“Waiting”

by Roger Cranse

One morning my father woke and found he couldn’t defecate.  His stomach began to swell.  He called his doctor; the doctor told him to go to the hospital emergency room.  

He and my mother drove to the emergency room, checked in, and waited.  Half-hours turned to hours.  My parents came of age during the Depression and the War; they didn’t butt in line, they didn’t complain.  They bore up, they waited.  

After eleven hours they were shown in to see the doctor.  By then my father was nearly dead.  He was taken to intensive care and hooked up.

My mother called us that night.  My wife and I drove down – about 325 miles – the next day.  We went right to the hospital and up to my father’s room.  He lay there, very small, a tube coming out of his nose.  You could see a brownish liquid moving through the tube to a container under the bed.  I asked, stupidly, “How are you, dad?”  He whispered, “I’m okay I guess.”  He looked frightened.  We stayed for a while and came back the next morning.

And waited.  And waited.  The doctor breezed in, in an obvious hurry.  “We’re doing tests,” he said, “eliminating possibilities.”

“But what do you think, what…?”

“That’s what the tests will tell us,” he said, and breezed out.

Over the next several days my father was wheeled in and out of his room for tests.  “So many tests,” he whispered.  At one point they were taking him away for a brain scan.  My mother finally spoke up and said no, it’s not his brain.

One morning we went in and my father had Velcro handcuffs on his wrists.  A beefy male nurse told us my father had pulled the tube out of his nose.  Dad smiled wanly.  “We secured his hands here,” the nurse said, indicating the metal safety rails on the sides of the bed.  “We unhooked him after a while but left the handcuffs on,” he held up one of my father’s limp arms, “just so he’ll remember.”  The nurse smiled at my father and chuckled his cheek.  

In addition to the tests, over the days a quiet parade of white coats marched in and out of my father’s room.  They’d nod at us, no eye contact, check a few dials or pulse or chest or something, nod, and slip out.  We tried to talk but they were in an obvious hurry, important people with important tasks before them.  “Just checking to be sure that…” or, “Want to be certain that…” they’d say over their shoulders.

We sat by my father’s bed, tried to talk, or tell him stories, or how much we loved him, and then silence, sitting, waiting, hours and hours, day after day.  Sometimes when we entered his room he looked terrified.  Other times he gazed at me with great love in his eyes, almost adoration.  One time he whispered, “Where’s Cathy?” my sister, his daughter.  But Cathy was unwell herself, a thousand miles away.

After five days they took him to the operating room.  They opened him up and found abdominal adhesions, fibrous tissue obstructing his bowels.  They fixed the problem, he was taken out of intensive care.  Relieved, my wife and I drove home.

Two days later we got a call.  The operation had been successful but by that time my father was just too weak to survive.  

We went down again for a small funeral service.  And then again a month later to help my mother out with the bills.  A small blizzard of white envelopes covered the dining room table.  These were the bills from the parade of white coats, most of them stamped, “Does not accept Medicare.”  

At the end, his final week, my father had become a cash register.  The hospital people, like the white coats, had seen his Blue Cross/Blue Shield card – my father was a high school teacher and retained his medical insurance into retirement – and rang open the drawer again and again.  As long as he lived – and presumably as long as they postponed the obvious treatment – the supply of money was bottomless.

I think it’s generous to say that my father died of hospital.  More accurately, I believe he was murdered for his money.  In fact, he knew that.  One time, so small under the sheets, he whispered to me, “I’m sick because they want my money, Rog.”  While he may have got the causation mixed up, he caught at the deeper truth.  My father was a tough character – they might do him in, but they couldn’t fool him.

Visual memories of one’s parents offer comfort as time passes.  I possess many: my father’s brilliant smile at the head of his classroom, my mother holding me up and pointing out the window to the cheering crowds marching down Broad Street on V-E Day.  I’ve also created a visual memory, something I didn’t see: the emergency waiting room, my parents, old people – as I am now – sitting side-by-side, holding hands, my mother saying, “It’ll be all right, honey,” my father stoic.  They bore up to the end.

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