by Steve Boman
He says I’ll get a special ultrasound of my heart on Monday morning. He says nothing in my laboratory results or scans shows any markers for any kind of cancer. I feel a bit better.
I’m again waiting for time to pass. Julie arrives at LAX at 5 P.M.
At 4:30 P.M., I smell my armpits. I stink. I stink really bad. I haven’t showered since Friday morning and it’s now Sunday afternoon, and I’ve been through enough emotional turmoil to melt an entire stick of Old Spice. I learn there is a shower somewhere on the ward. I get a towel and roll my street clothes into the towel, like I’m planning a prison break. I take my toothbrush and razor and fresh underwear and a shirt that Carl and Irene brought me.
There’s no indication the shower has been used in recent days. I scrub myself to a lather in the shower and start to sing. It feels so good to do something so ordinary. I shave in a foggy mirror. I wish I had some deodorant. I put on my jeans and the fresh shirt and look at my watch. Perfect. Shift change. The afternoon nurses on the unit are inattentive. I give myself a quick once-over and walk out of the shower and head for the elevator, my IV attachment taped to my arm under cellophane wrap. No one says a word to me.
Thirty seconds later I’m walking out of the elevators and heading for the UCLA Medical Center exit. A minute later, I’m walking across the hospital’s sunny courtyard. I’m free! I feel terrific. After two days in the stroke unit, I have begun to feel like I should shuffle and drool so I can fit in with the other patients. Now I’m outside and the sun is warm and even the Los Angeles air smells sweet and beautiful.
Coming toward me is a familiar face—my night nurse! Unlike the lazy day-shift nurses, he’s a champ, an upbeat joker who likes hanging in our room. My busted-jaw roommate especially likes him. He’s the only nurse who laughs with him and tells him jokes. The nurse’s eyes widen and he gives me a look of What the Hell Are You Doing? I start jogging and give him a wave.
I head across Le Conte Avenue. I go into a convenience store and buy a bag of corn chips, a bottle of tonic water, a lime, and a bottle of gin. I stand in line with an IV line dangling from my left forearm, a hospital ID bracelet on my wrist.
When I walk out of the elevator back into the stroke ward, my night nurse sees me and walks quickly after me. I pick up my step and beat him back to my room. He comes in and quickly closes the door.
“What are you doing?” he demands. “You’re not supposed to leave the hospital! You can’t just walk away like that!”
I tell him my wife is going to be arriving soon, and I had to get a little welcoming package. I sneak him a peek of the gin and tonic. “You want some?” I ask. He rolls his eyes. “You’re not supposed to do that in the hospital either!” Then he sighs. “I don’t want to know about this.”
He leaves, closing the door behind him, and I mix up some drinks in a pair of plastic cups. I open the bag of chips, fluff up the pillow, and raise my hospital bed. I recline and wait. I am most certainly not going to look like a feeble invalid when my wife arrives.
After a brief wait, there’s a polite knock at the door. It’s Julie. She comes in, eyes wide. She’s not sure what to expect. I’m kicked back, Hawaiian shirt and jeans on, a pair of G&Ts waiting on the counter.
“Welcome to the stroke unit,” I say.
7
Nice to Meet You, Donald Sutherland
The next morning the team comes by for morning rounds, and what a different response from them! Julie has stayed with me overnight—no kiss and tell about what happened—and the doctors seem surprised when they meet her. For two days, I’ve been alone, a John Doe from the Midwest who walked into the emergency room. Now with Julie by my side, they treat me very differently. Perception is reality. Julie is a doctor, and she’s articulate. Their talk immediately veers into medical jargon. The attending physician again says my stroke is a blessing in disguise. Had I not gotten a small stroke as a warning shot across my bow, he says, I could have been incapacitated or killed later by a bigger stroke. The diagnosis seems pretty simple: I sat in my truck nearly motionless for forty hours driving from Minneapolis to Los Angeles. The inactivity could have allowed small clots to form in my legs. If I did have some blood clots in my legs, they could have migrated to my brain via a hole in my heart.
Shortly after they leave, I am wheeled into the hospital basement again. This time I’m not alone. Julie walks beside my wheelchair. I again feel completely ridiculous being pushed around like a vegetable.
Every other test has been completely painless. MRIs and CAT scans are the lazy man’s treat: lay on a pad, let a big machine thrum and vibrate around you.
This test, an echocardiogram, is different. I am told I will be swallowing a large tube that will take pictures of my heart through the wall of my stomach lining. “This is not pleasant, not at all,” the gabby lab technician warns me. “It would be nice if we could sedate you, but we need you awake.”
I appreciate her honesty. It is not pleasant. I don’t swallow the tube, but rather the tube is shoved down my throat. My gag reflex kicks into overdrive as soon as the ultrasound probe touches the back of my throat. I immediately begin trying to vomit it out. They keep pushing it farther down my stomach. I keep retching.
For twenty minutes, it goes on this way. I’m retching so hard I sound like a dying water buffalo. There is nothing I can do. My body wants the probe out. Julie holds my hand and keeps me from grabbing the tube.
