Happy birthday, we love you

It was Monday that morning too, eleven years ago this moment, January 24, 2011, snow on the ground, twenty-something degrees out, a wind coming off Lake Erie, cold as the dickens. Bundled against it, in the predawn blackness our group had ridden the campus trolley from our motel over to the Heart Institute, and after a few minutes in the waiting area, a wheelchair had rolled up and I'd been whisked away to "prep".

"Take off everything but your birthday suit and lie down on the gurney," she said. "Shall I keep my birthday suit on?" I asked. But it was Monday morning where nothing is funny. Her workweek just begun and, humorless, with authority and a one-line script, she commanded again. "Take off everything but your birthday suit." So off with it and lie flat on the gurney to be shaved toes to neck with an electric razor that was set to nick painfully, which, thinking back, I am pretty sure was the part she enjoyed most.

In a couple minutes I was covered with a white sheet and warm blankets. A kind soul came in. "Would you like to see a hospital chaplain before going for surgery?"

"No, thank you, my priest is here."

"!!! Aren't you from Florida?"

"Yes."

"You're from Florida and your priest is here?"

"Yes."

Prayer, cross of oil on my forehead, short visit with Linda, away through swinging double doors, and, me the only traffic so far, down a hospital corridor as wide as Harrison Avenue, stretching as far as my eye could see, twelve-foot high sliding doors on each side. Whoever was pulling my gurney parked me just outside one of the sliding doors, laid another warmed blanket over my feet, asked if I was okay, kindly wished me well, and left me parked outside my operating room door clutching my little brown bottle of tiny white pills.

This story has been written here before, but it's one of my main stories, and it's my blog.

For some thirty or forty minutes in the chilly corridor, I watched as enormous equipment was wheeled past, sliding doors opened, and equipment disappeared inside. Eventually some of such was rolled up, the door slid open, and I watched as it was taken into the room that was to be mine. In Time a man in green scrubs came up, introduced himself as Dr _ _, my anesthesiologist, put a thing in my wrist for general anesthesia, and gave me something to swallow that he said would help me relax.

I was already relaxed and enjoying the morning. This was well into the third month of my "two to five months" prognosis, so it was my do or die day. January 24, 2011 was my sister Gina's seventy-third birthday. And I had my dreams lined up and ready to go, beginning either Lying on the beach at The Jetties with my best friend's girlfriend that May 1953 day of exquisite freedom after having finished last final exams before graduating Bay High, a senior moment when I was on top of the world; or Riding the Jamestown Ferry across Narragansett Bay to where I could see Linda and the green Dodge waiting for me that cool autumn Saturday in 1957.

Shortly, my gurney was wheeled into my own personal OR, a team of medics conferring off to the side, Dr _ _ and a nurse asking me to slide over onto the stainless steel operating table - - which I thought would be freezing, but was warm and snuggly. The doctor said he was starting my drip and I would be asleep almost instantly.

No one told me that deepest general anesthesia is as close as one comes to the oblivion of death, where it's impossible to dream.

In short order someone telephoned the waiting room to report, "he's on the heart-lung machine and doing fine."

When I woke up, my little brown bottle of nitro-stat pills was gone.

Gina would have turned eighty-four today. The rest of my memories of her birthday that year are tucked away for another Time or place.

RSF&PTL

pic: Jan 18, 2011, about to board the jet plane for flight to Lakefront Airport, Cleveland, Ohio. Not sure who took the picture.