Give Me A Break

“Damn, ole timer, you okay?” asked my friend Mike as I was struggling to work my way up from a hard backward fall. It was the last night of some overdue visiting with him and some other old friends and we had partied at a pace more appropriate to our younger days. The next day after loading the car and saying goodbye I drove home hardly noticing my back but by early evening there was excruciating pain and I knew from experience I had cracked a rib.

The next morning I went in for an xray which confirmed the crack but also revealed a spot on the lung that needed further examination. At this point my brother, I suppose in an attempt to lighten the mood, said, “thank goodness for your advancing clumsiness.”

Through additional tests the spot was revealed to in fact be cancer. As I was just learning the news, I walked out of a test and as I walked past an old guy in a wheelchair he said, “Do you have diabetes?”

I said, “No, why do you ask?”

He said, “Because you don’t have any hair on your shins. That can be a sure sign.”

“They’ve been like this for forty-five years so I think I’m probably okay.” I whispered.

As I walked away he yelled, “I’m warning you, you better get it checked, anyway.”

The cancer was shown to be confined to the lower lobe on the right side which could be removed and leave me in good health (or put another way able to walk as far as a guy my age needed to).

When my wife, daughter and I went to meet the surgeon to discuss timing and so forth for the surgery we were shown to a waiting room. Almost immediately after arriving there I needed to use the rest room and left in search of one. I went up and down the halls with no luck and decided it must be on the outside of the floor. As I was looking for the exit I passed a nurse practitioner’s office. She spotted me and asked in a friendly tone if I needed assistance. That is when I made my first mistake. I said, “I’m looking for the way out.”

I could see the expression on her face quickly change from happy to puzzled to concerned. I tried to recover and act normal so I said, “I am actually looking for the restroom.”

She went back to a sweet smile and said, “I can help you with that,” and took me by the hand and led me to the men’s room. While I was in there I thought, “this is terrible. She probably thinks I’ve come off the psych ward and am just wandering around aimlessly.”

To my horror, when I exited she was waiting for me. She said, “now let’s see if we can’t find out where you belong; which doctor are you seeing?”

I started to say, “You’re not going to believe this” and then I realized that she was way past that point, so I said, “I can’t remember his name, but I recall his wife is from the town I live in.”

Being the amazing woman that she is, she was able to keep her composure and suggest, “why don’t we go about this a different way?”

“Do you have family with you?”

“Yes, my wife and daughter.”

“Good, we’ll just look in a few of the rooms and see if you spot them.”

After about three tries we found the room and when my new friend saw my family’s recognition she said, “I’ll bet you know this fellow.”

She then left without once rolling her eyes, and I told the family I would explain later.

The surgery went very well the next week so the expectation was that I would spend two or three days in the hospital and head home. They told me the first night would be spent in the post-op holding area and then move to a regular room. The night in the holding area was noisy so I was looking forward to getting my own room and was therefore pleased when I was picked up early the next morning. After six hours of waiting in limbo with no room assignment, I stopped a nurse in hopes of getting an update. He said, “It shouldn’t be much longer now – I just heard they’ve about got the ant situation under control.” I looked at my wife and said, “This is going to make a good night’s sleep more difficult.”

She said, “Yeah, you’re going to probably want to stay on that morphine button no matter how you feel.”

I did that plus every time someone walked into my room I asked, “Ant thing still okay?”

When I could finally relax about the ants my only remaining problem was with the catheter. Using it was more painful than it should have been so a urologist was called in who said it was a scar tissue problem that would require a small procedure to correct. Now, since we were dealing with an area where even a small procedure can be a large threat, I was very anxious.

The urologist arrived in my room with a bag of tools and four nurses. I wondered why he would bring that many assistants until he began working and I realized that two of the helpers were there to hold me in place. (A word of advice: if you’re ever captured and told you will be tortured unless you give up your information and you hear the word ream, immediately spill your guts.)

I left the hospital two days later feeling well but still wearing the catheter. The urologist told me to use it for three more days and then come back and he would remove it. Because I lived in a town that was an hour and a half away, I asked him if someone there could remove it. When he said that it would be better if he was the one who took it out, I had the sick feeling there could be a lot more hell left to pay.

When I returned to the hospital several days later, the doctor greeted me and said he would be with me shortly. A few minutes later a female nurse came in and told me to get on the examining table.  I kept looking at the door expecting the doctor to walk in at any moment but soon realized the nurse herself was going to perform the removal.

I was puzzled and wondered if on the one hand her doing it might mean it was not going to be as bad as I feared or on the other hand maybe he was unexpectedly tied up and she was just going to give it her best try. She told me to pull down my pants and as I did so I placed one hand in the area about to be affected, I suppose to give myself some support. As she began, without thinking I moved my other hand down to the area. A few seconds later, to my relieved surprise she said she was finished. While I was sitting there in relief and joy she said something I didn’t understand. I said, “what?”

She repeated, “You can turn loose of my hand now.”

In girding myself I had trapped her non-working hand between mine.

“Oh, of course, I’m so sorry.”

Then she said, “You can pull up your pants now.”

I thought, “Oh, my God, I have got to get out of this trance and get ahead of her on what I am supposed to be doing.” So, to show her I was not addled and also had a cute sense of humor, I said,  “That was good work – what do I owe you?”

Without looking at me she gathered her instruments and got up to leave; however, at the door she turned and said, “FYI, your t- shirt’s on backward.”