Living It
On Friday morning, I interviewed a very cool physician for my master's project. He's so cool that I am hoping to do a separate story entirely about him someday.
For one thing, he doesn't wear a suit or even a tie. For another, he doesn't wear a white coat. For a third, he insists, approximately one second after you meet him, that you call him by his first name.
At the beginning of the interview, I explained my interest in the topic, which has to do with caregiver-patient relationships. I told him, briefly, about my first go-round with breast cancer, about starting J-school, about my original master's project (which was on an entirely different but related subject), about my second go-round with breast cancer, and finally about my dad's recent illness.
I described the past year, as well as 2001, as "medically intensive."
He put it better. He said I had been "living medicine," not just writing about it.
Too true.
After I left his office, I rode the elevator two flights up to interview yet another doctor.
And then I rode the subway home and tried to force myself to sit down and write the second draft of my master's project—the one that had been due the previous Monday and for which I'd gotten a week's extension. This was the new, pragmatic Jody—the one who surrendered to reality and tried to follow her academic adviser's advice: "Take every extension you can get."
I was feeling horrible about the draft. After working on it all this time—five months so far—I still didn't feel like I had a handle on the story. Or I had too much of a handle on the story and couldn't find a way to tell it simply and dramatically. And suddenly I could see all of the holes in my reporting—all of the things I would have to fill in between the second and third drafts, eating up time I already didn't have.
My top priority for the months leading up to my return to school was to finish my master's project before the semester even began, to give myself the breathing room I knew I would need for the all-consuming weeks ahead. When my dad's surgery and complications made that impossible, my revised goal was to do a first draft that was so complete and polished that the required second and third drafts would be formalities—just opportunities to polish the piece and maybe do a small amount of re-reporting just for the exercise.
What I wanted to avoid at all costs was having to do substantial reporting between the first and second drafts and to have to do any reporting between the second and third drafts. I just wanted to get the thing done. Done well, of course, but above all done. Because I had such a mountain of other assignments to get to that finishing the master's project wouldn't make the rest of the semester easier—it would just make it slightly less impossible.
But when I got home from the interviews on Friday, I knew I was completely screwed. My second draft would suck. It wouldn't even address some of the feedback—important feedback—I'd received from my master's project adviser. I would spend all weekend working flat out, and it wouldn't matter. I'd gotten an extension, and it didn't help. And turning it in would give me no relief because a few weeks later I'd have to repeat the whole exercise again. The prospect was so overwhelming that I just sat here, at the keyboard, and despaired.
A phone call interrupted my self-indulgent misery. It was my mom calling—reluctantly, because she knew that I was trying desperately to apply my nose to the grindstone—to let me know that my dad had just been rushed from the rehab facility to the hospital.
Let me pause to say that there is something very, very wrong when your mother is hesitant to call you with such news.
How in the world had I come to elevate the importance of this assignment to the point that it even entered my mother's brain before she dialed my number?
I have some reckoning to do.
In the meantime, I left the keyboard and headed to the hospital, which is about an hour away. My sister happened to be en route from Massachusetts for a surprise visit, so she met us there. Fortunately, my dad had pretty much stabilized before I had even gotten to the subway, so I did not have to ride in a complete panic.
If he had not been fairly stable, I'm not sure what we would have done. The paramedics had to take him to the nearest emergency room, which happens to be in what appears to be a fifth-rate hospital. I have now spent a lot of time in hospitals, with my dad, with Zach, as a patient myself, and as a reporter. Based solely on emergency rooms, this was the worst I'd ever seen. The nurses were pretty good, but the doctors inspired no confidence whatsoever. Several of the medical residents appeared to be older than I am, which made no sense at all.
The place was LOUD. Some of the noise came from equipment being wheeled around and from monitors beeping, but most of it came from various patients, who moaned or shouted or cursed or cried.
My dad was one of 25 patients in a very crowded space. He at least had a parking spot-like place of his own. Several patients were on gurneys in the hallways. Others were relegated to chairs. When the place got really crowded, a security guard enforced the visiting hours—10 minutes per hour—and kicked us out, dispatching us to one of two inhospitable waiting rooms until the the 10-minute window opened again.
Inside the ER, there was no place for visitors to sit, so we appropriated empty patient chairs whenever we could. Most of the time, we had to stand at my dad's bedside. He was just as uncomfortable, so we raised and lowered the back of his bed and tried to re-position him as effectively and as often as we could. In the rehab facility and in every other hospital, he had had a minimum of three pillows, sometimes four or five, arrayed under his arms and behind his head and back. One made the trip with him in the ambulance, and we used that as creatively as we could. We asked for others but were told that there were no pillows in the ER. We were given rolled-up sheets instead.
