Nephro Time

October 14, 2019

Our son Michael and daughter Marie traveled long distances this weekend to spend many hours in my beige-blazoned hospital room, as I heaved and gasped with the aftermath of my “nephroureterectomy” which, to keep this relatively at a layman’s level, involves the removal of several body parts. I went through it Thursday. The other two girls called the hospital over the weekend.

It’s not over yet, as I took a couple of wrong turns on my nicely crafted recovery plan, which called for me to be out of here yesterday. Instead I’m waiting for results of an all-upper-body x-ray while staring at the overwhelming beigeness and, out the window, at the tops of trees, now tinted by fall, above this massive hospital’s parking lot. Friends stopped by yesterday for warm-hearted visits. Sandy and the kids are gone, partly because of their schedules and partly at my urging, since I know, having done this before, that hospital patients quickly run out of ideas for playing host to visitors. Haven’t eaten solid food for four days, but now, Sunday evening, I’m well enough to sit up in the bed.

This being Sunday, a guy came by from our parish to distribute communion. I couldn’t take it because I couldn’t say I could keep it down, which hints at my morning. But he read today’s Gospel. We talked a bit about his time at the Naval Research Laboratory and my time at the Office of Naval Research, which funds NRL. Funny coincidence. He left with good words, “God will help you beat this.” Always helps to hear that.

Life will be curtailed when I get home. I’ll be dragging around a catheter for ten days, so no trips, no visiting, no yard work–except brief walks up the block, nothing that involves movement. After that, camping on the couch. Then a follow-up appointment to this adventuresome weekend. The catheter comes out. Then another visit to the oncologist who’s coaching this little enterprise to discuss what comes next. There will be another scan. I’m still wearing the medi-port in my chest.

That will get us into November, which means Thanksgiving, which means Christmas will be blowing in. We’ve already been talking about the THuG running group’s annual Christmas dinner,  probably the group’s only event in which I’ll participate. Sandy will be seeing a neurologist and a cardiologist. So a busy season ahead. An uncertain season.

What I remember, what I always make a point of remembering, are the kind words, even those casual kind words that sign off casual conversations. They gain intensity in late fall as we relive our progress through the year, and that of family members and friends. I hear from time to time of good things people I know are doing for others less fortunate. We may be bewildered or outraged bystanders to the direction the nation is taking.  But maybe our personal efforts are redoubled to do good things, or at least to try to do good things. The Holy Family food pantry where I once worked still is operating.  Others I know are doing important, similar things.

Here at the hospital, these images come together, even on the weekend, when the docs are playing golf or watching football—whatever they do on weekends when they’re invisible at the hospital. The senior RNs, “nurse charge practitioners,” charge nurses, the student observers, are kind and good-hearted and enthusiastic, jumping in not only to take vital signs and administer drugs, but also to change linens, empty various unpleasant things, and take notes from cranky patients.  They smile and wish you well.

If the future is set in the past, the fall is set in the late summer. This one ends for me with a bang, or with a snip—several snips. But we’re stepping out, planning Thanksgiving, maybe something else to look back on happily. But it ends. Then the memories emerge.