Exposition: November 17, 2011

The week before Thanksgiving, I was awakened by the telephone at 5 a.m. Calls at that hour are never good. I’d gotten one in February 1993 telling me my mother had died of a heart attack. Nine years later, the call came informing me that my sister, Mary Ann, had just died of a massive coronary. She was 48.

The call on this morning was slightly alarming, but not nearly so tragic. It was from a nurse at the assisted living facility where my now 92-year-old father went to live after Mary Ann died. The nurse said Dad could not get out of bed and wanted to go to the hospital.

I hurriedly dressed and, less than an hour later, found him in the hospital's emergency room. He looked horrible, his face ashen, moaning incoherently as if in considerable pain. I felt certain that this day would be his last. I called my brother, Greg, in Montana, and my sister, Kay, in Bowling Green, Ohio, to deliver to the news.

Kay and her husband, Dennis, were traveling to Cincinnati to spend a fun weekend with one of their daughters and her new husband. At Dennis’s urging, they drove back to Bowling Green and Kay headed to Cleveland to join me. By the time she arrived around 5 in the afternoon, my previously dying father had rebounded to his normal, slightly confused self. No more moaning or pain. He said he was hungry.

  

His rapid improvement came as a relief, yet Kay and I faced the decision we had long dreaded. What do we do with Dad? The assisted living facility, as nice as it seemed, could not provide the care he needed.

A sympathetic ER doc understood our plight and helped set in motion the process to move him out by insisting he stay in the hospital for several days and then be admitted to a nursing home for a longish rehab stint. The outcome far exceeded our expectations. Instead of some dreary, depressing, piss-scented bedlam, Dad ended up in the geriatric equivalent of the Ritz. Great care, great food and an administration willing to let him stay permanently once he'd completed rehab.

After more than 12 hours in the ER, Dad finally got sent upstairs to a room. As the attendants wheeled him out of the ER toward a bank of elevators, my cell phone rang. I was surprised to hear my general physician at Kaiser, Dr. Clarence Taylor, on the line.

"Mark, I don't want you to be alarmed, but the radiologist found a spot on your chest X-ray at the top of the left lung that needs to be checked out," he said. "It's probably only scar tissue, but with your history of smoking, we should probably do some follow up."

I had recently seen Dr. Taylor for a literal pain in the neck caused by degenerative arthritis, a condition aptly named radiculopathy. He ordered a chest X-ray and, as it turns out, the sharp-eyed radiologist had found something abnormal in the upper lobe of my left lung.

Dr. Taylor told me I needed to get a CAT scan of my chest to investigate further and that I'd be getting a call to set up the appointment. This was unexpected and more than a little disconcerting, but I had more pressing matters to deal with and and went in search of my father.
   

Little did I know then that, had someone made a "last-longer" wager between a 92-year-old man in the hospital and his outwardly healthy 52-year-old son that the smart money might be on the old man.