belong.  (How do I know if I want satin or flat?)  So it's best for me to not go there alone. With the help of my aunt, I managed to buy a gallon of paint, a foam roller, and a 9 foot by 12 foot plastic drop cloth. 

Fiberglass and Flesh..... the story of hearts, to be continued, with updates on the progress of the fiberglass heart and more wisdom from the heart floor.