Chapter 35
THERE IS DISCUSSION ABOUT open-heart bypass surgery. Dr. Goodfriend is against it, but my dad’s doctor in California says it is a viable option. They cannot do it in Ithaca. There are alternative hospitals; the procedure is still so new. Should he go back to California? Or Rochester? He can go to Strong Memorial in Rochester, an hour and a half away.
But first he will come home to the cottage for a while. Decisions will be made, but not then, not in that moment in the hospital.
He is told, of course, no cigarettes, no this, no that, and is given a long list of dietary and physical restrictions and suggestions.
My father is not the same. He loathes being an invalid or being treated even remotely like one. Understandably, his moods are mercurial. He says he needs to be by himself. He takes short walks. He hides matches in his shoes, in planters, in bowls. The cigarettes we will find months and months later behind the file cabinet, behind the wall, tucked into drawers.
He is going stir-crazy. We plan a night out, dinner and a movie. I watch my dad closely, but I cannot begin to know what he is feeling emotionally or physically. He jokes and laughs. But we don’t make it through the movie. He says he’ll be fine, he’s just tired, he just needs to get home.
Later my father is in pain. The nitroglycerin is not working, and in the middle of the night we leave for the hospital. My mother drives, my father beside her, and I am in the backseat pulling the bobby pins out of my mother’s hair for her.
There are few cars on the road at that hour. Occasional bright lights in the distance that quickly dim. The trees go by in a blur of shadowed darkness, quick shots of the whitest most iridescent moon between them.
I want to lean forward and touch my dad. Reach for his hand. Squeeze his shoulder. But I don’t want him to know I am afraid for him.
Sometime at dawn, or later, or before, the doctor in California is urging the open-heart surgery.
My father goes by ambulance to Rochester, an hour or so away. He wants to stop at the cottage. He wants to stand on the porch one last time before he goes, but there are, I guess, schedules to follow, appointments that must be kept, and so, he can’t go back.
Halfway to Rochester, though, he does ask the paramedics to stop so that he can smoke. Astonishingly, they pull over. Because of the oxygen in the ambulance, my dad has to get out. There they are, all of them, smoking on the side of the road like something out of a Saturday Night Live skit. When we hear this we are not entirely surprised. At the hospital in Ithaca, he had convinced an orderly to sneak him cigarettes. My dad kept them in the battery compartment of his radio. It heated up, and the cigarettes caught fire.
My dad is hopelessly, helplessly addicted.
At Strong Memorial Hospital, I have to show an ID to see him. I bring him his mail (he insists on this), and I also bring an audiotape I have made for him for Father’s Day. On it I pretend I am several different relatives. I make the phone ring each time before I answer, and then, in the voices of the relatives, ask for him—“Is Roddy there? It’s . . .” From his hospital bed, my father laughs. He asks me repeatedly how I got the phone to ring.
His days in the hospital are long. He walks to the bathroom or to the chair by the window, and then back to the bed. His steps are careful and slow. This is hard on him. The man he meets in the mirror looks tired and old, like someone he doesn’t know.
I’m not certain he believes us when the doctors, my mother, sister, and I tell him he’s okay. He says, “I listened to the radio to see what my condition really is.” He laughs a little when he says this.
One morning, just as I am about to tap on the door of his hospital room, I hear him talking to the doctor. “I think my survival chances may have been better in the war,” I hear him say, and I wait until the doctor comes out. When I see my dad, I don’t admit that I have overheard him. For just a moment, we are quiet, the brown of his eyes reflecting my own. Deep down, in a place I don’t want to glimpse, is a fear as immeasurable as his.
I pull up a chair beside his bed and together we watch television or talk a little. Despite what I have overheard, he looks at me and says, “You know, Pops, for the most part, I am feeling confident about this surgery.”
He has, apparently, shared the same sentiment with Dick Berg who will later recount: “The fact is those last weeks were affirmative ones for him. And he was moving more and more toward the conviction that the prescribed surgery would revitalize his condition . . .”
Nurses draw his blood repeatedly. His levels are checked, his blood pressure monitored. At one point, there is something wrong; his blood is not clotting correctly. The surgeon thinks they may have to postpone the surgery, but this anomaly soon corrects itself.
Several days before the surgery, we check into a nearby residence for patients’ families where my mother has been staying. Prior to that, the rest of us had been driving back and forth from the cottage.
I walk to the hospital, show my ID at the entrance desk, push the elevator button for the eighth floor, and step out into that sea of bright walls.
My dad is asleep. For a moment I watch him, sitting beside him, leaning, waiting, and thinking of another time when he was ill and I was little. In a white skirt, a hat I’d made myself, and teetering in my mother’s heels, I’d knocked on his door.
“Mr. Serling?” I said, in my six-year-old voice. “I’m your nurse. I have candy for your flu, candy for your throat, and candy for your stomachache.”
I took his pulse, wiped his forehead dry, and sat with him for hours.
Now, watching him so still, just days before surgery, the recollection feels so long ago and I barely know the girl and her dad looking back at me in that memory.
Down the hall, outside his room, people passing by speak in whispers. Despite the hushed tones, my dad wakes and sees me. He says he is so sorry. He says I should have woken him.
As if he should not have been sleeping, as if he should not have been gone, and afraid for him, I want to weep.
He doesn’t belong in that bed in the hospital. This is all a mistake.
The next day the surgery prep begins, and his chest is shaved, making it look like a boy’s. A team of doctors tells him what he can expect post-op. They say he may not recognize people right away.
“Don’t worry,” he tells us. “I’ll know who you are.” He smiles and winks and says again that he is feeling positive, confident that this surgery will fix things and he will soon get on with all of the things he wants to do.
The moon that night is full, a white-yellow glow pouring through the hospital window. It shines on my dad, illuminating him. In the shadows beside the colored wall, we kiss him good night and tell him we’ll see him tomorrow.
The next day, the “four- to five-hour procedure” stretches to six, to seven, to eight and a half.
My mother, my sister, and I sit in the waiting room and stare at the walls. Ken, Rochelle, my sister’s husband Steve, and my uncle, my father’s brother, are there now, too. Few words are exchanged. Hours pass when we say nothing at all.
The sky is black when, at last, the doctor squeezes into the small room and tells us my father is on a heart-lung machine and dialysis.
“The surgery went well,” he says, “but he had another heart attack after we closed him up.”
“After we closed him up.” I do not want to think of my father in those terms. Opened, sewn shut. I just want him there.
The doctor has a diagram of a heart. He holds it up and points. He indicates the area where something has gone wrong. But of course they can fix this, or more surgery will, and certainly my dad will get well and isn’t that just what the doctor is saying?