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A Brief Exposure

SEPTEMBER 19, 1985

 

One learns a lot about one’s own culture by slipping on a banana peel every now and then. Last Friday morning, at a hotel room in Detroit, I awoke in acute distress. Awoke, if that is what you call it, having slept for only twenty minutes, before which time I had been similarly awakened ... and so on, back through the night, which was supposed to have begun when I turned off the lights at 1 A.M., having finished my homework and taken my routine medication to keep my always freeze-easy respiratory system lubricating away, the better to address the distinguished members of the Michigan State Bar at noon the next day on their fiftieth anniversary.

Meanwhile, I had a very concrete problem. A jab in the center of my chest had abruptly awakened me every twenty minutes over a seven-hour period, resulting in isolated pockets of sleep but zero repose. “What kind of pain, Mr. Buckley?” I was later asked, and had to remind myself that Harold Ross has taught us that “nothing is indescribable” before attempting to establish whether the pain in my chest was one tenth what you’d feel sticking your hand over a burning fire, two tenths the kind of pain you’d feel if somebody clamped a rubber band around your esophagus, three tenths what you feel when what’s in your stomach tries to move up, instead of down, one tenth the feel of an icicle bullet fired through you from the resident Bulgarian.... It really isn’t easy.

But everyone should know what I didn’t, which is that when the hotel sends in the paramedics, they decide whether there is any reason to suppose your trouble might trace to the heart, and if the answer is yes, you find yourself on a gurney headed right through Times Square: at least four hundred people would have spotted you slithering out of the hotel into the ambulance. And since one hour and forty-five minutes later you were scheduled to address a press conference in advance of your post-luncheon speech, your nifty idea of sneaking off for a quickie test at the Cardiac Arrest Center in midtown Detroit and tiptoeing back to do your duty becomes a little surrealistic.

There they treat you as if you had had a heart attack—identical motions are indicated. And you learn for the first time (in my case) that doctors cannot rule out for twenty-four hours that what you had was a heart attack. They can, in the course of three or four hours, tell you they think it was something else, but scientific discipline forbids them to exclude “heart attack”—which is of course what everybody is quietly concluding.

And it is hard to begin to express one’s appreciation as the unidirectional messages of goodwill (you are not allowed to get messages out) flood in. Wife and son materialized, and were permitted to mediate the traffic, requiring a little improvisation when quoting me, since I was at that point near torpor. I remember several messages with especially keen delight, primary among them that from an old friend who relayed that two of his closest associates had died within days of each other and he was even at that moment headed for a service to deliver a eulogy, and if things did not work out for me at the Harper-Grace Hospitals in Detroit, he could with very little work use the same eulogy, though if in my last moments I had any deathbed afterthoughts and joined the Democratic Party, that would make his burden easier. Another friend suggested that this was the proper moment at which to call in an exorcist.

A disruptive personal and public experience: The gentlemen of the bar did not get their speech; my friends (and critics) in the newspaper world did not get their column, though on that gurney they wheeled me out on there was no room for my toilet kit, I sneaked aboard my little Epson computer, hoping to catch breath enough to abort a national solecism before my noon deadline (by that point I was fast asleep).

The whole experience will quickly fade from the memory—such things do—but not the conviction that if you flirt with difficulties of the heart, head for Harper-Grace Hospitals, which are associated with Wayne State University. And if you are very lucky, Joshua Wynne, M.D., chief of the Division of Cardiology, will be there, and if you lie to him that you are pleased that Harvard is doing so well in football, he may give you an eyeshade, which is the only piece of equipment they don’t have at that medical emporium of kind people.

What was it I did have? The docs didn’t know. I suggested “premature stigmata,” but I was not taken seriously.