5

Where Are You, Now That
I Need You, Lucille?

I didn’t know if it was okay to drink beer the night before you check into the hospital to have heart surgery, so I started calling doctors to find out. There were at least a half dozen involved in my case in one fashion or another.

The first doctor I reached said I probably shouldn’t drink any beer the night before checking into the hospital.

“You don’t want to show up with a hangover,” he said.

I certainly don’t think it would have been appropriate for any of my doctors to show up at the hospital that day of my surgery with a hangover, but I didn’t see why it would be a problem for me to appear in that condition, so I continued calling doctors.

The third one I reached said, “Sure, you can have a beer.”

A beer.

“Nobody drinks just one beer,” I explained. “That’s why they come in six-packs.”

“Okay,” said the doctor, “two beers.”

“Draught okay?” I forged onward.

“Draught is fine,” he said.

There is a store near my house that sells draught beer in gallon containers. I stuck to my doctor’s orders and bought only two containers.

Beer has gotten me through a lot of tough spots in my life, and I will always be indebted to Ronnie Jenkins—you will recall him as the hero of Chapter I who taught me about women. He also taught me to drink beer.

My first lessons began at Lucille’s beer joint in Grantville, Georgia. We were both fifteen. Old enough to buy it, old enough to drink it was Lucille’s motto. Only we never actually bought any beer at Lucille’s because we always made certain we drank with Mr. Hugh Frank Logan, a local farmer.

Mr. Hugh Frank was a large man, who toiled in his fields and enjoyed topping off the day with a few cool cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, which is all Lucille served, except for Carling Black Label and nobody would drink that, not even Ronnie and I.

The problem with Mr. Hugh Frank was he was hard of hearing, so he talked in a very loud voice:

“LUCILLE,” Mr. Hugh Frank would begin. “GIMME ONE UH THEM BLUE RIBBONS.”

Because he was hard of hearing and talked in a loud voice, nobody wanted to stand around with Mr. Hugh Frank and drink beer. Except Ronnie.

“Watch this,” he said to me one night after Mr. Hugh Frank had ordered his beer.

“HIYOUDOIN’, MR. HUGH FRANK!” screamed Ronnie.

“NOT TODAY, BUT WE MIGHT GET A SHOWER TOMORROW,” Mr. Hugh Frank replied.

“MRS. LOGAN DOING OKAY THESE DAYS, MR. HUGH FRANK?” Ronnie pressed on, a decibel or two louder.

“GOT ABOUT TWO MORE ACRES TO GO AND THEN I GOT TO HELP HARLEY BOTTS MOW HIS,” Mr. Hugh Frank answered.

The fact he had misunderstood what Ronnie had asked had nothing to do with anything. The fact somebody—anybody—would attempt to talk to him brought out all sorts of generosity in Mr. Hugh Frank.

“LUCILLE,” I can still hear him boom across the crowded room, over Ernest Tubb or Kitty Wells on the juke box, “GIMME ’NOTHER BLUE RIBBON. AND GIVE THESE HERE BOYS ONE, TOO.”

Later in the evening, Ronnie would ask Mr. Hugh Frank his opinion of the Monroe Doctrine and Mr. Hugh Frank would buy us more beer.

I had a terrible hangover when I awakened the morning I was to check into the hospital.

“The doctor told you not to drink a lot of beer,” said my wife.

I should have married Lucille, I said to myself.

I packed a little bag. I put in my toothbrush, shaving cream and razor, bedroom slippers, and some aspirin for my hangover.

“They’ll give you aspirin at the hospital,” said my wife.

“These are for the drive over there,” I said.

“Did you remember to take pajamas?” my wife continued.

I don’t wear pajamas. I am firmly convinced a man who wears pajamas also drinks whiskey sours and then eats those silly little cherries that come with the drink.

“Here are the pajamas I gave you for Christmas,” my wife went on. “Nobody goes to the hospital without pajamas.”

I asked my wife to describe the medical journal in which she had picked up that piece of information. She said if I didn’t take pajamas the doctors and nurses would know I slept in my underwear. I asked what was wrong with the doctors and nurses knowing that I slept in my underwear. She said men who sleep in their underwear sit up half the night drinking beer and then they belch and snore.

