Take Me Down to Paradise City…

For Chris, Haley and Scott

                                        Monday

It had mostly been a mild fall and early winter, but in the middle of December, it turned quite cold, causing him shortness of breath and a feeling of heaviness in his chest when he opened his car door and scampered to get inside his home or the other places he visited. He’s a retired professor who has just finished a novel, and he’s feeling the depression that comes from not knowing what to write next. He’s lonely and he uses his Movie Pass, going mostly to matinees, seeking conversation and inspiration, but he sees a lot of bad movies in mostly empty theaters that he gets a kick out of leaving -- loud movies that everyone else seems to love -- and sometimes when he leaves he boos the image growling and reverberating from the screen.

It was after a Sunday matinee, that ended just before it was fully dark, that the heaviness really bothered him. He had seen the latest Star Wars sequel; had to park at the very back of the movie’s lot because of the film’s popularity, and when he got to his car the heaviness didn’t go away when he took a minute or so to rest.

That night he told his son and his son told him to see a doctor.

“It’s almost Christmas. I’ll do it if it doesn’t go away, but look at me,” he said, stringing lights around the ceiling of his big room, then steadying the Christmas tree while his son set and screwed it in the holder. “I feel fine. Never better.”

The next morning the heaviness was back and stayed as he made and drank a mango smoothie. He opened his laptop to check his email, but edgy now, he decided to call his cardiologist; a doctor he had always liked since he helped him through an angioplasty that had followed a mild heart attack he had when he was only forty-nine years old. Dr. Krauss had helped him regain his strength, but Charley hadn’t seen or talked to him for several years. No number in his phone; he wasn’t really sure Krauss was his name, just that his name started with a K, as his last name did, but pawing through the phone book under Cardiologists, he saw the name Krauss and realized he was the one. He rested for a minute or two, deciding whether to call or not, but the heaviness didn’t go away, and he called.

After some of the usual rigmarole, from a recorded voice, he was finally connected with Krauss’s nurse.

“Hi,” he said to her, “I’d like to make an appointment to see the doctor.” He described the heavy feeling in his chest. “There’s no pain,” he said to her.  “Just the sense that I’m carrying around something inside that shouldn’t be there.”

“Are you nauseous?”

 “No, not at all.”

“Dizzy?”

“No more than usual,” he joked.

“Where is the heaviness?”

“In the center of my chest. You know that center spot where the ribs sorta’ come together”

“Do you drive?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“Well, Charley here’s what I want you to do. You need, right now -- right now -- to drive to the emergency room at the IU/Arnett Hospital. There’s no one there, so go right now. Do you know where the hospital is? Can you put it in your phone? Do you know where the big Meijer’s is? Well, it’s just past that. Do you understand? I want you to go to the emergency room right now, and we’ll worry about you seeing the doctor after you do what I’m telling you to do. Right now. There’s no one there.”

He didn’t know what to say. He hung up the phone; fed his cat; closed his laptop; there was nothing to save; took his time getting dressed and to the car, and he backed out of his driveway and started his trip to the hospital. He felt no different than he had before, but he realized that something big time was wrong. What am I doing driving? he wondered halfway there, when he bounced through a pothole, tightening up all his nerves.

When he got to the hospital, he found a parking spot close to the emergency room entrance. Told the nurse receptionist why he was there. Told her the story he’d gotten from Krauss’s nurse. She smiled when he told her that she had said no one was there, and there wasn’t in reception anyway. She took some information, told him to come around her desk and she took him through the entryway behind her, sat him down and administered an EKG. “A doctor will be right with you,” she said. “We need to find you a room. It’ll just be a few minutes.”  

This is where the holes start, and from here on to the end of this story, there are holes in his memory that appear like a big soap bubble, then pop to let his memories back in. He was put in a small room, x-rayed, and he thinks, given a cat scan. Around 2:00, he was put in a regular room on the second floor – a big room with a place under the window that overlooked a long expanse of gravel roof for guests to sit, or as he soon found out, to stay the night.

He was told to undress, his clothes put in neat, large, clear plastic bags that were sealed and labeled. He put on a hospital gown, open on the back, and he remembers telling several nurses that a guy creating a hospital gown that was comfortable could make a fortune. He even remembers some agreeing with him.

