STICKY DOORKNOBS

Just one more prayer ... and he'll go, we promise

   OK ... y'know those irritating people in the express lane who have 30 items, write a check, ask for a price verification, want a pack of cigarettes AND have to have a manager come verify their check? Or those people in the Wal-Mart customer service department who are returning an item the day after Christmas, and they don't have a receipt and can't prove that they -- much less the item they are returning -- even exist? Or those people in the bank drive thru who don't have their check written and can't find their drivers license and have forgotten to endorse their check? You know those kinds of people?

    I am all those people.

    No, no, no ... it's true. I am. You'd think with all the heart testing in the winter and spring that necessitated all the prayer lists that I was done enjoying my share of attention. But now ... NOW I am hogging the spotlight (just as I am prone to do as some people would argue). With the coming and going of this week, I have enjoyed my 15 minutes of fame plus another 15 just to be safe. I have also way overstayed my ride atop God knows (and he DOES know actually) how many prayer lists.

   I have experienced the discomfort and fear of a low-functioning heart. Returned for a test in a Dallas hospital in May that included tubing my jugular vein.

   But if all that isn't enough ... I give you ... (insert drum roll here) ... an emergency appendectomy. Please take it. I'd rather not have to go through it again.

   It's to the point where people are beginning to roll their eyes when they wonder why I'm not where I'm supposed to be and people no doubt have taken to asking, "Is he sick again?" People's prayers begin with the line, "Once again Lord we ask your blessings upon Jimmy, who this week has ... "

   Emergency appendectomy. It's all the discomfort the name carries with it -- and more! It doesnt sneak up on you. It grabs you by the gut and won't let go until the nasty little appendage lies squirming, life draining from it in a specimen dish, extracted and blood ugly. And even four days after it has been extracted it leaves you limping, slow to respond and in uncertain in your movements.

    Must've been about 2 Monday morning, I don't know, I was asleep -- and sick. I'd been back in town a little more than 24 hours from a trip to Lajitas, a remote, middle-of-nowhere resort town along the Texas-Mexico border. Beautiful and gorgeous, but the very picture of desolation so authentic that movie producers either won't go or cant get there.

    Two a.m. in the morning Monday I wake up in my bed at home and remember vaguely feeling a little discomfort. And every 30 minutes until 5 a.m., the discomfort grows until it is so totally unbearable that it prompts the dreaded statement to my wife Karen: "Something's not right" (which is maybe the scariest thing a person ever wants to say about his or her body and its functioning).

   8:30 we see our trusted family physician who recommends immediate check in; 10 a.m., by the time we wrangle through the lovely registration process, I am lying in another bed writhing with pain. Then 11 o'clock comes and I lie writhing with some painkiller on board. Noon comes and finally 1 when I am wheeled away to a CT scan room where I am invaded in an entirely unmentionable way just to prove that I have what I have. After it is diagnosed that I am in fact in tremendous pain, I am taken to the great O.R., where someone puts a mask on me and I fade to black just like in the movies.

    Next thing I remember was Karen, my daughter Jennifer, a coworker of my wife's and an Arab guy praying over me. I kept opening my right eye and seeing this scene, wondering if I was at the gates of heaven. Yet since I vaguely recall seeing Dr. Phil on in the background I figured I either must still be alive or in hell. (And the Arab guy, by the way, is my great friend, Billy Raies, who dropped everything to come by and pray for me to be OK, for which I am quite grateful).

    The painkiller and anesthetic worked together to twist and tangle the remainder of what thoughts and words I had the rest of the day and I apologize to anyone I spoke to this past Monday evening (including the Bishop of the Diocese of San Angelo) for anything I might have said. "Twasn't me. 'Twas the drugs.

   But thank you all for your prayers. They have once again proved the difference. Gotten me from dark to light. Guided me through places I could not have gone alone. And I thank you. But I am through now. I am done hogging the front of the prayer line. I have no intention of returning to any assisted care facility anytime soon. I have grabbed my receipt, gotten my money back in the return line and cashed my paycheck and I ... am ... outta here.

