INTO EACH LIFE SOME RAIN MUST FALL
Hip-Hop defines a certain youthful dance genre that does
not particularly appeal to me. Yet, I found myself inexorably drawn to perform
a crude imitation of its basic steps when my body simultaneously developed a
bone spur in my left heel and an arthritic condition in my right hip. Starting
in late 1996, these maladies caused me to hobble around in some degree of pain,
lurching to the right, gingerly stepping out to the left.
The pain caused by my bone spur continued despite being
treated by four different physicians, including two cortisone injections. My
regular physician, Dr. Jeffrey Baird, suggested, “Make an appointment to see
Dr. Gustavo Armendariz. He’s the best guy in town. He treats the whole
leg.”
Gus was just what the doctor ordered. After examining my
heel, without even bothering to X-ray it, he told me, “You don’t have a bone
spur. You have a nerve condition.” He prescribed medication and exercise. The
pain ended and never returned.
However, he had no magical cure for my hip. X-rays
revealed the loss of cartilage in the joint. He said, “It’s just a matter of
time before you will need to have your hip replaced. When that time comes, I
will be happy to perform the procedure. I could send you to five other surgeons
who would be willing to operate on you right now. I don’t recommend you have
your hip replaced until you are unable to walk around the block. The longer you
can defer the operation, the longer the replacement hip will last.”
It seemed prudent advice then, but after I became involved
in a minor car crash, X-rays convinced him the time had come to replace my hip.
Scheduling the surgery turned into comic opera. Months went by until a mutually
agreeable date could be found. At the last minute, Dr. Gus called. “Mr.
Finnerty, my office staff made a mistake when they scheduled you for surgery. I
am going on vacation at that time, with all reservations made and paid for.”
This meant my surgery could not be scheduled until after
returning from our long planned trips to Australia New Zealand Canada April 9, 2001 , at Good Samaritan Hospital in Phoenix
On the day of surgery, sedated but not yet unconscious, attendants
loaded me onto a gurney, pushed it into the operating room and slid me onto a
narrow table like a slab of meat awaiting the butcher’s attention. A horde of
masked medical personnel surrounded me waiting for the anesthesia to take
effect. I blinked an eye and in what seemed but a moment of time, I awoke with
my new hip installed. Afterwards, while in the recovery room where skilled
nurses monitored me, pleasant thoughts keep recurring: There’s no pain.
Three cheers for drugs.
During the next few days physical therapists helped me
out of bed, got me walking, and doing some exercises. To my happy surprise, the
hospital provided me with wonderful food which I consumed with gusto. By the
fourth day, they had removed my IV and stopped taking blood samples, while
limiting my pain pills to two per day. By the fifth day, the staff had me perambulating
out of the room and circumnavigating the nurse’s station. The time had come for
me to leave the hospital and enter a rehab facility.
On Easter Sunday, an ambulance carted me off to Scottsdale’s
Life Care Center, near 96th and Shea Blvd. I had barely settled in when a horde
of my family members arrived, bringing me flowers and Easter candy.
Initially, I shared a room with a very sick patient who required
considerable medical attention, day and night. The parade of his attendants
kept me awake. The staff took notice and transferred him to a private room,
leaving me as the sole occupant.
Physical therapists took control of my recovery,
teaching me how to strengthen my hip and perform simple household activities. Pain
free and pleased with the institutional chow, my life as a patient could not
have been better.
My solitary confinement ended abruptly when a patient and
truly remarkable person named Bob moved in with me. A car accident had broken
his previously damaged hip. He suffered from a variety of other aliments,
including rheumatic arthritis that left his hands gnarled. He could only walk
using crutches. A self-made man, he had accumulated a fortune as a contractor due
to his uncanny skill in calculating earth and concrete requirements on new
projects. His wealth allowed him to pursue his great love of flying. He owned a
1935 vintage two-place open cockpit plane known as the Gypsy Moth whose top speed
maxed out at less than 50 mph. When his infirmity prevented him from climbing
into the cockpit to fly, he gave it to a friend to store and to display at
vintage airplane exhibitions.
I learned all this about him in a few short hours. After
spending just one night in the room with me, he told his wife to take him home.
He said he had undergone so much therapy in his lifetime that he knew how to
take care of himself. Two physicians authorized his release. After receiving instructions
on how to place his hip in a restraint, his wife assisted him into a wheel
chair, whisked him away without bothering to check out officially. We had exchanged
email addresses before he left, but we did not stay in touch.
He told me this story: “I learned to fly from the waters
of Lake Michigan in pontoon-equipped planes not long
after WW II ended. One day my plane crashed in the lake. After floating for
over four hours, a ship fished me out of the frigid water. On shore, I took a
cab, not an ambulance, to a nearby hospital operated by nuns who only spoke
Italian. I phoned my wife and told her to bring brandy. In the morning, I left
the hospital without awaiting further examination. The following day, I returned
to the pier to thank the crew of the vessel that had pulled me out of the drink.
My crash made the TV news reports as the other person on the plane had died.”
