Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [41]
I went over by my mother’s side and put my hands on her. I whispered in her ear: “I’m here. You’re OK. This will be OK. Stay with me. Don’t leave me. Dad and Veronica are on the way!”
I bowed my head and said a prayer and asked God to please spare her, to not take her, to let her live. It was not her time! I asked him to take everything from me, everything I had, all my possessions, my career—anything—I would give it all up right now just so she could live. It was a crazy, illogical and unnecessary request. God—or nature or my mother herself—were going to decide if her body could carry on. But I meant it nonetheless, and I would be overjoyed if my offer were accepted.
My dad and sister and wife arrived, slightly shaken by what they said was the worst storm they’d ever driven through. They went to her side and spoke to her, and though there would be the occasional twitch in her eyes, there was no guarantee she could hear us.
Her heart beat through the night and into the morning. Our other sister, Anne, rushed to get on a red-eye from Sacramento and would soon arrive there to be with us. Each hour, our mother’s vital signs would stabilize, then go slightly downward. The night nurse with the long braid left without a word, and a new day nurse came in. She stopped when she saw me, and she didn’t try very hard to contain “that look” I’ve seen a thousand times from those who would rather not see me. Of course, the other nurses and doctors more than made up for her attitude, and they did their best to make my mother comfortable and to keep the rest of us calm. The doctor on duty admitted that if my mom were stable he’d like to move her to another hospital with facilities that might be better for her. But that kind of travel would be too dangerous at this point, he said. We would just have to play the cards we were dealt.
By two in the afternoon (now twenty-four hours since the surgery), her progress continued steadily downward. The blood pressure read 60 over 35. I called Jack Stanzler, a doctor and friend in Ann Arbor, to get some advice, and he in turn called a doctor friend of his in northern Michigan to see if there was anything he could do. Our mother’s eyes remained wide open with little or no movement. We all kept whispering encouraging things to her, hoping it would help.
I took a break for a moment and went out in the hall to the nurses’ station, where I encountered the not-so-happy-to-see-me nurse. She looked straight at me, and with a tone of disgust that she didn’t even have the decency to hide, she uttered the following:
“Why don’t you just knock it off in there? Your mother is dead. And nobody’s got the guts to tell you that. She’s gone and nothing you’re doing is going to bring her back.” And then she walked away.
I thought I had suffocated. If I didn’t know better, it felt as if the nurse’s hand was now on my throat, choking the life out of me.
“Wait a minute!” I yelled, as I found my breath. “Who are you?! Why would you say such a thing? You’re sick. Sick!”
I broke down. The others in the room heard me, and my wife came out. Sobbing, I told her what the nurse just said.
“Your mother’s not dead. Those monitors don’t lie. I don’t know why she would say that. Come back in the room.”
Instead, I went to the phone and called the surgeon. I told him what just happened. He told me to ignore the nurse and that the doctor on duty was handling things and that was all that mattered. “And your mother is still alive.”
Over the next hour we all took turns spending a few private moments with my mother, saying the things that you would only say if it were just you and your