Even though I’m retching, I’m required to bear down on my gut muscles, as if I’m constipated and I’m trying to expel the remains of some supersize burrito. As I do it, a technician injects air bubbles into my veins through a needle in my arm. The test is supposed to see if those air bubbles cross the wrong side of the heart. I’m puking, gagging, grunting, and being injected with air bubbles, all at the same time.
It’s an awesome way to spend a Monday morning.
I’m wheeled again to my room. Now Julie and I wait. I’m getting anxious—my 508 class at USC resumes on Tuesday. I’m desperately hoping I can get back to campus in time for class. I’m already missing my first screenwriting class.
On Tuesday morning, I shower again and am in my street clothes when the stroke unit doctors come by for their morning rounds. And they are smiling.
“Great news. You have a PFO!” says the attending physician. The residents actually line up to high-five me. Everyone seems thrilled at the news. I have a hole in my heart! Celebrate! A moderately sized hole that can let blood leak out and flow to my brain!
I’m not as thrilled as everyone else is. I have a freaking hole in my heart! The attending physician tells me it will be a relatively simple procedure to close the hole surgically, to which I’m reminded that I was supposed to just swallow the ultrasound probe. He suggests waiting until my Christmas break and doing it back in Minneapolis. Until that point, he says, take some baby aspirin every day, take some cholesterol-lowering medicine (my cholesterol wasn’t beyond normal range), watch my diet—and get heart surgery in four months. He discharges me.
Julie and I hurry to pack up and get out of the hospital. My first class is at 1 P.M. I walk out of the UCLA Medical Center a free man at 11:30 A.M. and find three parking tickets on the dirty windshield of my Suburban, which is parked in a hospital parking garage next to the emergency department.
I gun our big Suburban down the 405, then eastbound on the 10. Julie tells me to slow down. I glance at her as we race along at eighty-five miles per hour and deadpan: “What, it’s not like I could have a stroke.”
I hear myself say it and I realize I sound like a complete asshole. What if I did have another stroke? I think. I slow down. My first class will start in less than an hour.
T
he 508 course is structured like 507. There are fourteen students in seven partnerships, one lead instructor, several assistant instructors, and several student teaching assistants. Pablo is our lead instructor. Our cinematography instructor is Charles, an affable, sunburned Englishman. Our sound instructor is an i
ntense bundle of no-nonsense energy named Frank. It’s a fitting name. He’s blunt and no-nonsense. Frank. Thankfully, there are no acting classes in 508, but we do have an acting instructor who gives us advice when we watch dailies.
I walk into the class, my hospital ID bracelet still on my wrist. No one seems to notice. No one knows I was in the hospital, not even Dan. I had been admitted to the hospital on Friday evening. I was released Tuesday morning. It’s Tuesday afternoon, and now that I’m sitting, I take stock of how I feel.
I feel weird. I feel I’m levitating. I feel I’m rising slightly off the ground. When I speak I choose my words carefully. I don’t want to stumble or slur my words. It feels as if big words are difficult to find. Because of that, I speak in short sentences. I rehearse my words in my head. I don’t know if it’s an aftereffect of the stroke or if I’m just hyperconscious of how my brain works. I do know I’m worried my brain will freeze up again and I’ll be unable to talk. And I feel my memory is muddy.
I have three conversations going on simultaneously in my head: one is observing what’s going on in class, another is rehearsing what I’m about to say, a third is monitoring the functioning of my brain and body. I’m constantly doing a pilot’s checklist of my physical functions: feet moving, check; fingers balanced, check; eyebrows moving in unison, check; face not drooping, check.
It’s an exhausting task, and I know my own mind is running at a hundred miles per hour when everyone else’s in the room is probably idling. My mind also feels like it’s mushy. I’ve got the gas pedal floored—I don’t think I can go any faster or do any more than what I’m doing, which is next to nothing. I’m sitting in a chair in a classroom at USC, listening to an instructor. If someone were to look into the room, they’d see polite boredom. But my interior conversations are vivid and disquieting. I briefly take my pulse. It normally runs in the low fifties. My heartbeat is now more than eighty beats per minute.
It’s the first day of class. We’re going over ground rules, expectations, planning. It’s all pretty boring stuff. Pablo is a quiet speaker, and he’s friendly and kind in class. I’d dealt with him when I quit, and I smile at how things have worked out. He’s now my instructor.
I survey the class. I know from my 507 class that these thirteen other people will shape the tone and tenor of the next four months. I will spend hundreds of hours with these people.
The class has five women, again. And again we are a melting pot of races and accents. The partnerships are intriguing. It’s interesting to see how the mating dance from the previous semester played out. There’s a tall black guy with a soft southern accent partnered with a stocky Romanian guy who’s got the same ever-present five o’clock shadow as the late John Belushi. Two fashion-forward black women from the same South Side Chicago neighborhood are another partnership—one of them went to elementary school across the street from where Julie and I lived in Hyde Park. Another two women are paired up—a white Los Angeleno, a true Valley Girl, is partnered with a tall exotic-looking Asian-Anglo whose name is Kat. They’re both groovy-girl club kids, and they seem as perfectly matched as the women from Chicago. The fifth woman in the class is from the Philippines; her long jet-black hair is lustrous, her accent sweet, and she’s paired with a guy from South Florida whose parents fled Castro’s Cuba. There’s an exceptionally tall Mexican guy with a huge haystack of hair—he’s quiet as a mouse—paired with a grinning and chatty Chilean. Two square-jawed athletic white guys—they both seem to be out of a Polo catalog—are paired together.
