Wednesday, June 14, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Recovering
The letter of the law brings death, but the Spirit gives life. Now if the ministry of death, carved in letters on stone, was so glorious, how much more will the ministry of the Spirit be?
Andi does things for us that change our lives, make our lives easier, and rescue us. On Monday morning she arrived at our apartment at 5:30 am to take me to the hospital for my heart cath. Three hours of prep time? She was brisk and happy, ready to do whatever I needed. At 8:30 she would be taking Miles and Jasper to a nearby VBS.
I had already checked in. They told me that saved me fifteen minutes. I barely got into the waiting room before my name was called. I didn’t even sit down. Wow. When does that happen?
So I was led back to my personal waiting room, first to put on the embarrassing hospital gown with two ties in the back. I learned on my last visit to tie those strings in the front and then swing the whole back around, before I put my arms in the sleeves. Kelly took care of me. After pulling blood for tests, she installed an IV in my left arm, which would get plenty of use this morning. She got it in with her first try, and there are no scars or bruises left today.
Kelly checked the list of all my meds and which ones I took and didn’t take before the surgery. Her mask covered her face, but her eyes looked like they cared about me having gotten that right. Mostly, Kelly left me alone, so I read the 18th chapter of Ancestors by William Maxwell on my kindle. Mr. Maxwell was born in my hometown, Lincoln, Illinois, before he became the thirty-nine year fiction editor for The New Yorker. The sixteenth chapter details how his mother died at the Bloomington hospital during the 1918 influenza epidemic, while giving birth to his youngest brother.
But thirty years before Ancestors Mr. Maxwell wrote They Came Like Swallows, the story a fictional boy named his Bunny, who is eight, and whose mother died of the influenza, and who blames himself for her death. Will was 10 years old when his mother died and removed her light from his life. Perhaps even as he wrote this non-fiction about his family his heart skipped too many beats. So he wrote more about his mother, and less about her death.
Now the snow is gone and it is summertime. The woman is sitting on the plaid carriage robe, on the bank of Kickapoo Creek, dreaming about I wish I knew what. The what. The yellow leaves drift down, they float downstream, past her cork. (So much of what I remember from this period of my life is touched with a bloom, a golden dust, but especially those all-day fishing expeditions, which I didn’t even particularly enjoy at the time. Now they are seen in the slanting light of something that has not yet happened, and so are a great many other things. As if it were continually late afternoon.) When the cork bobs sideways, she gives a jerk with her pole, and the little boy, sitting with his behind in the roots of a tree nearby and the end of his pole in the water, observes that she has caught another sunfish. (p. 277)
I read this. I cry a bit and feel sad. But more, I am beside Mr. Maxwell, sitting at his knee, and he is reading to me. The words are warm, welcoming, soft, and burnished with melancholy. In his lament I take comfort, as I believe he did too.
Kelly took my extra socks, underwear and pillow, my cell phone and Kindle and wallet, to be locked away. Dr. Mark came to tell me about what he was going to do. I felt like he was my dad, like nothing he could do would hurt me. Rob and Courtney wheeled me into an elevator, through a maze of hallways a floor below, into a cold operating room. Adam and Melissa, my nurses, helped me off one table onto another and started a very mild anesthetic.
I felt nothing but heard everything. Perhaps because of this they had turned off the r&b music when I came in. In the middle of the catherization, Dr. Mark moved around to talk with me again.
“Everything is going fine. We’ll be done in fifteen minutes. How are you?”
Parisa from Iran took care of my recovery with her gentle hands and big smile. I had to lay flat and not move my legs for four hours. She made me guess where her accent was from. It took a couple of broad hints. After four hours she walked me around and into the bathroom.
“If you sit down …” I won’t sit down, I told her. “I’m a boy.” Embarrassed laugh. “I know.”
I hope I see her again in the recovery room. Like Dr. Mark, I felt safe with her. “We’ll see you again, but not here. We’ll see you in HEB,” one nurse said smiling. HEB grocery stores are all over Texas.
But I’m getting older, not younger. I’ll be seeing them again, I think. And not at HEB.
Later in the recovery room Dr. Mark told me that along with my too-tight aortic valve, he had also seen a second coronary artery which was 70% blocked. We talked a bit about options for repair. It was like he was talking to himself about what we might do, letting me overhear him, and again, I felt like he would always be my friend.
“Our team and I will see you Wednesday, David. And we’ll talk some more together then.” He touched my shoulder. We shook hands.
Andi brought Jasper with her when she picked me up at the hospital. We drove to our apartment and visited awhile with Margaret. On the back of Jasper’s sky blue VBS shirt was emblazoned the very important word: “LOVE”.
George and Anne brought vanilla and strawberry mochi from Trader Joe’s after work, and we talked awhile about what might happen next. The four of us prayed together. And laughed about this and that.
I’m headed back downtown today. Andi is joining Margaret and me this afternoon at 1:45. We’ll see about it then.
If what was going to fade was glorious, how much more will what endures be glorious?
 (2 Corinthians 3, Psalm 99, Psalm 25, Matthew 5)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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