Philosophy 101 Read online

just after the administration of the anesthesia. Dr. Michael Liu, one of the surgeons present, came out, and, still in his scrubs and wearing those soft blue shoecoverings, with a hair net on his head and a breathing mask pulled down from his mouth, took a minute to tell me the bad news: dad's heartbeat had skyrocketed to 170 beats per minute, while his blood pressure - which has always been low - dropped to half its normal rate. To continue with the surgery would have meant an almost assured flat line on the table. Maybe, Dr. Liu said, if they can stabilize dad's numbers, they will attempt the operation again in a few days. So they sent dad to the seventh floor. I arrived as he, now on his back, was being wheeled into his room on a gurney. The whole scene reminded me of Caravaggio's The Crucifixion Of Saint Peter. He was in terrible pain, and he was arguing with a petite young woman doctor, a stoic, mildly cool, well trained professional woman. He wanted his catheter taken out. She didn't want it taken out. She argued her point, he argued his. Calm, concerned, professional, she addressed him directly.

  "You're not being rational."

  Rolling into his room on a gurney, in his pajamas, a small crowd of medical personnel accompanying him, he lifted himself onto his elbows, and somehow managed no small amount of eloquence.

  "You're not understanding my rationale. I can get up and out of bed, and use the bathroom whenever I want."

  He issued this doubtless declaration with such strong conviction that I instantly became confident his will would prevail. Still, she did not believe him, that he could just get up, pain free, whenever he wanted. She looked at him doubtfully.

  "If we take that catheter out now, and you end up peeing in bed, it is going to be very painful for you when we have to put it back in." She paused, for gravity's sake. "You will also bleed."

  Dad pulled himself off his pillow and propped himself up, once again, on his elbows.

  "That's the chance I'm willing to take. Take it out."

  While this was going on, Tina, a small, nervous, stressed-out middle-aged Filipino woman, was trying to hook up his IV's. He had four tubes going into him, plus eight electrodes stuck all around his chest. As I watched quietly from my corner, she quickly tangled everything. While arguing with the doctor, dad had begun to notice this nervous, frustrated, seriously frowning, incompetent nurse. He turned to her, smiled, and attempted a pleasant introduction. Tina willfully ignored him. Dad tried a few more times to get her attention, to introduce himself, but to her, he might as well have not existed; she continued to coldly stonewall dad and his attempts at an introduction, which caused him added stress and anxiety. Exasperated, he finally turned to me and nodded, completely under the medical staff's radar, even though they were crowded all around him, and said, "I'm talking to complete fucking idiots."

  I watched Tina make three mistakes in less than five minutes and become very frustrated, while in the background, from his hospital bed, dad was still insisting that they remove the catheter. Finally, the still frowning Tina stepped away from his bed, away from the whole tangled mess that she'd created, and, anxiety-ridden, made her escape, leaving the tangled jumble of IV tubes and electrodes for someone else to fix. I watched her moved through the room, and emerge into the hallway. Then I saw a remarkable transformation. Her shitty little frown turn into a happy smile. She laughed as soon as she hit the hall. Just like that, she shook off the whole goddamned mess she'd created and abandoned in the room behind her, and completely shook it from her collective soul, her conscience, her mind. I continued to watch her as she walked up the hall and over to the nurse's station. She sought out the cool young woman doctor that dad had been arguing with. Reaching her, with a big, joyous smile, Tina gave that startled doctor a great big hug.

  So that was our bad start, and most of it was caught by dad. For the next two days, disillusioned, he would say stuff like, "I'm tempted to pack my stuff and go home."

  It was an awful time.

  Dad prevailed and they removed the catheter. A minor victory. But when he needed to go pee, which was quite frequently, it would take a monumental effort on his part just to get out of bed, and a coin flip whether he could make it to his feet without any pain. And making it to his feet was just the beginning; there was the short walk to the bathroom; just a few steps, yet miles and long minutes, peppered with wracking pain. Then the return to the bed, the getting back into that bed, it was terrible to watch; there were shouts of pain, and his face would contort in pure agony. But that wasn't all his problems. On the third day, there became apparent a real push to send him home. Samantha [Sam, for short] and Patty, my sisters, back at the house, worked hard to find a way to keep him in the hospital, for we three knew that for him to be sent home in the condition he was in was tantamount to killing him. He wouldn't survive the trip. Their search for a way to keep him in the hospital was conducted without dad's knowing, because, at this point, dad still tended to follow the hospital's rules and suggestions, and we feared that he would allow them to send him home.