That wouldn’t have bothered Lucille, I said to myself.

I was told to be at the hospital at 10:30 in the morning. I took my little bag with my toilet articles, bedroom slippers, and pajamas inside, and I walked out of my house and into my garage. I sat down in my car, turned on the engine and backed the car out into the driveway.

As I was about to pull away, my wife came out to my car and said, “If you don’t want to take the pajamas, don’t take them. I’m sorry I made such an issue about it.”

“You know something,” I said to her. “If you owned a beer joint, you’d be perfect.”

I chose to have my operation at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta for two reasons: It has an excellent reputation as one of the world’s leading centers for heart surgery, and the Atlanta transit system runs buses that pass directly in front of the hospital.

A nice nurse showed me to my room. It reminded me of the dormitory room I had when I was a freshman in college, not exactly the Ramada Inn, but better than the accommodations at the Laredo Correctional Institute.

The first thing I did after the nurse left was to check the lone window in my room. It wasn’t locked. The next thing I did was check to see how far away was the ground. Three stories. Tie a few bedsheets together and I could be out of here and on a bus in a matter of minutes. You plan ahead at a time like this.

I soon learned why they insist you be checked into the hospital nearly twenty-four hours before your surgery so every doctor and nurse on the lot, and the guy mopping the hall, if he is so inclined, can ask you a lot of questions.

I hadn’t been in my room fifteen minutes when a doctor wearing a beard and some rather strange shoes that looked like ballet slippers came in with a clipboard and began discussing my medical history with me.

“Diabetes?”

“No.”

“Blurred vision?”

“You mean when I’m sober?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Ulcers?”

“No.”

“Asthma?”

“No.”

“Bronchitis?”

“No.”

“Venereal disease?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“Just answer it.”

“No.”

“Kidney failure?”

“No.”

“Pneumonia?”

“No.”

“Hemophilia?”

“Do what?”

“Is there any history of hemophilia in your family?”

“Third cousin on my mother’s side.”

“He was a hemophiliac?”

“Well, we weren’t certain, but he wore ballet slippers to work.”

“Is there anything you need?”

“Aspirin.”

Later the anesthesiologist came into my room and asked me more questions.

“Have you ever been put to sleep before?” she inquired.

“You mean outside a truck stop?”

Soon, it was time for lunch. If you have ever been in a hospital, you know about the kind of food they have there.

For lunch, I received some Jell-O, English peas, and something served in chunks with brown, lumpy gravy poured on top of it.

I hate Jell-O. Jell-O isn’t food at all. Children like Jell-O because they can see themselves in it and it jiggles when you put a fork in it. I don’t eat anything that jiggles.

I hate English peas, too. Once I went to Boy Scout camp and they served English peas every night for dinner. One evening, I made the mistake of indicating how much I disliked English peas.

“Young man,” said my Scout leader, “there are children all over China starving, and yet you turn up your nose at these peas.”

“I would like to take the first step toward helping solve the world food shortage problem by donating my English peas to the starving children of China,” I said.

Boy Scout leaders seldom have good senses of humor. He made me eat all my English peas and all that were left in the bowl before I could go back to my cabin and shoot craps with the other campers.

I vowed that night never to eat another English pea. I hope the starving children in China appreciate my gesture.

The chunky substance with the lumpy gravy on it. I asked the woman who brought it into my room if she knew what it was.

“Looks like some kind of stew,” she said.

“Stewed what?” I asked.

“I don’t cook it, I just serve it,” she answered.

I stuck my fork in it. It jiggled a couple of times and then hopped out of my plate and ran under the bed. I suppose that have to do something with those laboratory animals after they are through experimenting with them.

After lunch, they showed me a slide show concerning what to expect after I was finished with my surgery. This was when I first learned about the tubes they were going to put in my body.

The slides pictured a male patient in the Intensive Care Unit following his surgery. I looked at all the tubes that were running in and out of him and I noticed that he was smiling and seemed to be in no discomfort whatsoever.

You can’t put that many tubes in a man and manage to keep a smile on his face. Either the man was simply an actor playing the part of a patient, I surmised, or he was dead. I know what probably killed him, too. He ate the chunky stuff with the lumpy brown gravy on it.