When we weren't with my dad, we sat in waiting rooms where televisions blared and icy breezes blew in through the automatic doors. We ate Munchos from the gift shop and tried to get service on our cell phones. On Friday, my sister and I were accosted by two different and equally unstable patients. We were also reprimanded by another security guard for using a passageway to get from the main waiting room to the ER. We were supposed to go outside and walk around, he said.
After that, we lurked in corners of the building, trying to evade security guards and crazy patients in equal measure. Yesterday we foraged for food outside the hospital, finding only a cornucopia of fast-food outlets. Meanwhile, my mother befriended the clerks in the admitting office and begged them to find my father a bed. We had tried to get him transferred back to the original hospital where he'd spent so much time—the first-class hospital with all of his doctors and records—but had been stymied by bureaucracy and by the fact that all of this was happening over a weekend.
Back in the ER, the paramedics continued to arrive with new patients. The EMTs who had transported my dad kept stopping short when they saw him.
"He's still here?" they asked my mom. "Can't you get him transferred?" They seemed almost apologetic. They didn't know that the woman in the bed next to my father's had been in the ER for two days.
Finally, last night, a bed became available in the post-ICU unit upstairs. It took another 90 minutes for my father to be moved.
He had been in the ER for 30 hours.
We waited outside while the nurses got him settled in the new unit. There was no waiting room, but we gathered three errant chairs and sat together in the hall. Finally, we were able to go in and say good night.
He has a nice spot, a curtained-off area in the corner of a large and fairly peaceful space that looks a lot like a post-surgical recovery room. There are eight patients in all. He is second from the left.
My sister drove me back to Brooklyn, and I picked up a burrito for dinner—my first real meal of the day. I sat down on the couch, with my plate on the coffee table in front of me. I turned on the TV and looked to see what was waiting for me on TiVo.
I scrolled past the first two entries on my "Now Playing List," then hit "Select" and "Play" on the TiVo remote. I cut into the burrito and took my first bite as the newest episode of "ER" appeared on the screen.
I sat back and watched.
For one thing, he doesn't wear a suit or even a tie. For another, he doesn't wear a white coat. For a third, he insists, approximately one second after you meet him, that you call him by his first name.
At the beginning of the interview, I explained my interest in the topic, which has to do with caregiver-patient relationships. I told him, briefly, about my first go-round with breast cancer, about starting J-school, about my original master's project (which was on an entirely different but related subject), about my second go-round with breast cancer, and finally about my dad's recent illness.
I described the past year, as well as 2001, as "medically intensive."
He put it better. He said I had been "living medicine," not just writing about it.
Too true.
After I left his office, I rode the elevator two flights up to interview yet another doctor.
And then I rode the subway home and tried to force myself to sit down and write the second draft of my master's project—the one that had been due the previous Monday and for which I'd gotten a week's extension. This was the new, pragmatic Jody—the one who surrendered to reality and tried to follow her academic adviser's advice: "Take every extension you can get."
I was feeling horrible about the draft. After working on it all this time—five months so far—I still didn't feel like I had a handle on the story. Or I had too much of a handle on the story and couldn't find a way to tell it simply and dramatically. And suddenly I could see all of the holes in my reporting—all of the things I would have to fill in between the second and third drafts, eating up time I already didn't have.
My top priority for the months leading up to my return to school was to finish my master's project before the semester even began, to give myself the breathing room I knew I would need for the all-consuming weeks ahead. When my dad's surgery and complications made that impossible, my revised goal was to do a first draft that was so complete and polished that the required second and third drafts would be formalities—just opportunities to polish the piece and maybe do a small amount of re-reporting just for the exercise.
What I wanted to avoid at all costs was having to do substantial reporting between the first and second drafts and to have to do any reporting between the second and third drafts. I just wanted to get the thing done. Done well, of course, but above all done. Because I had such a mountain of other assignments to get to that finishing the master's project wouldn't make the rest of the semester easier—it would just make it slightly less impossible.
But when I got home from the interviews on Friday, I knew I was completely screwed. My second draft would suck. It wouldn't even address some of the feedback—important feedback—I'd received from my master's project adviser. I would spend all weekend working flat out, and it wouldn't matter. I'd gotten an extension, and it didn't help. And turning it in would give me no relief because a few weeks later I'd have to repeat the whole exercise again. The prospect was so overwhelming that I just sat here, at the keyboard, and despaired.
A phone call interrupted my self-indulgent misery. It was my mom calling—reluctantly, because she knew that I was trying desperately to apply my nose to the grindstone—to let me know that my dad had just been rushed from the rehab facility to the hospital.
