The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [462]
Very early the next morning, the family accompanied Susie to the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center, where the technicians hooked her up to an IV and drew a huge oval from her knee to her left ankle with a Magic Marker. This, they said, was to indicate the area where they were going to open her leg to take out what they needed for the bone graft. Dr. Isley, Susie’s surgeon, came by to tell them that he would leave the operating room after ninety minutes or so to let them know for sure whether the cancer had spread.
Then Susie took her daughter into the bathroom and shut the door behind them. She didn’t want Warren to hear what she had to say. “Listen,” she said, “he is a wuss. You need to understand that if they get in there and there’s more cancer, don’t let them operate. I’m so afraid he’s going to tell them to operate even if it’s really widespread, because he won’t want me to die.”
By eight a.m. Susie was in surgery, and the family went to the main surgical lounge, where they awaited word, along with all the other people who were passing the time watching Jerry Springer on television while their loved ones were in the O.R. Warren pretended to read the newspaper. From time to time, he closed the paper, held it up before his face, reached a hand behind to wipe tears from his eyes, then opened it again.
Dr. Isley returned only forty-five minutes later. Although he had found cancer in two lymph nodes, it had not spread from there, which was good news. The surgery would remove only the lower floor of her mouth, the inside of her cheek, and about a third of her tongue. She did not need a bone graft. After Dr. Isley left, Warren began to ask, “Well, now, Sooz, was that what he said would take an hour and a half, or is he going to come back out again? Are you sure? Will they really know?” Each time, Susie Jr. reassured him that they already had the answer, and each time he would wait a few minutes and ask her again. “Well, how did they know so fast?” He kept saying, “I don’t think this is good. Maybe he’s going to come back out.”
Sixteen hours later, Susie was in the intensive-care unit, breathing through a tracheotomy tube. Her left arm was bandaged from wrist to elbow where the surgeons had carved a slice of flesh for the skin graft inside her mouth. Because her tongue was swollen out of her mouth, a feeding tube had been threaded through her nose into her stomach. She coughed continually, clogging the trach tube, which had to be cleared frequently so that she could breathe.12
The next morning at the hospital, Susie Jr. told her father, “You need to get really ready for this. It’s a shocking thing to see.” Warren steeled himself as he walked into Susie’s room. He knew he could not allow her to see any spasm on his face that would reveal to Susie how ghastly she appeared. Making a huge effort of will, he managed to sit unflinching with her for a little while. Then Susie Jr. told him and her brothers that they could go home. There was nothing further they could do. Having stuffed his feelings into a Pandora’s box while he remained at Susie’s bedside, after he left he says he “spent two days just crying, basically.”
He went back to San Francisco for the following two weekends. Then, just before Susie was going to leave the hospital and go home, he flew down to Georgia and spoke to a group of students at Georgia Tech. He didn’t talk about business much,