Not Far From The Tree

Who could have guessed I'd be doing this well? After a month, a short, short month, I am functioning, better than I had before my father got sick. A friend said I found a curious redemption in caring for my father, and I think that's possible. Of the family, I was the one who realized Papa-san was in distress, I was the one who hunted down his doctors (and may have to hunt them down in earnest; see my "Crestorfallen" post in November 2007), and my brother and I did all we could, everything, first to save him, and when we couldn't save him, to help him as he left this world.

So after a lifetime of questioning my judgement, my family relied upon it in a matter of life and death, and knew it to be sound. And now I know.

Initially, I didn't want to achieve anything, ever again, because he'll never know. "So you're not going to accomplish anything, for your father's sake?" my husband said.

Well, when you put it that way---

In my family, the irrational will always give the rational a good run for its money, and rationality usually doesn't finish first. But in this case, I heaved myself to my feet.

Now I have a new job, a learner's permit, and one half-hour's experience bouncing along the Hudson river in my father's little twenty-year-old car, a manual-shift Suzuki Samurai. It looks like a shrunken Jeep, and everyone who sees it refers to it as "the ice cream truck." All of this within the last two weeks.

The job is thanks to George Bush, at whose televised visage my mother has hurled more bad language than she even did at Nixon, and she bought a portable television just for the Watergate hearings especially so she could curse at Nixon in any room of the house.

But because of Bush's No Child Left Behind program, and the relentless testing it mandates, a number of children now need tutors to help them pass these tests, so that their schools don't lose federal funding. And that's what I shall be doing. Drilling poor little kids in how to fill in the right ovals with their #2 pencils.

I say "shall" because I haven't been unloosed on the kids yet; I have to be fingerprinted by the NY Board of Ed ($115 dollars please!), and I can't be fingerprinted until the company employing me sends me a letter to take to the Board of Ed, and the company employing me is just setting up its operation, so they tell me, which is why they are so disorganized.

This I learned the hard way as I called them from the actual Brooklyn offices of the Board of Ed, where I had gone to lay my money down for fingerprinting.

Incidentally, the fingerprinting itself costs sixteen bucks. New York state then charges ninety-nine to store the fingerprints. I could rent a storage locker for a lot less and start a sideline storing fingerprints. This is one of the ways New York keeps taxes off the radar: sticking it to little people in obscure corners like making them pay for fingerprint storage.

Should I ever get this letter (I may just go to their office and pick it up), I will be traveling to these kids' homes to tutor them, one-on-one. They will mostly be in Brooklyn and the Bronx, probably not in the yuppie sections. I just hope not to be felled by a stray bullet. I actually looked into buying Kevlar to line my hat (impractical---it needs to be folded and refolded exactly the right way to do any good--kind of like croissant dough).

Papa-San, Always

On Friday night, my father died. My brother and I held his hands.

He fought for life, we fought for his life, and when it became clear he couldn't survive, we fought for every drop of morphine to ease him. We had to fight for it; the Puritanical medical system in this country demands that a terminal patient not be given so much morphine as to be bad for his health ("We wouldn't want to 'push him over'").

The cardiologist who had prescribed the drug which gave my father Rhabdomyolysis, called us into the conference room to give us "the talk." Rather than look at "Doctor Z," as he calls himself, I looked at my brother's shaking hands.

The cardiologist's talk was interrupted by his cell phone. He answered it. The ER. He went to the house phone across the hall, ostensibly for either his privacy or ours, called the ER and berated them theatrically and very loudly for interrupting him. I suspected this was some sort of performance for our benefit. I'd already had the experience of Dr. Z's not returning my calls, blaming his staff for screwing up my number, and telling me "I verbally admonished them." That had set me wondering: how else would he admonish them? And if the receptionist made an honest mistake, how much admonishment did that merit?

We had the rest of the talk. Papa-san's condition was not going to improve. We should consider hospice. It didn't mean he wouldn't get treatment, just that he would be kept comfortable. We all wanted him comfortable.

"I know, it's hard," said Dr. Z., and patted my arm. He got up. "It's hard for me too." And off he went.

Hard for him too!




