Life staying the same?

In a poem she managed to lose, the writer describes the simple ritual of coffee and newspaper she and her husband share each morning. Then his departure, a quick peck on her cheek, the “Love you” which has replaced “Goodbye.”

She returns to the paper and sees an obituary, and is struck: This family had their rituals too, and now their lives will never be the same.

As we get older, we are more and more aware that day will come, beginning like most other days, but entirely different by evening. For some, it will be a surprise. For others, it will be expected, yet still breathtaking in its finality.

We go on making our plans, essentially believing that each day will follow in lockstep the one before it. We go on planning to control the changes, like Christmas with the grandchildren, a river cruise in the spring, a visit to a daughter in Germany.

Still, we admit reluctantly, it won’t be this way forever. The days and years are running out. Which one of us will it be?

So one gets through a crisis. When three nitroglycerine in five minute intervals did not relieve his pain, she called for an ambulance. Never mind that she could have driven him to a hospital 10 minutes away. He was hurting so much he wanted the paramedics, who obligingly came and relieved his pain and drove him to the helicopter landing zone a few minutes from his house.

When 911 gets a call that a 76-year-old man is having severe chest pain unrelieved by nitroglycerine, they take it very seriously. When the paramedics hear the same description, they dispatch an extra person or two by means of fire trucks until the cul de sac is clogged.

Patient loaded, they give his wife a few minutes to check the stove and lock the doors, then place her in a firefighter’s car. Neighbors respond, rapping on the window with lists of phone numbers and backup cell numbers and offers to do whatever they can to help.

She thanks them, her driver starts the car, and as they begin to thread through the red trucks, she allows herself to think ahead. Is this how it’s going to end? Is this the end of 51 years of breakfast rituals? There’s a light bulb burned out in the bathroom; where does he keep the spares? Did he fill the birdfeeders this morning? She knows other women have gone through this, but she doesn’t believe she can.

She looks for hope: We walked to the bank this morning, she recalls, then took the golf cart to city hall and had a Reuben sub at the oldest restaurant in town. He never said anything about his chest hurting then.

Home again, he went upstairs to his lounge chair for his afternoon nap and in minutes was back down, clutching his chest. How could he suddenly be in a helicopter leaping over rush hour traffic to a hospital in Atlanta?

She finds him in the emergency room, wired to monitors that beep and whistle when a benchmark is violated. Portable X-rays take pictures, blood is drawn, he is interrogated for his medical history over and over again.

The firefighter goes home and the pastor arrives. He seems relaxed. With how many others has he sat and waited for medical reports to translate for the patient? How many times has he raced to a hospital to sit down in a chapel and explain to a new widow what is happening to her? To her and her family and their rituals?

This time his body language signals that he is not so worried. He offers to take her home but she would not leave her husband. During the night they found room for him in the coronary care unit. More tests. More beeps, more lights moving across graphs. He finally sleeps. She cannot.

On Saturday, the cardiologist-on-call comes in and admits the tests have been inconclusive. He listens closely to the patient’s heart and when he’s done, the patient says he was sorry to interrupt the doctor’s weekend.

“Do you know what that doctor said?” his wife marvels to anyone who will listen. “He said, ‘This’s the life I chose.’ Can you imagine a doctor saying such a thing? This’s the life I chose?”

At last on Monday afternoon, the cardiologist comes in. He’s tall, white-haired and outgoing, and he bellows the “good news/bad news” announcement. The good news, he says, is that the heart looks great, not a thing wrong with it. The bad news? A gallbladder full of stones. But the patient can go home and arrange for his own surgery.

Within 45 minutes the patient is a patient no more but a man in a suede shirt and khakis walking out of the hospital, trailed by his wife, a friend and one of the hospital’s superb staff.

It’s as though he was here by mistake, she thinks. He was sick enough to be considered a heart patient and three days later, he walks out of the hospital to plan for routine surgery.

It’s not always like this, she thinks, but for us, this time, things will be the same.

For another family, on that very weekend, they will never be the same.