A few days earlier a patient named John had stopped by
my room, looking for someone for a chess opponent. He came by again, just prior
to Bob’s departure. Bob asked him, “Why are you in rehab?” After listening to John’s
describe the entire lengthy litany of his ills and ailments, Bob said, “It was
nice knowing you.” It cracked me up.
The following day, John told me he had a remarkable
daughter who had gone to India India El Salvador
John said he might take my Reminiscence Writing class at
SCC in the fall. He didn’t, much to
my regret. I would have liked to know more about him and his family.
After a few more days of living alone, a one-legged patient
named Fred became my new roommate. Over the span of just two or three days, he
told me numerous stories about his life that I found incredulous. Fred, a self-made
man, had joined the army long before the war, had fought in numerous South
Pacific battles, ironically without injury. After the war, he married, but his
wife did not like New York City , so they moved
to her hometown of Pittsburgh . He entered
into the printing business and became quite wealthy. After his wife died he
moved to Fountain Hills. There, he lived the good life, playing golf with
friends every day. Then, his whole world collapsed when his health deteriorated.
A year or so earlier, a surgeon amputated his left leg
below the knee while treating him for some unrelated illness. To add to his plight,
he now had a colostomy. On top of this, his daughter, to whom he had given
Power of Attorney, had sold his home and cleaned out his bank account. His
plight reduced me to tears.
He told me, “I contemplated suicide. I put a gun to his
head, but couldn’t pull the trigger. I decided you have to be nuts to kill
yourself. I began to think about the after effect if I shot myself. So I put
the gun down and got on with my life.” What a man. What a story.
Like my earlier roommate, Bob, Fred could not wait to
leave the place. He had pneumonia, but as soon as it cleared up, he moved back
to his apartment in an assisted living home that is designed to accommodate his
special needs, more so that the rehab center. We ate lunch and dinner together
in the main dining hall of LCC a few times, which always saddened me. I saw so
many other patients who were in terrible condition, many who could not feed
themselves, or who cried out for no apparent reason. Many of these patients
seemed pitiful. By comparison, I felt healthy and completely out of place. Even
Fred felt sorry for some of them.
Fred left after the third or fourth day, after which I
moved to a private room. I could scoot around the entire complex in my wheelchair
and could take of most of my needs with one major exception: Taking a shower. I
felt quite awkward having my naked body washed by two very young women aides.
Fortunately, a male attendant started to help me bathe. His
life story fascinated me. This young Ethiopian man once played soccer for his
country’s national squad. He had an accounting degree, but had not been able to
find work here in this field. He took this job in order to survive. He lived
far from Scottsdale
He told me of some of his travel experiences before
landing in America . He
encountered far more racial discrimination in Norway
I wrote a letter of recommendation to LLC, hoping he
would receive some sort of recognition and perhaps a raise. I also contacted
some friends, hoping to get him a job interview in the accounting field, but
didn’t succeed. Its not often one gets washed by a highly educated Ethiopian accountant
while undergoing rehab.
Angie accompanied me when I went to have the staples
removed from my incision. She counted thirty six of them. Dr. Armendariz’
nurse, David, removed them in about one minute’s time, a painless procedure. Dr.
Gus then asked, “How do you feel?”
“Great. I have no
pain.”
He smirked, insinuating this could not be true.
“No. I mean it. I have not had any significant pain.”
Then he remarked, “Are you still whistling?”
I laughed and said, “No, I am too busy.”
Let me explain. During my six days in the hospital,
whistling helped me pass the time which seemed to drag. Nurses dubbed me The
Whistling Patient. Dr. Gus wished that all his recovering patients could
follow my lead, as my happy demeanor seemed to speed up the healing process.
However, he expressed some concern after learning his
faxed instructions to LCC to limit my weight bearing to a minimum while
learning to walk had not been followed. He sent new instructions, this time
limiting me to put no more than sixty pounds of force on my foot while striding
in my walker. This required me to go back to square one and learn a new way of
walking and climbing stairs.
How do you measure sixty pounds? Place your left foot on a small wooden
platform and then place your right foot on a bathroom scale until the arrow
points to the sixty pound mark. To walk this way (old joke) with this
limitation required me to support most of my weight with my hands and arms. There
were times when the pain in my arthritic hands hurt more than the hip.
Being in good health otherwise, I found it easy to perform
all the exercises the therapists gave me, more than they prescribed. My
recovery progressed rapidly. My stay in LCC ended on May 1 when Angie came to
take me home. My family transformed the living room into a bedroom. They set up
my C-PAP breathing apparatus, stereo
console, CD player and headset ready to lull me to sleep. They installed an elevated
commode in the half-bath off the utility room, perfect for my needs. They
rigged up an outdoor camp shower near the pool equipped with a garden hose to
wash away my blues, the water warm enough to do this without shivering. Daytime
temperatures have been about one hundred degrees or so, unseasonably warm for
May.
Tomorrow, six weeks after surgery, Dr. Gus will X-ray my
hip. If all seems satisfactory, he will have me return six weeks later at which
time my therapy will be over. At that time, I should be able to climb stairs
and resume driving.
I met a number of remarkable people in the course of
undergoing and recovering from hip surgery. This vignette will help me remember
them.
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