Dog House (19 page)

Now we rarely drank and seldom sat in bars.

But that night, for the first time in a thousand years, we sat knee to knee. Beneath our entwined hands, the bar top reflected us dimly.

And we cried.

 

 

Denial is the first stage.

He didn't last long enough for us to encounter the second, for almost immediately after his first dose of the miracle drug, he wound up in the emergency room, where his blood work revealed he'd had a dangerous reaction to the poison. It was, after all, poison.

And Barden and I were terrified to see him so sick. He'd never been sick. Never had flu. Never broken a bone. Never had a headache. And our new best friend, the famous researcher, seemed to have been frightened, too, because when next we went to the hospital for his treatment, there were different meds in the chemo drip.

“But we were in Dr. X's protocol,” I said to the nurse.

“Oh no,” she replied, all officiousness and innocence, “I don't know anything about that. This is what's down on his chart, and this is all I can give him.”

The following day I learned we'd been dropped from the trial like the infamous hot potato, and our researcher—our savior—hadn't even bothered to let us know.

I understand the woman.

I do.

You don't want to be killing test subjects with your trial drugs.

But it seemed to us that we'd been expelled from the potential of Paradise without an explanation. Even Adam and Eve got an explanation.

 

 

And Millard slipped beneath the ice.

Immediately after that single Phase I chemo treatment, he was suddenly, truly sick. And daily grew sicker.

We had to leave a party halfway through dinner.

At work, they told me, he was dozing through the day.

He was noticeably jaundiced, increasingly paler and weaker.

He spent a disquieting amount of time lying mutely on a sofa in the sunroom, looking out the window.

The great metropolitan hospital where he was being treated for what, till now, had been an invisible disease, had built a falsely soothing waterfall in its marble lobby and had hidden speakers piping in whiny New Age music. It had unfailingly pleasant and interested people behind every desk. It had empathetic nurses (mostly) and smiling attendants. Despite this scripted goodwill, the next time I took Millard to the third floor for his eight A.M. exam, everyone—every one of those thoroughly coached, well-meaning people—dropped the ball.

The sweet administrators at the desk misplaced his paperwork. The busy doctor hadn't written the scrip and had gone out for lunch. And long after lunch, the so-sorry nurse had forgotten to send someone to pick up the prescription from the hospital pharmacy, and when she did at last, the scrip wasn't ready. And no one realized, somehow, that we were waiting ... and waiting. Maybe it was none of these or all of these—but there we were, still waiting in that deceptively cozy, crappy waiting room at six thirty that same evening—Millard lying uncomfortably on a narrow banquette, dozing, and me, for possibly the first time in my life, wanting truly ... truly ... to kill. We'd fallen through the cracks of the oh-so-perfect hospital.

I bent down and spoke softly in Millard's ear.

“I'm going to find someone.”

“What? What? Wait. I'll go with you.”

He squinted into the light, trying to shake off his stupor. Then, with real effort, he stood and walked with me back through the labyrinth of hallways and small rooms where scores of patients still waited to see the great doctor and then, farther on, into the long corridor that led to the central office.

I approached one of the kinder patient liaison people and took her aside. She seemed, now, to be the only one there.

I smiled politely.

“You know, we've been waiting out there the whole day for my husband's meds. Do you, or does anyone else here, know what's happening?”

“Oh, I'm so sorry. I'll see what I can find out for you.” And she turned to pick up the phone.

I looked around at the tidy, empty office; at the neat desks and the cheerful curtains and the dead computer screens.

And all of a sudden, I was yelling.

“What do you
mean
doing this to us ? ! Don't you know how hard this is for us even without sitting through hours and hours of these screwups ? ! Don't you see how tired he is? That he ought to be at home having dinner? That he ought to be in bed? Not lying on a bench at six thirty at night waiting for these stupid pills?”

The nice woman was actually cowering a little, and out of the corner of my eye, I caught Millard's shocked, pale face.

Oh, his face was lovely! There was discomfort and embarrassment there, but there was also shy joy. In our whole life together, he had never seen me yell at stranger.

“I'm so, so sorry,” said the woman, almost in tears. “Oh, you're right. I'm really so sorry. I'll see what I can do to get you out of here. This is terrible. You're right. It's terrible.”

I was right.

I was right?

My god, I wanted to yell some more. I needed to yell some more. But I wasn't used to the thrill of confrontation, and in the next minute, I'd dissolved into a teary, apologetic splutter.

We finally did get our meds, and later that night, as I numbly drove my exhausted husband home—his head thrown back on the seat, his eyes closed—I brooded on the hospital's lapse. Could it be that casual inhumanity is standard at all overtaxed urban treatment centers, or is it inadvertently but subtly reserved for those who've been sent home to die?

 

 

When I'd first begun to investigate medical care for Millard, a physician acquaintance had offered me the most unwelcome, hateful advice: Don't worry about getting the “best” or most highly recommended doctor, he said. Just look for that person who'll be there for your midnight phone call; the guy who'll show up when things get hard and you need him to be there.

I'd fumed after that call.
Not
what I'd wanted to hear. I'd been hoping to be told about the godly physician who could save us. And here was this friend-of-a-friend telling me there was nothing I could do beyond hoping for a hand to hold.

I understood him perfectly now though.

And it wasn't too late.

That's why we walked out of the great and famous hospital with its Stepford attendants and its waterfall and its commitment to research over humanity and found a physician who seemed truly compassionate; a doctor who cared for Millard but didn't promise anything and didn't smile any more than seemed necessary to pleasant professional conversation; a doctor who told us earnestly and honestly, “We'll get you through this.”

I've thought about those subtle words many times.

