There’s more than one Before and After in this story, and one watershed was the twenty-ninth of April 2016. In my cupboard of an office at VU, I was jotting a half-hearted lesson plan when my phone rang, after which our household would plunge into disarray.
Wade had been rushed to the Voltaire Medical Center. When I hastened to his side he was foggy with pain meds, so I pieced together the story only a day or two later. The Treehouse, Inc., team had been trimming a large ash that was diseased, and though the owners were hoping to save it, the trim would have to be drastic if the tree was to have a chance. Wade was near the top of a tall stepladder. Having previously complained about not being given “real” tree surgery jobs, Danson Pelling was harnessed farther up the trunk. The assistant took it upon himself to sever a large bough without checking that the coast was clear; it crashed onto Wade and toppled the ladder. Wade’s foot got ensnared by one of the steps, and it was wrenched around in a direction nature never intended. The tendons were a mess; the ankle would require surgery. He also landed on his wrist and broke it. He was badly scraped up, and he had a concussion. In other words, Wade had been forced to hire someone who was just as smart as everyone else, and look where it got him.
I brought the kids to visit and arrived with earbuds, toiletries, and slices of frittata with chorizo. Though she’d never been on Wade’s wavelength, Emory canceled a recording for Peas in a Podcast to spend a torturous half hour at his bedside. But simultaneous to all our tender concern, a cruel calculation intruded. Our household’s finances were already precarious, and while Wade convalesced, his contribution to our budget would sit at zero. It was impossible to judge how long he’d be out of commission, or whether he’d ever be able to return to clambering three and four stories high. Let’s put it this way: tiger prawns were off the menu.
I discovered in retrospect how helpful Wade had been in the domestic department once I had to take up the slack. Without bidding for credit, much less having to be asked, he had vacuumed, dusted, shopped, and taken out the trash while ensuring the kids took showers and got to bed at a seemly hour. I’d been spoiled. But overnight our house no longer stocked and cleaned itself.
Wade was insured, but his high-deductible policy didn’t give us much latitude in choice of doctors. So when I met the surgeon who’d do what I gathered was a complex operation on his ankle, my heart fell. I have no prejudice against youth per se, though there’s no getting around the cliché that practice makes perfect, and this whippersnapper wouldn’t have had much practice. Yet in recent times my anxiety about callow professionals had jacked up a level. After all, by then Kelly and David’s decision to book a hip replacement in India had grown par for the course; wealthier Americans were quietly slipping off to get procedures done abroad by the tens of thousands. Might this fellow be green enough to have gone to medical school post-2010? The students in my own classes who didn’t do the reading, talked through my lectures, and had contempt for the whole concept of education wouldn’t likely achieve a full appreciation for the lush fruits of civilization that had ripened before they were born. But at least ignorance about Herman Melville wouldn’t kill anybody.
Wade was pretty dejected. It had taken him no longer than it had me to recognize this accident was a financial catastrophe, for the jobs he’d canceled from his hospital bed alone would have covered our May mortgage payment. He was too practical a person to work himself into a rage at Danson Pelling, as rage wouldn’t moderate the cold reality of What Is one whit. Still, anger is energizing (before it wears you out), and the alternative to fury was dolor and defeatism. Maybe to some it would seem an odd lifetime aspiration, but Wade had never wanted to be anything other than a tree surgeon; he enjoyed the same natural affinity with plants that people more commonly feel with animals. I could tell that he was anguishing night and day about whether he’d be able to return to his occupation, because this was the one subject he never talked about.
The surgeon was a skinny guy with stick-out ears who looked about twelve and whose silly name, Barry Sarsaparilla, didn’t encourage confidence, either. I was present in the hospital room when this child physician explained to us what they were planning to do to Wade’s ankle, whose torn ligaments and tendons I pictured as a plate of spaghetti. But whenever doctors describe medical procedures, I often feel woozy, and I have a terrible time paying attention—not because the details don’t seem important but because they so very much do. For me, the urgency of following the particulars induces paralysis. Telling yourself to concentrate being the polar opposite of concentration, for the whole spiel all I really heard hissing in my head was “Listen!” Once Wade was wheeled off, for all I knew they were about to weave his connecting tissues into a macramé wall hanging to sell at a local crafts fair.
Beforehand, Wade and I had been in accord over preferring a local nerve block to general anesthesia. It might have been sweeter to simply wake up after it was all over, but going fully under in this hospital didn’t seem safe. This was now a place you had to keep your wits about you, and even sleeping was an uneasy proposition. While the visuals of the institution were unchanged from when I’d given birth to Lucy here in 2005, its touch and feel had transformed in much the manner of the VU campus. In its accoutrements, the university still looked like a sacred vessel of cumulative human knowledge, but as the institution broke faith with its core mission of handing on that knowledge, its infrastructure had reduced to pure pomposity. In the case of the medical center, the catalyst for a similar corrosion from the inside out was patient mistrust. Waiting in the lobby for Wade to come out of surgery, I watched numerous doctors and nurses rushing down the halls, and while they all looked plausibly like doctors and nurses, some of them were fake doctors and nurses, mere simulacrums, who threaded undetectably among the real ones like Stepford wives.
When the twelve-year-old reported on the operation, Dr. Sarsaparilla was reassuring that all had gone well, though he assumed an incongruous lightness of tone; I suppose there was no getting around the fact that it was not his ability to walk up the stairs, much less his lifetime calling, that hung in the balance. In contrast to his preparatory lowdown, he delivered no specifics, and there was something about the way he looked not quite straight in my eyes but about an inch to the side that I did not like.
Wade was kept overnight on an antibiotic IV, and I’ll tell you what else I did not like: being phoned the next morning with the assurance that Wade was fine and there was nothing to worry about. I said, “I haven’t been worried. Why should I have been worried?”
“No, no,” the surgeon said. “The point is, you shouldn’t worry. He’s sleeping soundly and his vitals are back to normal.”
“What do you mean, back to normal?”
“There was, well, an event. Mr. Haavik is right as rain now, but very, very briefly, he went into cardiac arrest.”
“Why on earth? He broke his wrist. He wrenched his ankle. But he’s only forty-nine and spectacularly fit. There is, or was before you people got your hands on him, nothing wrong with his heart.”
“It seems there was . . . a little mix-up. With the IV.”
I took a deep breath. “Uh-huh. Do I at least have you to thank for noticing that my partner was—not to put too fine a point on it—dying?”
“Not exactly.”
“He wasn’t ‘exactly’ dying?”
“No, I mean I wasn’t personally the doctor who identified the pharmaceutical error and revived the patient. That would have been Dr. Howard.”
“Out of curiosity. How old is Dr. Howard?”
“I don’t know,” Sarsaparilla said. “Old.”
“Well, thank God for the doddering codgers who actually had to pass the MCAT to get into med school. I imagine Dr. Howard could even tell the difference between a femoral artery and a big toe.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Converse, and maybe I’ll give you a free pass because you’re under a lot of stress. But that kind of talk is unacceptable—”
“What’s unacceptable is nearly murdering your own patients!”
I can’t tell you what wildly incorrect drug drained into my partner’s arm, and for once not because I couldn’t pay attention but because the surgeon didn’t, i.e., wouldn’t, tell me, even after I got my temper under control and pressed him. It seems quaint, looking back, but caginess borne from fear of malpractice suits was still habitual in the closed ranks of the medical profession. I say quaint, because at my urging Wade would indeed consult an attorney about bringing a suit against the hospital. But the lawyer would talk him out of it. Echoing the resolution of all forms of malfeasance these days, accusations of medical malpractice were systematically thrown out of court as manifestations of cognitive bigotry.