Let me pause to say that there is something very, very wrong when your mother is hesitant to call you with such news.
How in the world had I come to elevate the importance of this assignment to the point that it even entered my mother's brain before she dialed my number?
I have some reckoning to do.
In the meantime, I left the keyboard and headed to the hospital, which is about an hour away. My sister happened to be en route from Massachusetts for a surprise visit, so she met us there. Fortunately, my dad had pretty much stabilized before I had even gotten to the subway, so I did not have to ride in a complete panic.
If he had not been fairly stable, I'm not sure what we would have done. The paramedics had to take him to the nearest emergency room, which happens to be in what appears to be a fifth-rate hospital. I have now spent a lot of time in hospitals, with my dad, with Zach, as a patient myself, and as a reporter. Based solely on emergency rooms, this was the worst I'd ever seen. The nurses were pretty good, but the doctors inspired no confidence whatsoever. Several of the medical residents appeared to be older than I am, which made no sense at all.
The place was LOUD. Some of the noise came from equipment being wheeled around and from monitors beeping, but most of it came from various patients, who moaned or shouted or cursed or cried.
My dad was one of 25 patients in a very crowded space. He at least had a parking spot-like place of his own. Several patients were on gurneys in the hallways. Others were relegated to chairs. When the place got really crowded, a security guard enforced the visiting hours—10 minutes per hour—and kicked us out, dispatching us to one of two inhospitable waiting rooms until the the 10-minute window opened again.
Inside the ER, there was no place for visitors to sit, so we appropriated empty patient chairs whenever we could. Most of the time, we had to stand at my dad's bedside. He was just as uncomfortable, so we raised and lowered the back of his bed and tried to re-position him as effectively and as often as we could. In the rehab facility and in every other hospital, he had had a minimum of three pillows, sometimes four or five, arrayed under his arms and behind his head and back. One made the trip with him in the ambulance, and we used that as creatively as we could. We asked for others but were told that there were no pillows in the ER. We were given rolled-up sheets instead.
When we weren't with my dad, we sat in waiting rooms where televisions blared and icy breezes blew in through the automatic doors. We ate Munchos from the gift shop and tried to get service on our cell phones. On Friday, my sister and I were accosted by two different and equally unstable patients. We were also reprimanded by another security guard for using a passageway to get from the main waiting room to the ER. We were supposed to go outside and walk around, he said.
After that, we lurked in corners of the building, trying to evade security guards and crazy patients in equal measure. Yesterday we foraged for food outside the hospital, finding only a cornucopia of fast-food outlets. Meanwhile, my mother befriended the clerks in the admitting office and begged them to find my father a bed. We had tried to get him transferred back to the original hospital where he'd spent so much time—the first-class hospital with all of his doctors and records—but had been stymied by bureaucracy and by the fact that all of this was happening over a weekend.
Back in the ER, the paramedics continued to arrive with new patients. The EMTs who had transported my dad kept stopping short when they saw him.
"He's still here?" they asked my mom. "Can't you get him transferred?" They seemed almost apologetic. They didn't know that the woman in the bed next to my father's had been in the ER for two days.
Finally, last night, a bed became available in the post-ICU unit upstairs. It took another 90 minutes for my father to be moved.
He had been in the ER for 30 hours.
We waited outside while the nurses got him settled in the new unit. There was no waiting room, but we gathered three errant chairs and sat together in the hall. Finally, we were able to go in and say good night.
He has a nice spot, a curtained-off area in the corner of a large and fairly peaceful space that looks a lot like a post-surgical recovery room. There are eight patients in all. He is second from the left.
My sister drove me back to Brooklyn, and I picked up a burrito for dinner—my first real meal of the day. I sat down on the couch, with my plate on the coffee table in front of me. I turned on the TV and looked to see what was waiting for me on TiVo.
I scrolled past the first two entries on my "Now Playing List," then hit "Select" and "Play" on the TiVo remote. I cut into the burrito and took my first bite as the newest episode of "ER" appeared on the screen.
I sat back and watched.
posted by Jody Rosen Knower at 5:16 AM
3 Comments:
You are living medicine indeed. Sometimes life points you where you are needed and the rest will be whatever it can be given the circumstances. I'm sending good vibes your Dad's way. Pack some decent food. xo, Abby
Hey Jody, you need to TiVo the inner critic. Next time she starts to tell you that what you are about to write is going to suck, use that image to silence her and then type on sistuh! Let her play later after you've allowed yourself to write freely, that's when she will serve as your ally and guide. Sorry to hear about this new development with your dad. Thinking about you, as always. Call me anytime.
Big, gentle hug...robin
You are amazing and you're worried about not writing well????? You cannot even imagine how much I love you. Mom
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