He had blood drawn from both arms and from a fatty spot over his stomach, and he was given regular reports which early on revealed no real symptoms of anything except hypertension, but a couple hours later, he was told that the latest tests showed that he had had a heart attack. Nevertheless, they had him up and walking and they timed him walking a short distance to see what? He never knew.

His daughter, Haley, appeared sometime during all this. She got sick, when nurses came in and connected him to a couple machines, then told them that he was scheduled to have an angiogram the next day. 

                                    Tuesday

Haley stayed overnight, both awakened by nurses coming in several times to take his blood pressure or draw blood.  Early in the morning, a younger doctor came in and explained the angiogram surgery, but having had one years ago on his heart, and another fewer years ago on his left leg, he acted almost smug. “Ok,” he said to the young doctor, “No big deal, let’s go.”

“We’re doing several today, and you’re last minute, so you’ll go last.”

“How many before?” he asked.

“Four before you. A nurse will get you prepared a half hour or so before we take you up to third.”

There was nothing for them to do but watch television. Haley found a channel he had never seen with full movies streaming one after another, and they watched the movie, “Message in a Bottle” that Haley said would cheer him up. It sorta’ did, but the endless commercials drove him crazy and he explained, what Haley already knew, that he recorded movies with commercials at home and only watched them fast forwarding through the ads.

Around 4:30, a nurse told him he was next. Several minutes later, he saw a patient a few doors down brought back to her room and he was put on a gurney, or whatever it was called, and taken up to a very small operating room where he was sedated. Later he was brought back to his room and awakened by Haley and his son Scott.                   

He recalls eating supper with an appetite. Soon after, the young doctor who had told him when he would be taken for the angiogram came with an assistant or two (big holes here) to tell him that he had too much blockage to do angioplasty: 100% in one artery, 95%, and 45%, in two others. “Your condition is serious, but our head surgeons, Stone or Kalmbach, will see you tomorrow to discuss your options.” He shook his hand. Didn’t ask for questions and left.

 Later his daughter told him that the doctor motioned her out of the room and asked her if he had a “living will.” She thought he remembered him mentioning one to her, and the doctor told her to find it. She asked a nurse to ask him if he had one: The nurse, probably used to this request, said to him, “This is just routine for someone who will probably have more surgery,” and he told Scott and Haley that he thought he had his in a small metal box in his bedroom at home where he kept important papers.

Scott, when he left that night, stopped and looked for the will there and in other places where his dad kept papers and didn’t find one. Haley called his son Chris in Denver, who was planning to come on the weekend, and told him to see if he couldn’t find an earlier flight.

                          Wednesday

Scott, his girlfriend, Brianna, and Haley spent most of the day with him. He had breakfast using the call-in menu he’d been given -- a hospital menu that gave him lots of choices – in a room with a place for visitors to sleep. Not like the old Saint Elizabeth Hospital, with its cramped rooms, or the Jasper County Hospital in his hometown, Rensselaer, that he’d moved from two years ago.

His cardiologist, Krauss, visited him and told him he was in great hands; that his surgeon was Dr. Kalmbach, who was a genius. The nurses in the room all smiled, said “oh, how true” or words like that, as he bet they did to whatever a doctor said to relax the patient. He thinks he had an echogram, then later in the morning both Dr’s Stone and Kalmbach came in and examined him. Stone left, explaining that the particular kind of surgery he was going to have was Kalmbach’s specialty.

And what was that? He needed triple by-pass surgery, but because his aorta was thickened and brittle where Kalmbach would need to make some kind of incision to connect a heart-lung machine, he’d have to do the surgery without stopping his heart. He thinks that’s what Kalmbach said anyway, and he further explained that the aorta might shatter like glass if he tried to open it for the heart-lung machine and stop his heart permanently. At least that’s what he thinks he also said. 

To clarify, Kalmbach grabbed the dry eraser pen in the room, and he drew a diagram showing all that he had just told them on the plastic dry-board usually used to write the names of the nurses and other stuff.

He remembers all this clearly. Remembers Kalmbach describing an instrument called an “octopus” which stabilizes parts of the heart during an operation, but when asked if he had any questions he said nothing. Scott and Haley and his son Chris in Denver, who was hooked up on a conference call, asked some, but he has no idea what they were. Nothing was said for a time, then he said, “Well, Ok. I understand. When should we do all this?”

