The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [459]
The following morning, as she and Kathleen were making plans for what was to come, Susie unaccountably refused to authorize Kathleen to pay for the equipment that would be needed to make her apartment accessible postsurgery. Kathleen needed to get elevator chairs to carry her up all the flights of stairs to her apartment at the top of the building. Susie would not hear of it. Kathleen decided that Susie was in some kind of shock or denial and finally called Susie Jr., who simply said to ignore her mother and make the necessary arrangements.
Meanwhile, a stunned Warren paced through his routine, as he invariably did in a crisis. He escorted a very upset Astrid to the Nebraska football game in Lincoln. He flew out to San Francisco the following morning, where he learned that Susie needed major surgery within the next few weeks. She had a fifty percent chance of surviving for five years. A large portion of her jaw and most or all of her teeth might be removed. For more than a month after the surgery, she would be fed through a tube in her nose that led directly into her stomach. She would not be able to talk during that period and the surgery was potentially disfiguring. Susie told Warren little more; she did say she was worried that she would frighten her own grandchildren. They decided she would fly to New York City for a second opinion at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center the following week, although this was largely a formality.
Once back in Omaha, Warren filled his every conscious moment with phone conversations, Internet bridge games, work, and strategizing how to handle an upcoming meeting with Karen Elliott House, publisher of the Wall Street Journal. Buffett by now had had several run-ins with the Journal over its coverage of him, beginning with the 1992 story that called him a “tough, polished man” beneath the “mask” of a folksy sage. House was arriving perhaps on a repair mission, perhaps to sound him out about buying the financially troubled paper. But his mind never really left Susie; he touched on her in brief cloudbursts of conversation. He had decided to spend every weekend in San Francisco with her during the coming months. Although he didn’t really know what he was letting himself in for, he wanted to give her in some fashion what he knew she would have given him, had their situations been reversed. He felt certain, he said, she needed his presence. For sure, he was going to need hers.
The meeting with House proved uneventful; nobody got strangled, nor did Buffett buy the paper. For the rest of the week he started every morning in a thunderhead mood—a sure sign that he was not sleeping well—then brightened through the course of the day. Other than Debbie Bosanek and a few other people, nobody at Berkshire Hathaway headquarters knew the reason.
During that week he rarely left his corner of the floor next to the Xerox room and the two file rooms, spending much of his time on the phone with Susie. Although they talked for hours, she was vague about the ordeal that she faced. Initially, she herself had not grasped the extensiveness of the surgery, which might also involve a bone graft taken from her leg. The surgeons were not sure how much of her face would be involved, although they thought they could spare her tongue. Most devastating to her was that she would probably not be able to sing again. She had discussed the surgery with her former son-in-law, Allen Greenberg, who had a longtime familiarity with her medical problems, having taken his friend, boss, and former mother-in-law to the emergency room several times over the