Today In History (mine)
January 24th is my sister’s birthday. I remember when she was very, very tiny, a head full of tight, thick blond curls, adorable in a pink dress that mama made and embroidered. Happy birthday, Gina! May the Good Lord bless you!
Three years ago at this very moment I was lying on a gurney in a corridor outside my operating room at Cleveland Clinic, watching my team of doctors and nurses and aides enter and move around busily as huge machines are rolled into the room being made ready for me. Up well before dawn, I was first in line for the day. A physician came and introduced himself as my anesthesiologist, and started a drip of some sort while I waited there in the hall. My only possession was a bottle of nitroglycerin tablets, which I was clutching in case the chest pains started, but they never did, and when I woke hours later they were gone. Two hours earlier I had awakened in our hotel room and taken a head to toe shower using some kind of strong medicine that I had been cautioned not to get in my eyes, ears or mouth. A little while later, beloved family and friends got on the trolley with me for the ride to the heart institute. Now my name had been called, and the hugs were history, and the anointing with oil and prayer -- a memory of the morning and moment is of a nurse coming in and asking me if I would like to see one of the hospital chaplains and the look on her face when I said, "No, thank you, my priest is here." There was a split second of silence and open mouth doubt before she said, "Aren't you from Florida?" And I said, "Yes." She said, "And your priest is here?" And I said, "Yes, he's here." -- anyway, now it was my alone time, just me out here in the hall in total peace.
Was that you, Lord?
Was that you, Lord?
Waiting in the corridor was the alone part, but honest to God I was not the least nervous, having heard the chief surgeon’s confidence at my Friday conference with him. He had asked me whether I wanted to go ahead with the surgery. I asked him his success rate. He said over 97%. I asked him what was my alternative. He said “cardiac arrest.” A song comes to mind, What's the use of worryin', it never was worthwhile, so pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile.
Outside on that predawn just blocks from frozen over Lake Erie, the weather was down in the twenties or so, snow on the ground. In the corridor outside my OR, someone kept bringing me hot blankets, and I relaxed. After my wait of an hour or so on the gurney in the corridor, the OR door rolled open, someone came out and wheeled my gurney in, helped me over onto the operating table -- which I expected to be freezing cold, but it was warm. And told me they were starting another drip.
Several dreams were all ready for the Grand Nap. I was going on the sleigh ride with Robert Frost in snowy woods. I would spend the day alone at St. Andrews State Park at the jetties, walking on the beach and in the surf. I would ride the ferry from Newport across Narragansett Bay over to Jamestown, where Linda would be waiting for me. There she'll be, standing by that green 1948 Dodge. Nothing happened. Not one single dream, zip, zilch, nada, nil, goose egg, total black darkness of oblivion. My next feeling was a panic of drowning as a tube was pulled up my throat, completely closing off my air passage for a few seconds as I gasped to breathe and couldn't, then opened my eyes, saw smiling loved ones staring down at me, and said, “I’m alive!”
Of the next couple of days, my memory is what someone called “ICU psychosis,” vivid dreams of incredible reality and intensity. Repetitive. Two dreams kept repeating over and over again. I’d wake up, thankful the dream was over, only to go back to sleep and have it return.
In one dream “Deutschland über alles” was playing at deafening volume constantly, unendingly and would not stop or let up. A very loud German brass band with especially loud euphonium and tooting tuba. Over and over and over returning and continuing furiously. Even now the dream shades my love of the hymn "Glorious things of thee are spoken" to the tune Austria. But don't even think of playing that other, the wrong tune, it's even more annoying than the wrong tune for "O little town of Bethlehem."
My other dream was really strange. The two-masted schooner Annie & Jennie was caught in a storm at sea in the Gulf of Mexico just off shore. I am here in my house. Alfred and I are emailing and texting each other back and forth about the vessel’s plight, and me warning him to return to port. The situation and communication was as real as anything that has ever happened to me in life. The repetitive dream was my life. The Annie & Jennie was shipwrecked there, in that storm, in January 1918 and Alfred, my father’s brother, was lost. The death of their son so permanently devastated and broke my grandparents that within a couple of years, by 1920 they picked up and moved away from this house and the sea. More than forty years later my parents reaquired this old Weller homestead, but my grandfather refused ever again to come in, as he told me, "I can't go there, because of Alfred." Had Alfred not died the Weller family would never have left St Andrews, to move to Georgia, then to South Florida, then to Niceville/Valparaiso, then to Pensacola where my father and mother met, then back to St. Andrews/Panama City. At the very center of my being is my awareness that I have my life because of Alfred’s death. We have a praise song with the phrase, "in his death is my life." For everyone else it's about them and Jesus, but it's about Alfred and me, just that one line. Even during that time of frantic ICU psychotic dreaming, I could not save him. It was one of the most real things I have ever experienced.
Grateful. Gratitude. On a jet plane, one hour and forty five minutes from Panama City to Cleveland -- and home again.
In one dream “Deutschland über alles” was playing at deafening volume constantly, unendingly and would not stop or let up. A very loud German brass band with especially loud euphonium and tooting tuba. Over and over and over returning and continuing furiously. Even now the dream shades my love of the hymn "Glorious things of thee are spoken" to the tune Austria. But don't even think of playing that other, the wrong tune, it's even more annoying than the wrong tune for "O little town of Bethlehem."
My other dream was really strange. The two-masted schooner Annie & Jennie was caught in a storm at sea in the Gulf of Mexico just off shore. I am here in my house. Alfred and I are emailing and texting each other back and forth about the vessel’s plight, and me warning him to return to port. The situation and communication was as real as anything that has ever happened to me in life. The repetitive dream was my life. The Annie & Jennie was shipwrecked there, in that storm, in January 1918 and Alfred, my father’s brother, was lost. The death of their son so permanently devastated and broke my grandparents that within a couple of years, by 1920 they picked up and moved away from this house and the sea. More than forty years later my parents reaquired this old Weller homestead, but my grandfather refused ever again to come in, as he told me, "I can't go there, because of Alfred." Had Alfred not died the Weller family would never have left St Andrews, to move to Georgia, then to South Florida, then to Niceville/Valparaiso, then to Pensacola where my father and mother met, then back to St. Andrews/Panama City. At the very center of my being is my awareness that I have my life because of Alfred’s death. We have a praise song with the phrase, "in his death is my life." For everyone else it's about them and Jesus, but it's about Alfred and me, just that one line. Even during that time of frantic ICU psychotic dreaming, I could not save him. It was one of the most real things I have ever experienced.
Grateful. Gratitude. On a jet plane, one hour and forty five minutes from Panama City to Cleveland -- and home again.
Cleveland Clinic. January 24, 2011.
TW+