Kalmbach, without a pause, said, “How about tomorrow morning at 8:00? There was again a fairly long pause. Kalmbach said they might wait until after Christmas, “but if we do, I’m concerned that you might have another heart attack.” The house was polled. Everyone said tomorrow at eight. When they looked at him for his response he pretended some doubts, but he had made up his mind when Kalmbach said, “do it tomorrow,” and he said, “Let’s do it tomorrow.”

That night after supper he went through a most humbling and humiliating experience. Everyone was thrown out of his room. He was given a battery operated, waterproof, electric razor, a dozen towels, and a half-dozen plastic bottles of disinfectant soap, and told to take a shower, use the razor to shave off all the hair on his chest and groin and under his arms, and to use a new towel for each part of his body he was supposed to wash and disinfect. The soap was yellow, a particularly disgusting yellow, and it smelled like lye.

After shaving himself with the sputtering razor, that sometimes pulled hair before cutting it, ouch, he had to stand under the shower, to wash both arms and legs, his ass, his chest, his head and neck with a separate towel; throw them on the floor; open a new bottle of disinfectant and do it again. The shower was warm, of course, but moving back and forth, grabbing new towels and disinfectant, chilled him, and half-way through all this, he started crying, then he said out loud to himself, “Fuck all that. Tomorrow can’t be worse than this. Nothing can except not waking up.” And he dressed himself in a new, enormous hospital gown, called in the nurses who cleaned up his mess without talking to him. They told Haley she could come back in, and he and Haley went to sleep.                                

                        

                                  Thursday

He slept well. Things were moving too fast to think much about them. The next morning Scott and Brianna and Haley came in just as his nurses were getting ready to start prepping him to go up to surgery. Everyone was somber, but some comment got Haley laughing, and she started singing, then dancing, to the tune of “Take me down to Paradise City/ Where the grass is green/ and the girls are pretty.” Her brother and Brianna looked at her like she was crazy, and she is usually a bit crazy, so she kept it up, dancing back and forth in front of his bed.

“What’s that?” he asked her.

“Guns and Roses, Dad. You know Guns and Roses.” They all started laughing at him because they knew that he had no idea who or what Guns and Roses were.

But he said to them, “Sure I know Guns and Roses,” and he picked up the song along with Haley until a nurse getting him off the bed told him he probably ought to stop.

She told Scott and Brianna and Haley they had to go to the Surgery Waiting Room on the first floor, where Susie, an assistant of Kalmbach’s would come in every hour and tell them the progress and any issues that they might encounter. They all said their goodbyes, lots of hugs and “everything will be all rights,” and they took him to the elevator and up to third floor. He was scared. He thinks he said a prayer when they took him out of the elevator, but then he started singing, “Take me down to Paradise City /Where the Grass Is Green/ And the Girls Are Pretty/ and he finished it because, damn it, he realized he did know the song. He sang, “Oh, Won’t You Please Take Me Home,” moving his arms like he was dancing, and he sang it until they put a mask over his mouth. 

He woke up mad. He had no idea where he was, but he had a tube down his throat; it hurt, and he wanted it out. He looked around; saw Scott and Haley, Brianna and Wally, Haley’s boyfriend and saw no reason one of them couldn’t take the damned tube out. He tried to tell them that, but all he could make was a gagging sound, so he started to spell “Take this tube out” one letter at a time, above him, like a teacher writing on a blackboard. When he finished the T in OUT, he gestured with both hands at his mouth and the tube hanging out from it there.

They weren’t supposed to get up and come to him, he guessed, because no one did, so he shuffled his arms back and forth in a stop motion and tried again, and then a third time, finally attracting a nurse they called over.

He’s awake,” they all said to her. 

‘Yes, he seems to be.”

“Why’s he so aggravated?”

"I think because he wants the tube in his throat out."

This was more than he could stand. He swallowed, coughed and managed to speak enough for them to hear him around the tube: “Take this damn tube out.”

Then a doctor or a nurse did, and his family came over and everything seemed to be all right.    

That memory is so clear to him, but little else that day is except being occasionally awakened by a nurse to do his vitals, and his gradual awareness of being hooked up to three machines all with digital screens, and a stand holding two bags dripping medicine into him. He remembers being alone. His family later tells him that they were told to leave and come back tomorrow since he wouldn’t be conscious enough to know them.