The Bedpan Diaries, Part 5

We're moving to the produce department

    The last of my stuff should be moved in by Friday. Oh, did I not tell you? I have gone ahead and actually relocated the family to the produce department at my local grocer. We spend so much time there, it only made sense. It may take a while for the children to adjust, what with them having to share a bed with a box of squash, but in the long term it really only makes sense from a financial standpoint.
    I mean, why pay a house payment and then turn around and pay the equivalent of one-sixth of your mortgage every month on fruits and vegetables without some higher reward than ruffage, regularity and a healthier ticker? The way I figure it, H-E-B should furnish me with a small one-bedroom as much money as I give them every month.
    Let me put it another way ... Before I was strapped to a hospital bed in Dallas last month, here is an example of the mental dialogue I would have with myself while passing through the H-E-B produce section: "Oh, bananas. Let me get some. Maybe we can choke down one or two this week." And then it was on to the meat and cheese aisle where there was a much more meaningful mental dialogue involved.
    But NOW, since I have been declared physically deficient, Doc Harper (the best cardiologist in the business, I am convinced of it) has told me he wants me to change my diet.
   And so now, my brief pass through the produce department has become an extended stay. I no longer have mental dialogue with myself in the produce section because, well, people would see it as odd to see me talking to myself for 20 minutes at a time.
    The other day I spent almost $30 on about 25 items. My list:
6 tomatoes
1 celery stalk
2 red onions
2 yellow onions
1 bunch, green onions
2 green peppers
1 bell pepper
1 jalapeno pepper
4 avacados
1 bag, green beans
6 bananas
1 bag, apples
1 bag, oranges
2 plums
3 pears
    And when I was done, I walked to the spice aisle because I'm told the one sure way to survive the curse of healthy food is lots and lots and lots of spices. So I bought pretty much one of everything. Parsley, sage, rosemary ... I bought so much spice I felt like a folk singer from the Sixties.
    This heart-healthy stuff -- which Mrs. P insists is much different than "dieting" -- is brutal. No beer, no Mexican food, no cheese, salt, pizza or red meat. Instead, we're damn near vegetarians except that we also eat pretty much anything that swims. I am beCOMING a tuna. I would already BE a tuna were it not for the salmon swimming upstream in my veins.
   But I can do fish. Fish are OK as long as the head is off, the eyes are gone, what is left is thoroughly cooked and there's lots of sauce somewhere nearby. It doesn't actually matter what kind of sauce, just anything.
   Chicken is another story. Most of my life, I have had an understanding with chicken: I stay away from them. They stay away from me.
    I don't like the way they walk. They have nasty feet and the things that hang off their head and chin really kinda make me nauseous. You never really know where a chicken has been. And if you don't cook a chicken all the way ... you die. What's there to like about a chicken? I'd like to know. Aside from a deep fried chicken which is really the nly way to eat one.Doing so for an extended time period, though, will ALSO make you die.
    We are not doomed to this healthy new lifestlye 24/7, thank God. We do have a cheat day. Doc Harper says cheat days are OK, provided they're not everyday. Currently, we cheat every Wednesday night. We celebrate Wednesday as if it's some sort of religious holiday. We order pizza or some other horribly tasty food that was OK when I was 20 but is killing me at 45. Again, this is probably due to the amount of pizza I ate when I was 20. I used to eat a lot of pizza. It's almost ALL I ate. When I was a bachelor, empty frozen pizza boxes were my furniture. It was ugly.
    The only thing harder than eating heart healthy is exercising (exorcising), but that's another story for another day.

