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The making of a president
I found out something interesting recently. And I found it out while I was in the hospital. Here's how it happened.
A couple of weeks ago I was sent to the hospital with an intestinal blockage. It turned out that I had a UTI that went septic. On top of that I had pneumonia. My whole system was affected, including my breathing and blood pressure. I was placed in the ICU for 10 days, and for the first few of those days I was a pretty sick puppy.
Fortunately I got better. In a few days the breathing tube was taken out and I was able to breathe on my own. My stomach tube was removed, and I was able to eat again. I became stronger; and in doing so I found that I had the leisure time to observe what was going on around me.
One thing I found out was that there was a tremendous difference in quality of service between the day nurses and the night nurses. The former gave me good and regular care; whereas the latter provided spotty care at best. (Of course it didn't help things that I suffered from rampant insomnia: perhaps those night nurses were leaving me alone so that I could sleep; but since I couldn't do that, I was forced to lie there and ruminate.)
One big problem I was having because of all of the tubes that had been in me was that I was bringing up a tremendous amount of sputum. Not just any kind, but rather a strange sort which seemed to be filled with cottage cheese. This stuff I could not swallow; it had to be either spit out or sucked out of my mouth by means of a powerful suction device. And this had to be done frequently.
This was not a big problem during the day, because the nurse was in my room with a fair degree of regularity. It was the night time that gave me the problem: I would bring up a lot of sputum, and there would be no nurse around to help me get rid of it.
And so I found myself lying there in the middle of the night wide-awake with my mouth full of gunk. The nurse had promised a quick return.
Now I found by bitter experience that a night nurse should not be taken literally when, as she leaves the room, she tells you when she will return. I've appended a glossary below which contrasts what she says and what actually happens:
"I'll be right back." -- one half hour
"I'll be back in a minute." -- 1 hour
"I'll be back in a few." -- 2 hours
"I'll be back soon." -- ???
Yes, I knew all that to be true by bitter experience. And yet I continued to entertain hope -- me, a poor pathetic helpless invalid, my mouth full of noxious sputum, aching for her to come and siphon out my mouth. And so I lay there facing the door in the twilight dark, looking and listening for any sound or shape which might indicate that another human being was entering my room.
I did not have long to wait. There was a sound of footsteps echoing down the corridor, getting louder and louder, and making a beeline straight for my room. I heard them turn into my vestibule (there was a little hall connecting my room to the corridor; so I could not see directly into the corridor from my bed.)
Except they didn't. The footsteps continued past my room and gradually got softer and softer. I was devastated, of course, and I cast about looking for a scapegoat for my disappointment. I finally decided to blame "the perniciousness of omnidirectional acoustics" -- that is, the fact that sound waves travel in all directions from a source. I concluded that footsteps should only be heard in the direction in which the person is walking -- a sort of Truth-in-Sound.
(Is there a judge or a legislature somewhere which might be willing to overturn a law of physics?)
So I lay there some more. My eyes were fixed on the vestibule, where some soft light was indirectly reflected from the corridor. I vowed that I would not be fooled a second time by the acoustics; this time I would look for shadows on the wall to indicate that someone was coming to see me and mercifully empty my mouth out.
I heard a sound of footsteps in the distance coming toward me -- a phenomenon I tried to ignore but couldn't. As they reached their climax, a shadow passed over the wall of the vestibule. "At last!" I exclaimed to myself.
Not quite. The shadow spread across the wall for a second, and then as quickly retracted. The footsteps gradually died away.
I had been fooled again -- but this time by the opposite phenomenon: "the perniciousness of the unidirectional nature of light and shadow." That is, when someone steps between my room and the ceiling light out in the corridor, it casts a shadow into my room -- even though it is at a right angle to the direction they were traveling.
I made a mental note to begin a campaign in the morning to have the ceiling light in the corridor outside my room disabled. No more false shadows!
My mouth was still full of the noxious sputum. I feared falling asleep and choking on it (even as I knew that I was not sleeping one wink nights there in the hospital.) Of course I knew that I could always choose the so-called "Gordian Knot" solution if I absolutely had no other choice: simply letting everything run out of my mouth and down my front. True -- there was a towel under my chin which was intended to catch any such runnings; but I have found by bitter experience (I found out a lot by "bitter experience" there in the hospital!) that it would run down between me and a towel anyway. Besides, there is something inside of me which rebels against that sort of behavior as being "inherently un-civilized". (Of course the nurse would have to clean me up and maybe it would serve her right; but I still hesitated.) What I really needed was one of those stiff plastic bibs of the kind that we used when we fed our infant children -- you know, the sort with the trough at the bottom.