Before we go there, here are some things he was told happened while he was in surgery. The surgery took from 8:00 am until around 2:30 pm. Several friends from Rensselaer came and stayed with his family through much of the waiting. He’s not going to put names here, but he’s thanked them all for coming. Scott and Brianna, who are sleepers, slept through much of the time, waking up every two hours for the report from Susie, Dr. Kalmbach’s assistant. Haley was far too nervous to sleep, so she talked her boyfriend, Wally, into taking her to McDonald’s for two things she’s addicted to: At McDonald’s its French fries and Cappuccino, with lots of caffeine. (Also, Gummy Bears, Mountain Dews, and Skittles, not relevant here).

Kalmbach came to describe the surgery, explaining that all went well, but Scott still remembers how he talked so softly that no one could really hear him, so there was a lot of optimistic, “I think he saids” after the meeting.

Around 4:00 pm, he was taken to what became his room in the Intensive Care Unit where he was kept for seven days. Everyone was awfully relieved, but only his family was allowed to go there, but they were told to leave.

                                                                       Friday

They got him up to walk, unhooked him from the machines, but he thinks they had him walk with the IV pole for him to hold onto. A nurse came with him, holding onto a belt she put around his waist to steady him. He thinks they walked down a full corridor to the window that looked out over a long stone-covered roof to one of the parking lots off several hundred yards away.

He was terribly proud of himself, and his nurse (it was too early for him to associate anyone yet with names) praised him for not needing to hold onto the belt around his waist. All he can think about is that he is walking on his own 24 hours after the time they took him to surgery.

His oldest son, Chris, came from Denver and asked a lot of questions. He is the general worry-wart of the family, and others came too, though he has especially big holes here. He remembers people telling him how good he looked, but he doesn’t know who. He does clearly remember that they had him walking again and being timed on a short section of the corridor and getting praised for his time.

Haley came and slept over.

                               Saturday

It’s Christmas Eve and a young doctor’s aide came in to show him how he must behave to protect his incision from being damaged. Sometime, the day before the surgery, he was given a bright red, heart-shaped pillow with the IU Health Logo and Arnett Hospital in bright white letters on it, that his kids had signed, like they sign casts, telling him he was going to be all right. The aide told him he was to wrap his arms around the pillow to stop him from using his hands or his arms to push or pull himself up from anything. If he had to cough, he could lessen the pain by also wrapping his arms around the pillow, something he found to be true. He was also told that he absolutely can’t lift anything over five pounds, or he’ll rip his guts out – his interpretation of their kinder instructions.

Next, he’s given a strange looking plastic thing, called a Voldyne 5000 inhaler that he’s supposed to use by sucking in his breath as strongly as he can to prevent him from getting pneumonia. After he catches on, he gets the dial up to 2000 level, and he’s praised some more. Do this ten times every hour, he’s told.

It’s Christmas Eve. He feels great. He says to Chris and Scott and Haley and Brianna and Wally, “Let’s have a party,” then he naps and later in the afternoon – after he walks – can’t forget the walking, and the sucking up his breath into the plastic thing -- they come back with Brianna’s mom and dad and her brother, who’ve come down from northern Illinois to celebrate Christmas in Lafayette. They share a bottle of champagne (he gets diet Sprite) and they laugh and pretend that this is just like any other Christmas Eve.

After they toast, he says, “What a hell of a way to get the families together,” and they all laugh self-consciously. His nurse, Joann, shoos them out.

“I’m not tired,” he says.

“That’s fine,” Joann says. “You’ve done enough for today.”

Chris stays with him that night. He tries to talk to Chris about him and his wife, Juliet’s, new house that is being built for them, but he keeps falling asleep.

                                                      Sunday

The nights are troubling. He can’t roll on his side to sleep, and even with the head of the bed raised, his chest hurts when he tries to breathe deeply or when he coughs. Oh, the coughing. He tries hard not to cough, and he clutches and squeezes his heart pillow against his incision, but when he’s awakened to do his vitals, he almost always has to cough, and it scares him. Dee and Stephanie, two of his night nurses talk to him; call him hon, ask him questions about his family and what he did before surgery. He needs to talk to someone and this helps relax him, and as uncomfortable as it is to have to stay in only one position on his back, he falls asleep, until he wakes up coughing.