The Bedpan Diaries, Part 4

Say goodbye to Long Johns

    Before checking out of the hospital last week, the last person to visit was a nutritionist. When she came in, I told her she must be mistaken, she really needed to talk to the cook.
    And then it dawned on me: She was not there to apologize for the fat free dressing that I was given one night or the roast beef and oranges (on the SAME PLATE with orange juice running into the brown gravy!) that I was given for lunch one day. She was there to try to change my life forever. When I looked at the dietary information she had, I knew that, thanks to my bad ticker, my life would forever contain fruits and nuts. Literally.
    Although I am intimately familiar with fruits and nuts, they have not generally been a part of my meal plan. And I have not seen three squares a day since I was in the high school chess club.
    I've been more a donut and chip guy my whole life.
    Biologically, the human body can only process a certain number of donuts in a lifetime. I apparently exceeded that number during a three-month period ending in December 1983. And another three month period that ended that September. And during that June and March, too.
    Doc Harper came in to my room last week and told me I should probably remove from the refrigerator my tattered Krispy Kreme menu, and take down my poster of a creme-filled fritter that had secretly hung in my closet since the Seventies. Donuts, he said, are a part of my past.
    Instead, mealtimes would be filled with yummy things like bananas and yogurt and fat free creme cheese.
    God is good. He's done wonderful things for thousands of years. But I really sometimes wonder what he was thinking when he made healthy food tasteless. Was it an oversight? Did he not consult the recipe because he was God and just didn't have to?
    If the design of the heart and the rest of the human body had only been tinkered with a little more in the beginning, maybe a few hundred thousand more people could enjoy donuts in the morning without it killing them, or have Doritos and Budweiser with their football games and a few pork rinds before bed at night. On second thought, no ... then we'd have to watch Terrell Owens all ... year ... long ... and that would be bad, too, so I guess God did know what he was doing.
    All things considered, I'm glad God turned us out the way he did. But that won't make it any easier every time I walk down the Ding Dong aisle.

  Next: Moving in to the produce section
   

The Bedpan Diaries, Part 3

So, what IS the problem?

  I spent a week in the hospital when I was 15. Had surgery. The whole deal. And when I rose from the anesthesia, someone in a mask, presumably a doctor, told me, "It's all over."
   "It's all over" is not  what I would actually choose to say to someone who has just been knocked out and cut on. I'm weird that way.
    When I was lifted from the fog of my angiogram last week, the doctors at least didn't tell me it was "all over." Angels didn't appear and my life didn't flash in front of me as had happened 30 years earlier.
   The doctor looked at me and said "Mr. Patterson, we're done, everything's fine, there is no sign of coronary artery disease. There are no blockages."
    Advancements in tact and common sense have apparently come as far as medical technology.
    On the other hand a full oral report is a little hard to digest when there is still Valium (and some other unnamed narcotic they shot in me) steamrolling through my system, but it beats "It's over."
    So what IS wrong with me?
    A week later, I should be completely free of the drugs and their effects and able to give a full report to you. I'm still me, though, so I'll remember what I can and you'll just have to be OK with that.
     I'm happy to report that after an angiogram, a third echocardiogram, a stress test and four days in the hospital hooked up to a heart monitor, dealing with bad food and maniacal wheelchair drivers, I am stuck with what I've had since the first day I learned I was among the unwell: a dilated cardiomyopathy.
    I am, however, delighted to report my heart function has gone from 20 percent to 40 percent, likely due to the cabinet full of medicine I have been issued. But there's even good news on that front: Doc Harper, the best in the business, I am convinced of it, cut the medicines in half, which means I can now play catch with The Boy without falling asleep before the ball hits his glove.
   It's all relatively good news, save for the fact that I'm stuck with a low-functioning ticker that I will have to live with as long as it chooses to get by. I think both of us are a little p-o'ed about its apparent decision to reduce its functionality, but what can ya do? A guy can groan all day about his heart and if it doesn't want to work right, it ain't gonna work right.
    A couple of months ago, I was fortunate enough to interview a man for a story for the local newspaper. He had had cancer, and then a recurrence of cancer. He is a very wise man, admired by a lot of people. Quiet and unassuming, he told me, "The one thing I learned when I was dealing with cancer was that everybody has a burden to bear."
    Everybody has a story. So although people may genuinely care about you and offer prayers for you -- which were being said in many corners, for which I am very grateful, my story's no different than the next guy or the next guy or the next guy.
    My father always told me that among us there are too many complainers. It's another bit of wisdom that has come in handy, and is as hard to follow as the "poor me" stories that some people tell.
    I don't wanna tell any more "poor me" stories. And I hope I haven't to this point. (Perhaps you would consider granting a little leeway when the hospital bill comes in, though).
   I do hope you continue to laugh, assuming you have from time to time up till now. It does good like medicine, I'm told. Not as good as hospital-issue Valium, but it'll do. But since I can't give you any Valium, we'll just have to laugh for now.