I'd already punished Dr. Z. in my own way by dreaming about him as a sleazy 70's bachelor with a pouffy frosted hairdo. Office like a bachelor pad with burnt orange shag rugs, chrome floor lamps and naugahyde chaise longues. A more suitable environment for being handed a line of BS.



It was an unquiet death. The first dose of morphine put him out for hours, and I'd hoped he would be kept floating on a nice, puffy pink morphine cloud, but he never, never again had enough morphine to put him on his cloud.

He stirred restlessly. I won't say just how. But, "I don't know what's going on in there," I said to the nurse who'd arrived with his next dose. "And you will never know," she said with an odd smile. She had "morphined" her father. "Morphine's a nice drug," she said.

Most of the nurses were extroardinary beings, empathic to him and us. Every time he got a dose which relieved him, it was as if the whole family got it. But there was a young "nurse-scholar" who didn't seem to understand that our father's comfort was the priority. He let his patient languish; when it was time for the next meds, the nurse-scholar was nowhere to be found. He was off the floor. He'd gone to lunch without telling anybody. It was over the new year, we explained that we couldn't get our father into hospice over the holiday, and this nurse-scholar, having finished his shift, cheerfully said, "Happy New Year!" to us, and left. The next day, he was once again Dad's nurse. We finally had to ask that he be removed. After he was, it was better. But our father was never, never, peaceful. Never easy. He'd never been easy on himself, and he wasn't now.


But it's over. No use conjuring up all the bad images. We have thousands of pictures of healthy Papa-san all over the world, having fantabulous times: the cities he saw, the friends, the meals--he took pictures of every plate of oysters he ever ate. I see him before me, healthy, in his green corduroy jacket and too-loud tie, rubbing his hands together, anticipating sitting down with us to smoked salmon and duck eggs and arguing over the meaning of the word "isinglass."


He had a few more years in him. Carelessness took them away. But the years he had, we had, how wonderful they were.

Which First, Crow or Egg?

The cardiologist's voice was solicitous: "I know you're worried about Dad, honey..."

Me, he honeyed. My mother, he darlinged. My brother, the airline captain, who has been gathering Papa-san's medical records assiduously, was spared the endearments.

The cardiologist did tell me that now he had figured out why the Crestor he prescribed had attacked my father's muscles and put him in the hospital: "Dad's" heart failure was advancing so quickly that "Dad" was unable to metabolize the Crestor, which built up in his system!

The cardiologist was immensely relieved to have discovered that he was off the hook for this one. He reminded me again that he considered my father a friend, his favorite patient, and he wanted the best for him.

I, wits dulled by stress, did not say, well, when he first,started complaining of weakness to you, why did you not even consider it might be Crestor? You checked his pacemaker, you sent him for a CAT scan, and you didn't do a blood test for this known side effect? And don't you think his current level of heart failure might have something to do with being on his back for a month with rhabdomyolysis and hospital-acquired infection?

So. The drug didn't cause the sickness, the sickness caused the reaction to the drug.

That's the cardiologist's story.

The Sock Eater

This blog was intended to be a little bit useful and a little bit amusing, but since my father's illness, that's not the way it has gone.
He was brought down by the mistakes of his doctors, whom he trusted. They prescribed powerful drugs, too powerful, more powerful than an eighty-two year old could handle. They didn't warn him of side effects, passed the buck about how he landed in the hospital, and now won't return our phone calls.
So add anger to the normal grief I feel at seeing Papa-san, world traveler, laid up in the plastic pink sterility of a nursing home bed.
Yes, he's eighty-two. Yes, he's had multiple cardiac problems for thirty years. But he was up and working and shopping and cooking, zipping around town in his little white Suzuki (nickname: "the ice cream truck"), buying duck eggs and smoked salmon and stuffed olives and heirloom tomatoes from the same people every Saturday, and turning out reams of copy on his industry, reviewing unreleased prototypes, going out to dinner with Mama-san. Only a couple of months ago. But all the time, he was being overdosed with Crestor, growing weaker and weaker without knowing why.
At his age, with his heart, it was a tightrope act. It's a tightrope act with us all, of course. As you near the end, the rope is narrower, your balance more delicate. But it's possible to keep going for quite a while, all the way to the end, unless something knocks you off the tightrope.
That's what these doctors did: they knocked him off his tightrope, early. Maybe it's greedy or unrealistic of me to want more for him, of him. But I want it. This is not how his life should finish. The hospital and nursing home rounds of fear, humiliation, fear, humiliation. And his internist of more than 20 years, who is the same age as my father,and who retires at the end of this week, was supposed to see him; Papa-san has been having some problems. The internist's office called the nursing home and cancelled the appointment. They didn't suggest one of the other doctors in the practice; they merely said that Dr. Ch----- was no longer seeing patients.














