I like doctors. I admire their skill, their dedication and how hard they work. I also like their stories.
Years ago I was in a hospital operating room and about to be put under when I looked up, and there was a ruddy-faced man I had never seen before. He introduced himself, said “I’m the heavy hitter” and that’s the last thing I remember before waking up.
He was the doctor I saw in follow-up visits after my TURP. (Ladies, that’s prostate talk so let’s move on.) Walking through a parking lot on my way to one of those visits, I saw an MG sports car with letters on the license plate that matched the doctor’s initials. After the doctor finished examining me (Guys, you know what that means so let’s move on), I said, “Mind if I ask you a question? Am I helping to pay for gasoline for that neat MG in the parking lot?”
He beamed. “You know, I don’t have a place in the Hamptons. I don’t have a second home in Florida. But I bought an MG. When I’m in it, I’m 19-years-old.”
An orthopedist I’ve seen for years understands that smart people who are competitive do dumb things, even doctors. When he was treating me for something I had pulled or torn, he mentioned he had been playing tennis when he felt something that wasn’t right in his leg. He knew he should stop, but it was a close match so he wanted to keep playing. After he won the next game, his leg hurt even more, reinforcing the sane notion that he should get off the court. He didn’t. It was his serve and if he won one more game he would win the match.
“I played on,” he proudly told me, resuming his examination of me.
“Well, did you win?” I asked.
“Yes, of course,” he said, smiling.
My periodonist likes to ski and knows I do too. When he is cleaning my teeth in the summer, he delights in asking me – while scraping away with a dental pick as his assistant holds a hose in my mouth – “What do you know about skiing in Chile this time of year?” And I always try to reply, “I hear it’s supposed to be very good.” That’s what I try to say. Maybe he keeps asking me the same question every summer because what comes out of my cramped mouth is “ah har isposed begd.”
The urologist I go to these days told me about being arrested for speeding in Austria - an experience I’m familiar with - and the arresting officer asking if he spoke German. As I recounted in an earlier essay, he said “a little.” While the officer explained in German that the fine had to be paid on the spot, the doctor’s wife was saying, in English, “That son-of-a-bitch, that son-of-a-bitch. He’s going to take that money and buy a dress for his girlfriend or wife. That son-of-a-bitch.” After the officer had completed the paperwork and taken the money from the doctor, he said, in perfect English of course, “Next time tell your wife not to get so excited.”
A few days ago I got up to go to the bathroom and while brushing my teeth realized I felt woozy. My next memory is being on the floor near the toilet bowl, drenched in sweat. I managed to push myself up and returned to the bedroom where I told Irene something was wrong. She could see I didn’t look right. Although there was no chest pain, I was very cold and sweating. There was a cut under my eye, apparently from my fall. She said I should get to a doctor, and she was going to call our son, Jack, who lives a mile or so away.
I then took an aspirin, and we decided the best thing to do was to call 911. The EMS crew – two guys, one of whom told me we have the same birthday 36 years apart – was terrific. They took my blood pressure, checked my heart and immediately told me I had an irregular heartbeat. Irregular and slow. They strapped me in a chair and carried me down the steep stairs from our second floor bedroom.
In the emergency room I had another woozy episode but was on a gurney this time so there was no falling. An EKG was taken and then another and I was told I was going to be admitted. While we waited for a room to become available, another EMS crew came racing in with a man on a gurney with one of the crew pumping on the patient’s chest. A few minutes later the trauma team went into action behind the curtain next to us. We heard one of the team say the person they were working on was a woman in her 80’s who took too many pills and left what appeared to be a suicide note.
I was soon in a room and had plugs attached to patches all over my chest. I didn’t feel bad at all, but a cardiologist confirmed what the EMS crew said: I had an irregular and slow heartbeat. After dinner – a chicken leg, baked potato and very hard broccoli, the way I like it, and two pretty damn good chocolate chip cookies – my primary physician stopped by. An Iranian Jew who always wears a yarmulke, he told me that the plan was to try to “convert” me the next day, to correct my heartbeat by shocking me.
“Like in the movies?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
He then said again they were going to try to “convert” me.
“To Judaism?” I asked. He laughed and put two fingers over my belly and made a snipping motion.
I didn’t sleep well, thinking of the shock treatment to come and whether I would still be able to play ball and ski. There was also the distraction of the frequent visits to the man in the bed next to mine, a stroke victim who had an oxygen mask put on him every other hour.
Morning came and after breakfast there was another EKG taken. Not long after that a nurse practitioner introduced herself and told me, “You didn’t have a heart attack and guess what? Your heart has corrected itself.” There would be no shocking of my heart. I had atrial fibrillation, which wasn’t all that uncommon. An hour or so later a cardiologist saw me and said I could go home after they took an echocardiogram, but that I didn’t have to change my habits. I could stick with bourbon and basketball but should add a baby aspirin a day to my diet. After a long wait for the echocardiogram and then a long wait to be dismissed, Irene drove us to a Chinese place where we got some food to take home for dinner, a dinner preceded by two bourbons, one for each of us.
Oh, about the title of this piece…. The night before I found myself on the bathroom floor Irene had made a salad Niçoise with fresh tuna for dinner. As I was in the kitchen cleaning up afterwards, Irene asked from the living room, “Is there any chocolate?” I opened the fridge, took out a package of chocolate chip cookies and took them to her. When my work in the kitchen was done, I joined her in front of the TV to watch the Yankee game. She quickly confessed, “I had four cookies. I never have four cookies.”
So let’s recap: Irene had never had four cookies before, and I had never collapsed before in the bathroom in our home on Long Island and never been told I had atrial fibrillation. The connection is perfectly clear. Case closed.
(Posted August 14, 2011)