But it’s Christmas, and he walks without his nurse bringing a belt, and the whole gang comes back in the afternoon with presents to open, pictures to take and some special Christmassy Chicken Noodle soup, wonderfully full of cream and butter that Brianna’s mom, Cheri, made for them. Here’s one of the pictures they took:

Look how happy he looks clutching his red heart pillow, smiling like he’s just gotten out of bed at home, waiting for all the presents to be opened and the mess cleaned up, so they can get together in his big room, sit around his dining table with two extra leaves in it, and folding chairs brought in from the garage, all snuggling around the table together, holding hands and wishing  everyone a Merry Christmas. They tease Scott and Brianna about their maybe? coming engagement plans. Leave Wally and Haley alone since they’re still just in their mid-twenties. Then the big feast.

But what they do in his hospital room is quite enough, and after an hour or so, Joann again throws everyone out, but Haley, who stays over, and they watch movies until they both fall asleep early, after all the festivities they wanted or needed.  

                                 Monday thru Wednesday

He walks more and farther, or he lays in bed and later sits in a chair that’s by the side of his bed. He’d like to take a seat under the window where visitors sit or sleep, but the wires and tubes connecting him to the machines aren’t long enough to reach there. Boring.

His nurses are wonderful. Joann seems to make a special effort to stay with him to relieve the boredom, and she answers every question he asks her, sometimes just to keep her there.  Judy, an older white-haired nurse, has the best response to one of his questions: She cleans and puts back all the tubes and cables he’s attached to from the machines. When he asks her how she keeps them all straight, she says, “It’s just plumbing,” and he realizes how many drain out fluids and wastes from his body, and they have a good laugh together. 

Haley and Chris are his most steady visitors. Haley’s a kindergarten teacher, but her principal, who’d recently lost her mother, told Haley to stay with her father if he or she felt the need. Scott and Brianna have to go to work and, Scott, who works the second shift at a car assembly plant, comes and has lunch with him.

Slowly, they disconnect him from one machine or another, but the most dramatic thing they do is remove three seven-inch long blue tubes, spaced an inch apart just under his ribcage, that drain fluids from his what? He’s not sure he wants to know.  When the young woman doctor pulled them out, he watched her, and he almost fainted. Three seven- inch blue tubes! On Wednesday he’s liberated from the IV pole, and to celebrate when he walks, he swings his arms like he’s an Olympic runner.

He’s told he might be released as early as Thursday, one week from the day he had the surgery. He needs a place to do rehabilitation that will be paid by Medicare. On Tuesday and Wednesday, Chris, Haley, and Scott, when he can, go to inspect a number of rehab facilities. Most are retirement centers with resources for rehabilitating people with serious problems or people like him who have had major surgeries. Many of the places that they visit are sterile or shabby, but they find a place close to the university they think he will like.

He remembers another place called Westminster Village where his favorite aunt and uncle went to live after they retired. He remembers visiting them there, and so does Chris, but that had been a long time ago.

He asked them to check out Westminster. They did, and on Wednesday, Chris called him; said it was fabulous, by far the best, and that they'd started the paperwork, so he could move in on Thursday if he could get released from the hospital.

The next day, after waiting around all morning to finish signing his release papers, an ambulance finally came for him. The nurses on the floor that day came in and wished him well, and he cried when they took him down in the elevator in a wheelchair to the Emergency entrance, where he had to let them put him on a gurney to get him aboard for the ride.  It had snowed a lot, and it was below zero. He didn’t care. They covered him with blankets and took him to Westminster. 

                                             Thursday

Everyone just calls it the Village. It has apartments, guesthouses and cottages and a rehabilitation center where he was greeted by the Health Center administrator, the director of nursing, a social worker, the day nurses and an aide on duty, who put a call device on his wrist that looked like an old-fashioned watch with a button in the center. After doing that, they wheeled him down to room B-17, a large, attractive room with a hospital bed, a desk, wi-fi for his computer, two easy chairs, end tables on both sides of the bed, a large flat screen television, and a huge, ugly, dark bathroom with a shower. His room has a picture window looking outside to a patio that was covered with what looked to be at least five inches of snow. He signed a lot of paperwork, threw everybody out, and took a nap in the chair next to his window. It was cold there, but he couldn’t have been happier. 