 

 

Millard was constantly drowsy now; asleep more than he was awake. And this meant, rather strangely and perhaps for the first and only time in our life together, that he didn't get Socratic about everything I did. It was almost a relief, I admit it. Nevertheless, once, as I was driving him to the city for yet one more doctor's appointment, he awoke from his stupor, lifted his head, looked around, and asked, “Why aren't you passing that truck?”

Why, indeed.

Although ask him a direct question now and he could barely rouse himself to say, “I'll do whatever my wife wants.” He'd always done that, you know. But never actually said so.

 

 

On an ordinary Thursday in November, as the country geared up for the Bush election, Millard drove to work and around noon, he called me from his desk.

“Could you come and get me? I need to come home.”

As I helped him into the car, he smiled apologetically and leaned his head back on the headrest, smiling still, and slept. Once we were home, he stretched out on the living room sofa and slipped into a doze. An hour or so later, I was walking past him with a glass of water in my hand when he opened his eyes, smiled and asked:

“Where are you going with that”—he searched for the word—“book?

I slammed the glass down so hard the water sloshed over the tabletop, then I ran to the phone and called the new doctor who, with chilling urgency in his voice said, “I think he may have developed hepatic encephalopathy. Bring him in to the emergency room right away. I'll arrange for his admission.”

And so, for a final time, we made that familiar drive to the city and Millard was admitted as immediately as they ever do such things. But there seemed to be no beds in the hospital that day, even for the very, very sick. So some very, very efficient nurses put my barely conscious Millard on a gurney and wheeled him into the ER, where, I was told, we'd just have to wait. Sobbing audibly, I trailed the gurney toward a curtained cubicle as a Latina woman waiting with her family called after me, “Don't cry, Mami, everything will be all right.”

“Mami?” Was I a Mami? I wept.

The impressive nurse in charge didn't want me crying either.

“If you insist on crying, you can't stay in the ER. You'll have to wait outside.”

Now
there
was a powerful weapon; one she'd very likely wielded effectively a thousand times before. It impressed me enough that I choked on my tears for nine long hours, during which Millard drifted into unconsciousness and we waited and waited and waited for a bed.

Maddeningly, there was nowhere in that big emergency room for family to sit. There was the busy central desk, the tiny roomlets, each encapsulating its discrete and frightening misery, a great deal of menacing electrical equipment and within a fairly large space, nothing to sit on but a few rolling stools. I discovered the hard way (Ms. Large and Bossy again) that these were off-limits to everyone but staff. For legal reasons. Though wouldn't you love to know how an adult could manage to injure herself on a rolling stool? Push off hard, maybe, and shoot across the room straight into a wall? Roll into a syringe-wielding nurse? Fall a terrifying eighteen inches to the floor? But there they all sat—empty. While I didn't. Then, at around two thirty A.M., drained, weary, and stiff from leaning against walls and tables, I eased myself down to the floor at the foot of Millard's gurney. And it took about five seconds for the No-Crying Nurse to sniff me out.

“You can't sit on the floor,” she raged. “There might be blood on the floor ! ! ! Fatal diseases ! !

I looked around. There
was
blood on the floor, in fact. Suspicious-looking shades-of-yellow things, as well.

She was a good deal bigger than me and hadn't liked me from the get-go. She was fighting mad, Miss Nurse. But I, grandly, was madder.

“Goddammit, I'm going to sit here if I want to, and you know what? I don't give a shit if I get a disease!”

“Get up!” she hollered, looming over me, face in my face, hands on huge hips. “Get up, or I'm going to call Security!”

There wasn't much staff in the emergency room at that hour. At the word “security,” those few that were in the area looked up from their monitors and murmured conversations and leaned ever so slightly in our direction.

I was filled with something like righteous testosterone, like nuclear fury, and I was getting ready to stand up and ... push her, maybe? ... hit her? ... when Millard, who hadn't spoken since he'd called a glass a book, sat straight up on his narrow gurney, and peering over its foot to find me sitting on the floor at his feet, turned to the giantess, smiled and said in a louder than normal voice, and emphatically:

“Let my wife sit wherever she wants.”

He was cogent as hell.

He was Zeus.

 

 

He lay back down and left me once more.

But she looked at him in shocked surprise, turned her back on us both and walked away. And I continued to sit there, and after another hour or so, we got a bed.

 

 

We only stayed in the hospital for a couple of days. Long enough for friends to gather on the chairs at the foot of Millard's bed and long enough for him to have one of those unexpected returns to clarity in which he sat up, looked around and observed: “Looks like you're all sitting shivah.” Then falling back on his pillows, he slept again, leaving me laughing and everyone else faintly embarrassed.

 

 

Long enough for Barden to bring his dad homemade marijuana brownies (the handy neighborhood dope peddler being an advantage of a downtown ‘hood). He didn't tell his father they were good for him or tell him what was in them, so when Millard took a bite, spit it on the sheet and pronounced it awful, I took the brownies home, stuffed them in the back of the freezer and months later, looking for a little pain relief for myself, learned that Norah had eaten them all.

 

 

Long enough for one of the staff doctors to gather his class around my husband's bedside to watch and take notes while he asked an awake and smiling and wishing-to-be-helpful Millard to hold his uncontrollably flapping hands out in front of him for them to see. This humiliating little trick was one they could use, he told them, to diagnose liver involvement when they all grew up to be wonderfully callous MDs themselves.

 

 

Long enough for me to know that nothing else could be done.

 

 

When the palliative care team came to see me, all soft voices and practiced solicitude, I ordered an ambulance and took him home. I didn't want him in a hospital anymore, this hospital or any hospital. And despite the fact that by then Millard had fallen into a persistent stupor, he still seemed to be able to hear, and he still occasionally opened his eyes. And when he did, his mind was, surprisingly, very much his own: clear, unaware of and untroubled by his condition. He had no idea he was dying.