  Once his pain reached a certain level, though, even he began to realize that he had to fight to keep his bed at this hospital.

  It began to look bad, and I warned Sam to watch for the moment when Dr. Bush would come into dad's room and try to persuade him to go home.

  Sure enough, that moment came.

  "Monday or Tuesday, when we can try to operate again." Dr. Bush said, sitting with an assistant, at dad's bedside. This was met with a flat refusal to leave, which, in turn, was met with an insistent, firm push to leave. I rose, and as I stood in his room listening, the phone rang. It was the ambulance service, trying to schedule dad's pickup and transportation home.

  "He's not leaving. You can cancel your trip here," I said, and hung up.

  Meanwhile, back at home, Patty and Samantha managed to get ahold of what was called a Patient Advocate. Sam explained to me what a Patient Advocate is. Apparently, a Patient Advocate fights for the Patient. We became hopeful. A while later, the situation still unresolved, I stepped out of dad's room and went to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee. As I returned, and was coming up the hall towards his room, I could hear him screaming in pain. I walked into the room. He was half in and half out of bed, tense, apprehensive; "Go outside," he said, then gave out a great cry. "Arghh!" He grimaced.

  "What?"

  "Go outside!", he boomed, "Shut the door! AARRGGGHHH!!!"

  I went out, into the hall, and stood outside, in front of the closed door, folded my arms across my chest and stared resolutely, straight ahead, across the hall. A team of doctors, to my left, were making their morning rounds, and walked down the hall towards me. I didn't move, didn't look at them, and stared straight ahead, while behind me, behind that heavy wooden door, dad's screams were fucking horrible. That group of doctors walked slowly, quietly past. A minute or two later, after they'd passed, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed, poking his head into the room directly down the hall, again, to the left of where I was standing, a little Puerto Rican guy. He was well dressed, had on a pastel shirt, wore glasses and had a clean shaven face and head. He looked just like a miniature version of Malcolm X, and gave the impression of quiet strength, quiet dignity, and intelligence. He gently leaned into the room down the hall, his clipboard in hand.

  "Mike Kenny?" He said, softly. "Mike Kenny?"

  "Here," I said. "Over here."

  He walked over.

  "Are you Mike Kenny?"

  "No,"

  A pain-wracked scream issued forth from behind the heavy door.

  "That's Mike Kenny." I said, with a grave waive of my head at the heavy wooden door behind me. "You must be the Patient Advocate," I said as I reached out and shook his hand.

  "Yes I am," he said. He looked at the door somberly, then looked back at me. "That's all I needed. Thank you."

  Then he walked away, without saying another word, and walked over to the nurse's station, and leaned his slight frame on their counter.

  That was the last I saw of him. Never saw him again. Nor did dad, nor d
id anyone else in our family, ever even meet him, shake his hand, or get a chance to thank him. But, except for the social worker calling dad's room once more about ambulance pick up, which I canceled, the general attitude, as well as the quality of care, that dad received from that moment on, improved markedly. And there was no more talk about sending him home.

  The ensuing days found dad suffering in more pain than I thought I could bear witness to. Between his tormented, tormenting outbursts of pure agony, he would say, more than once, for anyone that would listen, that he would rather have died on the operating table than to live with the pain.

  After the pain, the torture, had sent him from his bed, denied him the comforts of his chair, and either concealing or dismissing the exhaustion he must have felt from months of sleep deprivation and wracking pain, he simply drew himself up and stood, in the middle of the room, in between the hospital room's two beds, and slowly set his large hands upon the edges of his telescoped hospital bed table. Effectively ennobling himself, he turned that simple hospital table into his personal podium, and, with the perfect posture that he has always maintained throughout his life, and now balancing upon the precarious point of clarity, he held court. Larger than life, with his buzz cut and white stubble and large blue expressive