Later, around five, Chris and Haley came and decided to show him around the place. Haley pushed him in his wheelchair out of rehab into the main building to show him the library, “You can maybe come here and write,” she told him. “This is one of the reasons I picked this place.” They moved on to the large dining room where they watched residents eating their dinner (they eat early here, he came to find out). Next, they wheeled him into building B and into the Live Well Fitness Center with rows and rows of exercise equipment, a fireplace, a pool table, then the most impressive thing of all: a beautiful swimming center with two warm water therapy pools, and a heated lap pool in a room with colorful arrangements of lots of large plants. Finally, they took him to the art room where they told him he might also like to come to write.

They had dinner after all this at the Village Pub, where guests were welcomed and seven days after his by-pass surgery he had a medium rare filet mignon for dinner. Chris had a cocktail, and Haley had wine with dinner (he had another Sprite), and they toasted him and each other for all the good things that had happened in just one week. They said they couldn’t be happier with his progress. They pushed him back to his room. (He wanted to walk, but they wouldn’t let him.) Haley helped him get into bed, hugging his heart pillow and he quickly fell asleep.

                                     Friday and on

When he woke up on Friday, he felt miserable. He was not supposed to push or pull himself up, so holding on to his heart pillow, he found it, at first, almost impossible to get up to go to the bathroom, or out of bed in the morning. He had to call an aide to come help him and that took time when he either had to go, or he was just tired of laying in one position on his back.

When he told Haley about this, she smiled and said, “You’re not a very patient man, Dad. It’s going to be different here.” It was, but his nurses and aides did as well as they could. First thing every morning, after he learned to get himself out of bed and into the recliner in front of his window, he pushed his call button and Susan, or Shona would come in and ask him what he wanted for breakfast. He’d ask them to bring him two decafs and a large orange juice. “I’ll order breakfast later,” and shortly after, he was brought a copy of the local paper. He had his Alexa with him. He asked her for the local weather, then had her tune to WFMT, his favorite classical music station, and that completed his early morning routine.

That first day, he met his occupational and physical therapists and had preliminary workouts with each. Working out, he realized how shaky he felt, and all he did after finishing a morning and afternoon session with one or the other, was fall asleep or try to anyway, on his hospital bed with its hard mattress on which he had to lay flat on his back. Even laying that way, his chest and back hurt more than they had in the hospital, and he was given hydrocodone for the pain, which was especially strong when he coughed and spit up mucus into the Kleenex he threw on the floor.  There was little else to do. “You’re supposed to rest,” his day nurse told him. “You’re a cabbage.”

“What did you call me?”

 “Oh,” she laughed you’re a CABG – a coronary artery bypass graft patient. A cabbage.”

“Do you know what being called a cabbage suggests to me?  Chopped up coleslaw” and he thought of his incision and the scarring that was turning dark purple like the cabbage he always used for coleslaw. Yuck.

That first weekend there was no therapy, and annoyed, he walked up and down all the corridors in rehab, and eventually out of the rehab unit into the main building where the library and the main dining room were. He also decided to eat breakfast at the Café, a smaller serving area in the rehab unit. He found that depressing. Most who came there to eat were in much worse shape than he was. Most had been in rehab for a long time, and he went back to eating breakfast in his room.   

It went like that through New Year’s, but on Wednesday the 3rd, he had a temperature over 100. His nurse tested him for the flu. He was positive, and they quarantined him. 

He immediately requested Tamiflu and later that morning he had his first pill. He was asked to sit in the bathroom while they disinfected his room, covering his desk and the chair he didn’t sit in with plastic sheeting. When an aide or a nurse came into the room, they had their hair covered, and wore a gown and a mask.

He never had a high temperature after the first day. He did have body aches and his chest hurt, especially when he coughed, and as his coughing increased, he spit up more and more greenish mucus into the Kleenex that he threw on the floor and picked up when he got out of bed.

What did he do? He slept, waited for an aide to bring him coffee and orange juice and his paper, that was left outside his door, then breakfast. He listened to his Alexa and watched television. He wanted to write about his by-pass surgery and what he was experiencing. He wrote some notes on the back of the daily schedule they brought to him with his newspaper, but when he sat down and opened his computer he had no energy for it, closing it because his reflection in its screen seemed to be mocking him. The last day in quarantine he was able to write and answer a few emails but that was all he could do. 

His family and a few friends visited him, dutifully wearing masks, and he sucked and breathed, sucked and breathed into his Voldyne and he slept.

