Have a Heart

For the past week, I’ve been fighting a cold. I hate colds, partly because I don’t understand how it is that scientists have discovered how to make the perfect French fry (beef aroma apparently has something to do with it) but they still haven’t figured out a cure for the common cold and partly because colds are so mundane. I like what my favorite character on Gilmore Girls, Loralei, says: “Having a cold is so boring. Just once I’d like to say, ‘I’m sorry I can’t make it, but my leg is haunted.’”

Having a haunted leg is far more interesting than having a head cold. At least then I could have a ritualistic exorcism rather than recurrent visits to the local Safeway for Nyquil and tissues.

I think mostly I just hate feeling like I’m a slave to my body. My lungs shudder up a cough, my throat swells in protest, my sinuses expel excess mucus, and I just have to let it happen. Add a dinner with beans, and I am my own wind instrument of disgusting noises, smells, and fluids.

But I put my minor cold into perspective when I received a call that my dad was in the hospital after having suffered a mild heart attack. He was hiking on the Appalachian Trail when it hit, and because he didn’t realize he was having a heart attack and was simply enjoying the view, my brother took a picture of both our dad (having a heart attack) and the view. It’s a pretty good picture, actually.

Because of the rapid appearance of his chest pain, doctors admitted him to the hospital and believed the problem to be a clot. The clot, they said, could be cleared up with the placement of a stint in one of his arteries. The angiogram would tell the whole story, they said.

But the angiogram said something altogether different. Instead of a simple splint, my father would require quadruple bypass surgery.

So I hopped on a plane and headed home. I didn’t make it in time for Dad’s surgery, but I was there to visit the evening after his surgery. There were lots of tubes, IVs, and monitors, and there was a teddy bear. Huh? 

We’re not a stuffed animal kind of family, so I wondered about bear my dad was hugging so tightly.

I found out the bear’s name was Cough Buddy (though I renamed him Myron T. Coughman). Cough Buddy is actually a soft surgical splint, designed to help bypass patients cough and deep breathe with minimal pain.

Cough Buddy’s ear tag told us the correct usage for him; Dad was supposed to hold Myron T. flush against the incision running the length of his breast bone. Patients having had thoracic surgery were to hold Cough Buddy sideways across their chests, and abdominal surgery patients were to hold Cough Buddy tightly across their bellies.

But Cough Buddy’s ear tag also indicated that he was to be used “to ease the discomfort of abdominal, thoracic, or open head surgery.” Open head surgery? Does that mean patients could wear Cough Buddy on their heads like hats?

This typographical error aside, Cough Buddy served my dad well, keeping him warm after cold walks in the hospitals corridors and helping him cough up all the fluids that landed in his lungs while he was on the bypass machine.

The rest of the time in the hospital was marked by respiratory therapy, incision care, and enough pills to make a junkie jealous. After a lot of bad cable TV, my brother bought Dad a Nintendo DS lite and loaded it with games like Flash Focus and Brain Age.

I’d never played Brain Age before. It’s one of those games that tests the player’s ability to memorize and problem solve with words and numbers. It’s also one of those games that tells you exactly how stupid you are when you suck at these games. Apparently, I have the brain age of a 49 year old. I am not 49.

But the way my dad has powered through this surgery (less than a week after his surgery he’s puttering around the house telling me how to make his oatmeal and coffee), lets me know that my brain isn’t as important as my heart.

My dad’s heart, always open to his family, is even stronger now after surgery. He lets us know how much he appreciates us (even when he’s bossing me around the kitchen), and with his cockatiel Cindy firmly planted on his shoulder, he models for us what’s really important: love, tenderness, and an amazing tolerance for bird crap.

Though he may have no pulse in his left arm (that artery has been “repurposed”), my dad still has a lot of heart.