   Next: Exercise and Diet -- Welcome to My Nightmare

The Bedpan Diaries: Part 2

Ummm ... trust me, you WON'T need to shave my chest

    She came in all panicky. She was in charge of wheeling me down to the basement to be on the receiving end of one of many tests I was to have been administered at a Dallas hospital last week. The tests were done in part to show if my heart was indeed functioning following months of speculation that it may have actually ceased at some point.
    She was in a big hurry, almost as if her job depended on volume: the more people she could wheel to the testing room, the better her chances for advancement.
    "We have to go," she said.
    "Y'know, I should really call my wife and let her know I'm going down since she's not here yet," I said.
     She said OK.
     "And I should probably go to the bathroom since I don't know how long I'll be down there," I told her.
    She allowed this, too.
    I started to get in the chair, clad in my tennis shoes of course, because if I'm wheeled through a hospital in a wheelchair, I at least want shoes on my feet. I'm weird that way.
    But I lifted myself back out of the chair just as she was about to put it in drive.
    "Oh wait, my laptop. I can't leave it out in plain sight. I need to call a nurse and have her come lock it up for me."
    That was it for my own personal Taxi Driver. She'd had enough by now.
    "No, no, no, you can just put it there," she said, pointing to the unsecure drawer on the nightstand beside the bed.
    I immediately sensed that she was in a huge, huge rush to get me back downstairs to the testing area.
    "Well .... uhhh ... no. No. No. I'm not going to leave it in a drawer that you can't lock. I'm going to call the nurse."
    "We can take it to the nurse's station and they can watch it there. Or ... (a bright light suddenly went on in her) ... you can take it with you! Yes, yes, just you take it with you."
    I wasn't happy, but I wanted her to not dump me down the elevator shaft on the way. I wanted to arrive there and back in one piece, and I guess I didn't want the poor woman to lose her job just because she didn't meet quota that day.
    So I got back in the chair and she proceeded to break every posted wheelchair speed limit on what was a wild ride down. People must have thought I was either really important or very sick.
    We arrived at the testing area and ... (this can probably go without saying) ... I sat and waited for 30 minutes. I could've WALKED back to the room, MADE a key and locked the computer in my drawer.
    But I sat like a good patient and waited for my tests to begin.
    The first one was a stress test.
    The woman who had served as my wheelchair driver was apparently also my barber. She had a razor in her hand.
   "What's that for?" I asked.
   "We might need to shave your chest," she said.
    "Oh no, you won't."
    She was insistent.
    "Well, if we don't, some of the leads we attach to your chest may not get the correct readings."
    "No, no, you don't understand." I pulled up my shirt. "I have one hair on my chest. And you're not shaving it. I've been working on it my entire life. You can just work around it."
    The next day, as I was being drugged and prepped for an angiogram, another woman came at me with another, sharper razor, and this one meant business.
   "Hey, what are you ... HEY! Hey, hey, hey, hey."
    The last thing I heard was the buzz of a razor.
    (THIS PARAGRAPH BLEEPED OUT DUE TO THE INTENSE PERSONAL NATURE OF CONTENT. IN ORDER TO MINIMIZE SHIVERS THAT OCCUR DURING MOMENTS OF DISGUST, I RESPECTIVELY REQUEST YOU NOT USE YOUR IMAGINATION HERE).