At night, after he went several days without a temperature, he snuck out of his room and walked the corridors in rehab. His night nurses knew he was doing it, but since their protections from him had been lifted, they thought, as he did, that he was over the flu. One night, Scott and Brianna sneaked him into the Pub for dinner and he got back with no one noticing. He’s not sure how long he was in quarantine. Was it seven or was it eight days?  He can’t remember for sure. All he knows is that it was after he finished taking the Tamiflu.  

                     “Oh, Won’t You Please Take Me Home”

The first thing he did after getting out of quarantine was get a haircut in the Village Salon.  He thought his hair seemed grayer, of course, but he felt he looked more like he had before the surgery. He did morning occupational workouts with Andrea, often bouncing a balloon back and forth to each other. In the afternoons he did hard walks with Siva, his physical therapist who was from India, and he took him to the Wellness Center in Building B where he rode a stationary bike and did some work to strengthen his arms and shoulders. He found out from his day nurse that when he was released, he had appointments scheduled with his surgeon and his family doctor, then he was expected to go to a Cardiac Rehab facility in a hospital building closer to home, and Westminster offered him the opportunity to come back there and use their facilities for a very reasonable fee.

He started going to the regular dining room for lunch and dinner, meeting an acquaintance from his hometown who he joined for some meals. He had his first shower; learned to wash and clean his incision, which surprisingly did not bother him. He was ready to go home.

Andrea and Siva agreed, and on the following Saturday and Sunday, he was driven home by Scott for trial visits where he watched a basketball game on Saturday and went out to dinner on Sunday, coming back much later than he was expected. Scott watched him like he was a child just learning to walk, making sure that he was well enough to take care of himself, especially worried getting him out of the car, and into his house because his driveway was icy.

A meeting was set up for Tuesday with his therapists, nurses and the administrators responsible for such things. The meeting went well, and they agreed he’d leave in two days on Thursday, January 18th.

Lots of cleaning up. He filled two large clothes bags, he had been given in the hospital, with lots of stuff he had brought to him, his stereo and his Alexa, and lots of clothes on hangers. Again, he waited for the paperwork to be properly signed – a whole folder full – then around noon Scott loaded up his car; carefully helped him around some ice; got him home without incident, over some more ice, and into his house.

He was greeted by his cat, Dexter. The weekend of his trial home visit, Dexter had snuggled up with Haley, who had stayed in the house with Chris before he flew back to Denver and she went back to work. “I’m back for good,” he told Dexter, but after greeting him at the door, Dexter hid out somewhere in the house until later that evening when he came out to be fed.

“I’m fine,” he told any who asked or called, but that first night home, he let Scott, Brianna, and Haley bring carry-in pizza, and he didn’t cook as he usually did when they were there with him. After they left, he deleted many of the television programs that recorded while he was away, and he watched the last CBS Sunday Morning show, fast-forwarding thru all its commercials. Then, doing the same, he watched 60 Minutes.

He read over the paperwork showing the doctor’s appointments he was to have starting on Monday of the next week then wrote them down on a notepad he taped to the top of his coffee-maker. He was so tired, but things were turning out all right. His chest was still numb on both sides; his right groin also where they had gone up for his angiogram. He still hurt when he coughed, but he was only using Tylenol for his pain. He wasn’t spitting up much and his irregular heart rhythm, though more noticeable than before everything that had happened, was tolerable. His family had done all anyone could have ever expected. He needed to do more for and with them than he had.

He knew that he needed to Skype Allen in Canada and email Alan in Florida, who had just lost his wife, and book club was coming up on Sunday and he could see most of his Lafayette friends there. He knew it wouldn’t be long before he could drive to Rensselaer.

He wanted, he needed, to write. He sure as hell had something to write about. But he didn’t open his laptop and only did a quick look at his email on his desktop. No Facebook. For God’s sake no Facebook.

He went into his bedroom and unpacked. He pushed back his covers, grabbed his soft down pillow that he should have had at Westminster, smelled it, and put it on top of his larger one so that it would be next to his face. He put his heart pillow in the middle of his bed, next to him, and he undressed. Later, after doing his bathroom stuff, he sat down on the bed and slowly lay back, pulling his legs up and settling back against his soft pillow. Then, even more slowly, he began to turn on to his right side. It hurt. He heard his heart beating, feeling the occasional irregular beats. He moved even more onto his side until his right arm was under him. “I can do this,” he said out loud. “I can do this…” and he fell asleep.