When I was a little girl, I could not hang on to a pair of socks. Neither could my brother or father. Mama-san, obsessively methodical as she was, could not understand why we never removed both socks in the same place. She said she never thought she would marry into a family of one-legged people, but the evidence was clear that she had.
Really, of course, it was the Sock Eater who lived in the deep recesses of Papa-san's closet, beyond the shoe trees. At night it would make the rounds, camouflaged among the dust bunnies, incorporating one of every pair of socks into itself, and retiring to its lair to digest all that cotton, wool and nylon during the day. I don't know what it excreted---buttons, maybe.
We children didn't worry about the Sock Eater. Mama-san sighed over it but she had to accept it and its voracious appetite. It was our only under-bed monster--there wasn't room for anything larger or more sinister, what with the extra cot and all the Woman's Day magazines.

We didn't fear monsters. We didn't fear the dark. We didn't fear spiders, or bats, or fire or floods. We lived in a stone house in the woods, up on a hill where floods or tornados never came. It seemed impregnable, a fortress. And none of these things ever hurt us.

It wasn't impregnable, of course; time crept in. That was to be expected, but we didn't expect it. More than that, though, a tiny oval marauder was brought in, disguised as a friend.

elephantasy

A Card for my Father

He really did see the Hindenberg. He was at Admiral Farragut Military Academy in New Jersey. I suppose they were all watching for it, and it floated right over on the way to its historic immolation.

I wonder if that image was transmuted into the dream he told us about years ago, when we were all sitting around the kitchen table at breakfast. Here it is:

It is a holiday in a small New England town. People are standing around, waiting, as for a parade. A shadow forms in the distance. Slowly, it takes over the sky, darkens the sun. Looking up, my father realizes it is the underside of a giant elephant. The shadow passes, and as it goes, the crowd breaks into applause, and cheers, "Elizabeth's done it again!"

This is the best dream I ever heard. Most people are more entranced with their own dreams than with each others', but all my friends have to admit that this is one really great dream.

He is in the rehab center, which looks awfully like a nursing home. I've come down with a cold and can't see him, so I'm sending him this.

Action Figure

Just to let you know what they're messing with, this is Papa-san. This is his action figure. My brother had it made for Papa-san's 80th birthday. It is true-to-life down to the belt buckle. He is accessorized with a safari hat, giant single-lens reflex camera, and a pocketful of leaky green pens.

Thanks to his doctors' near-fatal enthusiasm for a powerful statin drug (see 'Crestorfallen' in November), he is in a rehab center now. Today was his 2nd day of physical therapy. I won't tell you his exact progress; that's his story. We don't know how far he'll go, or how long it will take to get there. But nobody has put a limit on his possibilities, and so we go on.

Terminal Detail

For over 47 years, he strode through Grand Central Terminal, past this little brass panel on the way to his job on The Magazine. He and my mother had lived in the Village but after I was born, they moved up the Hudson to a stone house in the woods, and Papa-san car-pooled with other commuting Daddies. Many children in my town thought this was actually their fathers' job: commuting. In winter, in the dark, while children were still asleep, all over the little town Daddies were getting into cars to take them to the station, to board their usual car on their usual train to sit in their usual seats for the ride down the Hudson to New York, not to return until six-thirty or seven, well into the winter evening. I wouldn't call it an easy existence.
For the last two weeks, I have walked past this little brass panel on my way to my father's hospital. It's part of the ticket window. It's a little grace note from 1913, when Grand Central was constructed to uplift the spirits of the throngs passing through.