At the hospital last night, the nurse asked Mom, “How long have you been married?”
My going on 92-year-old dad, the doctor, has been taking care of my going on 91-year-old mom pretty much on his own since she fell and broke a hip last year. It’s best not to talk in much detail about that, but his help has gone far beyond anything he ever learned in medical school. Far beyond anything you think you’ll ever have to do when you stand and recite your vows at the wedding.
When it got to be too much for him this week, Dad called an ambulance and checked Mom into the hospital for some tests. He gives me detailed clinical updates each night on her oxygen levels, hemoglobin counts, electrolytes. Dad, I say, I just want to know how she’s doing.
“Oh, better,” he says, his voice tired over the phone. “I suspect she’ll go home tomorrow.”
The worst is over, he says. For now.
***
I’m a slow reader, so apologies in advance for just now finishing “The Book of Charlie,” on the extraordinary life of Dr. Charlie White, published last May. It’s a fine book, and I admire author David Von Drehle’s style of writing and voice.
For a time in the 1960s, my dad was one of Dr. White’s anesthesiology partners in Kansas City. Dad loaned me his copy of the book to read last year, and when I asked if he was in it, he said, “I don’t know.” I thought that was an odd answer, since he’d read and enjoyed it when it first came out.
Now that I’ve finally read it, I think what he meant is he’s in it, obliquely, in references to the “grand rounds” he and Dr. White did with the other doctors at Baptist Memorial in KC. My dad was a partner with Dr. White and four or five other anesthesiologists at the time. When I asked Dad how many of those doctors are still with us, he stopped for a moment to think.
“Just me,” he said.
When I was a kid, I worried about my dad breathing in the gasses he and the other anesthesiologists use in the operating rooms. It didn’t seem very healthy for your health, possibly the medical equivalent of inhaling coal dust in the mines and developing black-lung disease. But all those men – and they were all men back then – have lived or lived long, overall healthy lives. Notably, as we know from the book, led by Dr. White, who passed the day after his 109th birthday.
After I finished the book, I told Dad I thought I’d drop David Von Drehle a note and tell him I might have a sequel for him on my dad’s (almost) equally eventful life. “Oh no,” my dad said, “I would have never stuck a needle in my arm to give a transfusion to a gun-shot wounded gangster or ridden a cow-catcher across Colorado.” Without going into too much detail, I think he’s being humble about his own notable exploits.
I know I’m late with this, but there’s much to admire in Dr. White’s story. “Charlie,” Von Drehle writes, “learned to treat the unknown as a friend until life convinced him otherwise.”
Better late than never, to learn a lesson for a lifetime.
“How long have I been married?” Mom repeats the nurse’s question, as Dad folds her clothes in the hospital room. “It’ll be 70 years in June,” she says. “And I haven’t regretted a day of it.”
Being a caretaker is so much harder than being a doctor ever was, my dad says. “Hearing her say that,” he adds, his voice tired but happy again, “makes it all worthwhile.”
Another lesson from the “Book of Dad,” to last a lifetime of unknowns.
mgauert@cityandshore.com
