Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [102]
“Now, Mr. President,” Bell said, “you need to get some sleep. In the most polite way I know how, I’m putting this cover over your eyes, and I want you to shut up and go to sleep.”
For the first time in almost twenty-four hours, the world around the president came to a stop. Someone turned off the overhead lights. Nurses read charts by flashlight; doctors quietly finished their reports. Around the recovery room, Secret Service agents stood sentry. Only one sound could be heard—the beep-beep-beep of the machine monitoring the president’s steadily beating heart.
EPILOGUE
After a fitful hour of sleep and a sponge bath, Ronald Reagan was wheeled from the recovery room into an elevator for the ride to the hospital’s intensive care unit on the fourth floor. There, as Secret Service agents and police officers stood at attention, he was rolled down a hallway until he reached room 4025-N, one of the largest in the ward. The plain white room had been scrubbed clean for the president, and his bed was placed headfirst against a wall. To his right, sunlight from a bright new day seeped around the edges of the stuffy room’s thick window shade.
The door closed, and now the president was alone with two nurses and a Secret Service agent who stood guard behind a drawn green curtain. For the rest of Reagan’s stay in the hospital, an agent was always stationed in his room.
Nurse Maureen McCann, wearing a yellow scrub dress, introduced herself. Though he was still weak and in pain, Reagan smiled and said, “I have a daughter named Maureen.”
McCann and the second nurse, Carolyn Ramos, then conducted a basic medical assessment, checking the president’s blood pressure, his pulse, his temperature, the position of his chest tubes and dressings, and his IV lines. Everything was fine. Ramos asked Reagan a series of questions to test his mental acuity. After querying him about the year and whether he knew his whereabouts, she paused and said, “I was going to ask you who is president, but I don’t think that is necessary.”
Reagan laughed, and Ramos went on to say that when she had asked the same question of a patient a few weeks earlier, the patient replied, “It’s that actor fellow—Jimmy Stewart.” Again Reagan was amused, and he responded with one of his favorite yarns about being mistaken on a New York City street for his fellow movie actor Ray Milland. Not wanting to disappoint the fan, Reagan had signed an autograph in Milland’s name.
The nurses were impressed that Reagan could joke after his ordeal, but the laughter stopped when they began performing respiratory therapy, which involved pounding on the president’s back with cupped hands and then forcing him to cough up debris from his lungs. The therapy was so vigorous that it could be heard by anyone in the vicinity; later, when Nancy Reagan spent time in a nearby room while the therapy was administered, she described it as sounding like someone was “slapping a side of beef” next door.
The therapy session exhausted the president and made him sweat; to help him cool down and to quench his thirst, McCann gave him some ice chips to chew on. Then, knowing that he would soon have visitors, she asked whether she could brush his tangled hair to make him look a bit more presentable. “I meant to have it cut,” Reagan said, adding that he hadn’t washed it in a couple of days. She gently combed and parted the president’s hair.
Ramos offered to brush Reagan’s teeth for him. Looking puzzled, the president said, “But they’re mine.” Ramos was embarrassed—most ICU patients around Reagan’s age had dentures. She gave him what he needed to brush his own teeth.
At 7:15, the president’s official day began. Jim Baker, Ed Meese, and Mike Deaver filed into the room. “I should have known I wasn’t going to avoid a staff meeting,” Reagan quipped, drawing laughter from his top advisors. Someone handed the president the dairy bill to sign. Borrowing a pen, Reagan scrawled his signature in the proper place and