They ran all sorts of tests on me. A nurse came in and took out something sharp and cut a slice out of my arm.

“Okay, I’ll eat the food,” I said.

She explained I wasn’t being punished. She was merely checking to see how I bled.

I bled pretty well. All down my arm, in fact.

“That’s perfect,” the nurse said smiling, while I laid there bleeding all down my arm.

“There’s a knife fight Saturday night,” I said to the nurse. “Want to go?”

I think she would have cut me on the other arm, but a doctor walked in to check my heart. He put his stethoscope to my chest and then he asked if I wanted to take a listen.

I had never heard my own heart beat. I asked what to listen for.

“The sound the heart is supposed to make goes like this: ‘lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub,’” the doctor said. “If you will listen closely, you will hear yours go, ‘lub-dub, shhhh, lub-dub, shhhh, lub-dub, shhhh.’ The shhhh is the sound of the blood leaking back through your valve.”

I listened. The doctor was wrong. My heart didn’t go “lub-dub, shhh.” It went “lub-dub-dub-dub-dub, bzzzt.”

“The only way your heart would be making a sound like that is if you had sat up half last night and drank two gallons of beer,” the doctor said.

My surgeon peeked in. I could tell from his voice he had a slight cold.

“Try not to worry about a thing,” he said, just before he sneezed.

As soon as he left, I called for the guy with the weird shoes and asked for Valium, as much as they could spare.

Nobody mentioned the shave to me. There was a knock on my door.

“Come in,” I said. More questions or more tests.

A man entered carrying a pan of water.

“I’m Doctor Prep,” he said, pulling a razor out of the pan of water.

“Doctor Prep?”

“I’m the one who preps you for surgery,” he said.

“Preps me?”

“Shaves you.”

“I shaved this morning.”

“Not where I’m going to shave you.”

I looked a the window. If I couldn’t get out through there, I thought, maybe I could hide under the bed with my lunch.

Escape was out of the question. I pulled back the covers.

“Nice pajamas,” said Doctor Prep.

“Say that again without that razor in your hand,” I said back to him.

I took off my pajamas. I was wearing nothing but my hair. In thirty-five years, I had accumulated quite a bit of hair on my body. Hair can cause infections during surgery.

Dr. Prep took most of it. He started at my neck. He shaved my chest. He shaved my stomach. He spent ten minutes shaving in my navel. I didn’t even know I had hair in my navel.

He shaved on. When he got to my dignity, I closed my eyes.

He stopped at my knees.

“When we do bypass,” he said, “I shave ’em all the way down to their ankles.”

In bypass heart surgery, they take portions of arteries from the legs to replace the clogged arteries near the heart.

“You seem to enjoy this work,” I said to Dr. Prep.

“Beats plucking chickens,” he answered, closing the door behind him.

I figured the worst was over. Then, there was another knock on the door. I wasn’t going to be surprised again.

“Who is it?” I said.

“Come to check your plumbing,” a voice answered.

That’s all I needed. I’d been questioned and requestioned, had a nurse cut my arm and a man shave my knees, legs, chest, privates, and belly bald and now here came the man with the rubber glove.

I couldn’t bear to look. I rolled over on my stomach, beckoned him in, and waited for the intrusion. Thirty seconds later, I heard the toilet in my restroom flush. I turned around and there stood a man wearing a brown shirt with his name sewn over the pocket holding a plunger.

“Nothing to worry about now,” he said. “It flushes fine.”

I called for more Valium.

There were only a couple of more things. There was the enema. I will spare you the details of that. I was told I could order something out to eat if I didn’t want what the hospital was serving for dinner. I think they were afraid maybe I had a gun and would use it if they brought me anything else to eat out of the hospital kitchen.

I sent my wife out for chili dogs. I saved them until after my enema. A hospital patient takes his revenge where he can.

Night came. Twelve hours to go. The nurse slipped her head through the door and said I had a visitor.

“If he doesn’t have a razor, let him in,” I said.

My minister walked into my room.

“Anything on your mind?” he asked.

“Pull up a chair,” I answered.