Next: What's wrong with me    

The Bedpan Diaries, Part 1

Looking good not possible when wires, bags hang from you

  It is impossible to look professional when you are a hospital patient. Especially when you walking around with something attached to you. I tried this the other day. Mrs. P had gone out for a while and I, after having been issued yet another absurdly rank hospital meal, wanted to get in touch with her to bring me real food before she returned to the room.
   Incidentally, cell phones in the "on" position are a felony inside "the ward." You take two steps past the ward, into the waiting room, and suddenly cell phones are again socially and legally acceptable. I learned this the hard way when my favorite nurse ran into my room one night and asked me if my cell was off. My immediate response, being quick on my feet, was, "Uhhh."
    She told me to turn it off or she would reposition my I.V., if you know what I mean, because a cell phone signal had just "shut down all the heart monitors on the floor."
   "Uhh," I said again, throwing my hands up in the "Funny,-I-have-no-idea-how-it-actually-got-ON" position.
    Anyway, back to being hungry and looking bad ... when Mrs. P was out running an errand and my stomach was grumbling from having eaten just two salads in 36 hours, I walked to the waiting room and what I did was really a very I'm-in-charge thing: I called my wife to ask her to bring me something to eat. I was polite, but professional. I was the boss. I was asking that a task be completed by another human being. So I walked down the hallway of "the ward" toward the waiting room and flipped open my cell. I paced back and forth as I asked for ham and cheese, no pickles.
    An old man looked at me, apparently not impressed. Maybe even embarrassed for me that I felt the need to be so authoritative while dressed in pajamas with a heart monitor wired to some unseen part of me. Suddenly I felt like I was in a dream. You know the dream ... you're naked and the only thing you want to do in the dream is go home or wake up. In addition to my studfest t-shirt and pajama bottom ensemble, I was wearing only socks on my feet, and I had gnarly hair because Mrs. P forgot to bring up my toiletry bag with my brush and I had been forced that day to use a cheap, flimsy $35 hospital-issue black comb to try to will my hair into performing.
    Simply put, there is NO way to look good in a hospital. There is NO way to look ... "in charge." I saw people wallking around with colostomy bags, IV drips, people in wheelchairs. These people could be CEOs of major corporations or grocery store baggers ... but they all look the same when something is attached to them and they are wearing slippers. Pretty much everyone in a hospital looks on the verge of death
     I packed nothing but t-shirts for my stay. T-shirts and Dallas Cowboys pajama bottoms. And tennis shoes, which I saved for special occasions like the wheelchair ride to X-ray. Gotta get dressed up when you are wheeled through the halls. You may look bad, but when someone is wheeling you around, you at least have a few moments of dignity, and a feeling that borders on feeling like you're royalty or the Pope or something.
    I didn't really feel sick during my hospital stay. But I didn't feel much like a pope either; not in pajama bottoms and hooked up to a heart monitor. Yet, all things considered, I'd rather be hooked up to something high-tech like a heart monitor than a bag containing urine. There's just something, I don't know, a little more dignified, about being hooked up to something that's keeping track of what your heart is doing than if you're holding a bag of bodily fluid.