Well, she eventually came in -- ironically after I had given up hope and ceased looking and listening for her. She just materialized. I got my mouth suctioned out, and all was right with the world once again -- until such time (unfortunately to come all too soon) that my mouth filled up once again.
The day nurses were a different story. There was a comely buxom young woman (she was a worthy rival to Susannah York of the movie "Tom Jones") named Eileen. She had only been recently married. I endeared myself to her as she fed me by asking her how she met her husband, what she had to eat on their first date, and so on. There was also a Vietnamese nurse (not buxom) named Huyan whose every movement was designed to give me the most efficient quality care.
And then there was Molly.
Molly was the day nurse for several days straight while I was in the ICU. Like all of the other day nurses that I had there, she seemed to be utterly competent in her care for me. For example, she dealt with the new computerized database like an expert, keeping careful track of all my medications and my vital signs whenever she was in my room.
She was a funky gal from head to foot. Unlike the buxom Eileen, Molly was thin with no discernible figure (her clothes, which were loud and funky themselves [a shirt replete with wildflowers, and pink pants] seemed to hang off her.) A pair of narrow glasses cut across in front of her eyes, partially obscuring them. In short, she was no beauty queen. But that is not what I looked for in a nurse: I wanted someone who was utterly competent and who would give me kind and loving care. Molly fit the bill on both those counts. And I was delighted to see that she was completely comfortable in her own skin.
She seemed to be in my room quite a bit; but I didn't think anything of it until, on just the second day, my wife humorously remarked to me: "She likes you!" I asked her how she could tell. "Because she is in here all the time; and she is obviously enjoying herself." So I looked; and indeed, I saw a playful little smile hovering on Molly's lips as she went about her duties.
If the ICU nurses each have three patients to care for, then I could expect and hope to have the attentions of my nurse about 33% of the time. What about Molly? After a bit of observation, I concluded that Molly was spending at least 60% of her time in my room. Oh yes, she kept herself busy all the time; or at the least she gave the appearance of such, puttering around here and there while wearing her goofy smile.
(Was my wife jealous of Molly? Of course not. On the contrary: she was the immediate friend of any person, male or female, who treated me with loving care. That is the kind of person my wife is.)
Molly was attendant not only to my every need but to my every preference as well. Because of the stomach tube, I was not able to take anything by mouth for several days. Finally, though, it was removed; and at that point it was judged that I could have hints of moisture to lave my parched throat. So Molly brought me some ice chips, and I thought that I had never had anything so refreshing. Then she brought me cherry Jell-O, and that replaced the ice as the most refreshing. But I had scarcely finished that when she appeared, her face beaming, with a big bright red cherry popsicle. Apparently she had secretly colluded with my wife to find out my favorite flavor. At any rate, at that point I thought that I was in heaven and that Molly was its chief Archangel!
Molly told me that she had another vocation which she practiced later in the afternoon and in the evenings: she was, of all things, an interior decorator. I told her I thought that was a good complement to nursing, and she agreed with me.
My wife had been in to see me every day, and our two daughters were coming frequently as well. So Molly got to see them quite a bit. One day, in a gesture toward equality, I asked about her family. She showed me a photo of her four grown children. They looked like a happy bunch.
I asked what her husband did. She replied matter-of-factly: "We're not together now -- we separated quite a few years ago. But the separation is amicable. We get together with the kids for all of the major holidays."
She hadn't really answered my question. I wondered whether she was ashamed of what he did, if anything, for work. Then again, I have met women who would deliberately hold back information on a famous person they knew; you had to keep questioning them until they "reluctantly" divulged the fact that their crippled friend was named Stephen Hawking.
I decided to be persistent: "But what sort of work does he do?"
"Oh Bobby's a hotshot lawyer in Boston. He is a very good friend of John Kerry; in fact, he's Kerry's right hand man."
I asked her whether he had worked on Kerry's campaign in 2004.
"Of course. And then Kerry put him in charge of engaging the speakers for the Convention."
I figuratively shrugged my shoulders at this bit of information. After all, aren't the speakers at conventions the usual cast of characters?
And then it suddenly hit me: "Did that list include Obama?" She said that it did. "He enlisted him to give the keynote address."
I knew what that meant: that one speech catapulted Obama from obscure state senator to national prominence. And so I think it could be said that, more than anyone else except for the candidate himself, this woman's ex-husband "Bobby" was responsible for making Barach Obama president.
It just goes to show: you never know what you'll find out in the hospital from a funky nurse who likes you!
(26 May 2009)
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