Being There -- Teil zwei

The Green Miles checking The Amazing Bob for a heart beat

Time is a whole different beast when you’re in the hospital. It’s as though the earth’s rotation is, mostly, slowed as we travel around that big yellow star of ours.

I was back at Mass General by 6:30 the morning after we’d brought The Amazing Bob and His Nasty Heart Attacks into the ER. He was in a regular room now and had just finished his Wheaties and banana breakfast. As the day wore on and the parade of internists, heart specialists and techs all had a good look-see, it became clear that this wouldn’t be a quickie stay.
TAB seemed, for the most part, fine and dandy. It was as though I was visiting him at a grimly health conscious Norwegian spa. OK, he was def missing his ciggies, cupcakes and Coco but, apart from that, he was in decent spirits.

He’d occasionally ask me where we were and when we could go home. Scary stuff. The docs and nurses assured me that confusion was normal after heart attacks and this would pass. It did.

As the inpatient days stretched out, with no end in sight, I began telling time by when the orderlies arrived with the meal trays, when Jen, Oni, Ann or Steve would arrive for visits (Steve at 3 PM, Jen and Oni at 5 and Ann at 6), by how many games of Scrabble we’d played and whether we’d finished The Globe and The NY Times.

I want/need to be in motion, always doing. I want progress and I want it NOW! Yup, I’ll never win any awards for calm mien. There’s no Ms. Tranquil Spirit sash coming my way.

What did I do when overcome by an antsy attack? Walks. Mass General is a giant-ass hospital -- there are miles of corridors and stairs. Thank dog.

The first surgery was another angioplasty. TAB’s fab cardiologist, Dr. Drachman, came out afterward to let me know that the procedure wasn’t a goer. TAB would need bypass surgery.

Oh...joy.

An aside -- Dr. Drachman, very thoughtfully, had an ASL interpreter for me. Here’s the dealio though -- I’m not fluent in ASL. Being a late deafened babe, I get by via a combo of lipreading, signing and having stuff written down for me. Communication, other than written, is a challenge for me. The interpreter was wonderful but she didn’t speak/sign my kludged together language. As it turned out, as long as Dr. D slowed down his rate of speech slightly, I could read his lips near flawlessly.

TAB and I met his bypass surgeon -- an austerely efficient and direct dude. He was, we’d been told, the absolute best. Given his spectacular rep, the lack of warmth seemed like a real piffle.

The Green Miles, TAB’s son, flew up from DC. We spent our days and evenings at MGH -- in Bob’s room, running around the halls and stairs, lunching at Harvard Gardens and then, on the big day, in the Gray Family Waiting Area with all the other families whose honey’s were under the knife.

Hospital time moves slower than regular non-hospital time. Time, spent waiting for the love of your life to get out of bypass surgery, dawdles lethargically -- periodically, seemingly, coming to a full stop.

We’d been told Bob would be having triple bypass. When his surgeon came down to tell us that everything went very well and we could visit Bob in the ICU shortly, he told us they found further obstructions and it ended up being quadruple bypass.

Miles and I joked that MGH had been running a special -- buy three and get the fourth bypass for free. How could anyone resist such a deal?

17 days after zooming up route 93 north in an ambulance with a jet engine, The Amazing Bob and I came home.