   "Whatta ya got there?" another guy in a wheelchair asked me as we were wheeled onto the elevator.
   "Heart monitor. You?"
   "Oh, just my last 24-hours of pee."
   I mean, what's the appropriate response to that? You sure pee a lot? Why don't you cover it up or did you want the whole WORLD to see? You CANNOT build a conversation based on someone telling you they're carryin' their pee around.
   The guy kinda shrunk back into himself because he knew I had a high-tech gadget hooked up to me and he had pee hanging from his shoulder.
    And I felt pretty good again. Dignified and superior.
    True, his bag didn't automatically report back to the nurses' station like mine did. I mean, I coudn't unhook or go anywhere without the nurses knowing. It was like being under house arrest. They said they were concerned about my heart ... I think whatever it was they had hooked up to me had something to do with the Patriot Act.
   The night after my angiogram (another story for later), they even turned my bed alarm on. Talk about humiliating. I get up to visit the facilities about midnight -- in my own room -- and it's like a freakin' jailbreak. Nurses come runnin' in, all in a tizzy, like I've robbed the place or brought in a Big Mac or something.
   "What are you doing What are you doing?" one of them with a thick middle Eastern accent asked.
   "Uhh, thought I'd go to the bathroom?"
   "No, no, no, you can't do that."
   "I HAVE to do that. I CAN do it and I WILL do it."
   "You can't do that unless we're here to help you."
   "I'm 45 years old. I believe by now I've found all my parts and I've done it a few thousands times in my life and I remember how."
   She told me to be quiet and get back in bed. I did because by then I didn't care anymore, I just wanted her gone.
   It was like a gulag, I tell ya.

   Next: Put that razor away right now

The Bedpan Diaries: Prologue

What To Do With The Kids

    Leaving children alone is often a tough call. It's different in every household. Kids mature at different ages. So when the decision was made for me to go into the hospital last week, the big question was: Can the kids survive while they are actually in charge -- AND alone -- for a week? Since we had left them alone during the summer when we went on a 20th anniversary trip to Tennessee, we figured they could do it again. After all, it had been almost nine months since that trip and they did OK then. They had only grown up since, right?
    Well yeah, sorta.
    Mrs. P and I had learned one very important lesson from our Tennessee trip: Kids can sit all day and listen to explicit instructions all day about what to do and what not to do. But if you leave out just one "Don't," they will find it and they will exploit it.
   When we escaped to Tennessee, we told the kids ... No candles ... no sleep overs or parties ... no boys at the house. Blah, blah, blah. We thought we had covered all the bases.
   When we returned from the Fried Food State, we learned first that our children did in fact survive. They did, however, push the kid envelope. One night, they had a mud wrestling contest on the front lawn of a local high school. Another night they hosted -- in OUR house -- something called a Chubby Bunny Contest, during which other kids in the neighborhood came to OUR HOUSE and proceeded to individually see how many large marshmallows they could each stuff in their mouth (the winner had 11 -- ELEVEN! -- pretty impressive). And finally, we learned that they had a running poker tournament throughout the week. I didn't even know my children knew HOW to play poker.
    So, when we loaded up to go to the hospital last week, we made sure to tell the children ... no candles ... no sleep overs or parties ... no boys at the house. Oh, and no mud wrestling contests ... and no poker tournaments. And for crying out loud, no Chubby Bunnies (even though I am still wowed that the guy down the street did 11).
  As if I needed to include this ... they somehow DID survive again last week. Mrs. P told me to trust God to take care of the children. I did trust God to take care of our children. It's the kids I was worried about. It's like driving. I trust myself to drive. The other guy I'm not so sure about. Kids are like the other driver. You never know what red light they're gonna run or when they're gonna run it, but you're pretty sure it's gonna happen when you're hundreds of miles away with an I.V. in your arm and a sexy open-out-back robe that would be hard to explain to a highway patrolmen if you had to get home in an emergency.
    Next: Young Urban Hospitalized Professionals With Cell Phone and Things Hangin' From Them.

Things You Don't Want to Hear Your Hospital Nurse Say

10. If you want another spit basin, it'll be $33.

9. Do you get the beta blocker or the Viagra?

8. Can you remember if I changed out your bedpan this morning?

7. The doctor will be in to see you after he watches "Regis"

6. I've misplaced my latex glove; you don't feel anything weird do you?

5. No, that's not your surgeon ... yours has shaky hands. Kidding ! KIDDING!

4. We're gonna have to open you back up, your doctor can't find his scalpel.

3. When you flush, remember to jiggle the handle.

2. Sorry ... your roommate paid extra to have extended visitor hours.

1. Here, why don't you take this pen and mark an X on which arm has been hurting.