Then there’s Dan and me. We’re the oddest couple by appearance. Dan is slight and boyish. He’s twenty three and could pass for nineteen. He’s got a mop of reddish blond hair, freckles, and exceptionally fair skin. I’m in my forties and I could pass for a guy … in his forties. And even after spending time in the hospital, I’m still deeply tan. My skin shows the decades I’ve spent outdoors. A few months earlier, I commented to my kooky barber that I wanted my hair a bit shorter—“Like Daniel Craig had in the last James Bond flick,” I said. She thought of someone else with a shaved head and immediately gave me a buzz-cut. With no hair, I look fierce, with a touch of Travis Bickle. I’d since kept the boot-camp hairdo. Dan and I have already been confused for being father and son, and we quickly learn to add filming partners when we tell outsiders we’re partners.
Our class is exceptional in one way: the men are all handsome, the women all pretty. Compared to my first go-round, the class looks older, more mature, and more poised. I expected the reverse, since I am two years older, and the undergraduates on campus certainly look younger. But as we introduce each other and spend the first day in class, I realize all the men in the class are straight and, well, manly. Four of the women are straight, and the one lesbian, the Valley Girl, is straight out of the imagination of Howard Stern. Everyone seems confident and upbeat, in school to work. It’s as if our class sidestepped the usual film school clichés I’ve already witnessed at USC—the slacker, a cigarette dangling, who yammers on about avant-garde French cinematographers; the Lexus-driving Marxist, who drones on about the total unfairness of the world economic system; the wandering rich kid, who uses film school as some sort of extended personal therapy session.
Everyone in my 508 class seems interested in making films, not posing, not complaining, not searching. It’s only the first day, of course. And I wonder how much of my observations are shaded because of the simple fact I’m just out of the hospital. Four nights in a stroke ward makes everything look good. I notice the air smells good. The sun shines brightly. USC looks beautiful. It is beautiful. It’s August. The days are long. The sun is hot. It feels like the Southern California the Beach Boys sang about.
After class, I tell Dan I spent the weekend in the hospital and he seems to brush it off—okay, cool, how do ya feel? I don’t want to dwell on the details, and I make my patient time sound pretty minor. If he’s worried, he’s hiding it well. I introduce him to Julie and they hit it off. We joke that we are going to take our son out for dinner, which we do.
O
n this first day back, the San Fernando Valley hits 102 degrees. It’s in the nineties at USC, which is down in the L.A. Basin. When Julie and I return to Carl and Irene’s house, we find my room is heavily damaged. The broken pipe sprayed enough water to soak all the carpets, which in turn soaked the walls, which in turn damaged the sheetrock. The carpet is pulled from four rooms, and a handful of large industrial fans are drying the mess. The air-conditioning is off. It’s hot, humid, and loud, as the fans blast 24/7. We spend a sleepless night, my first out of the hospital.
Julie needs to return to Minneapolis, and I drive her to the airport at 5 A.M. It’s still eighty degrees outside. I return to USC, park, and leave my engine running and AC blasting. I try to take a nap in the back of the Suburban. I can’t sleep. I’m now six days into my return to grad school and I’ve had a mild stroke, I discover I have a hole in my heart, and I find that my home-away-from home has been damaged in a way that seems a mocking echo of my own body. As I lie there, the Suburban engine sucking gas, the sunlight filtering in the window, my head still aching slightly, I realize the broken water pipe is so spot-on for a metaphor that it wouldn’t work in a fictional script. I hear the critique already: “Too on-the-nose, Steve. Try something a little more subtle.”
I feel very alone. Julie is gone. Classes are starting, and I don’t know a soul on campus other than Dan. I made him promise not to tell others about what happened to me. I know film school is a gossip chamber, and I don’t want misinformation to spread.
Luckily, film school semesters at USC start with a slow ramp-up: in 507 and in 508, I’m not expected to do much in the first few days of class. I haven’t missed a thing, nor fallen behind. The first long weekend is meant, apparently, for students to socialize and get settled before the real work begins.
As I lie in my truck’s backseat, I think: What am I doing here? Why am I doing this? Am I an idiot? My mind spins toward the macabre. I for
esee a news story:
From The Associated Press: A forty-two-year-old Minnesota man was found dead in his vehicle on the campus of the University of Southern California yesterday afternoon, apparently from natural causes. The man was enrolled in the university’s School of Cinematic Arts, officials said, and was pursuing a master’s degree in film production. Police and USC officials refused to release the name of the man until relatives could be notified.
A classmate said the man apparently had been hospitalized earlier in the week for a stroke. The classmate, who only identified himself as Dan, said the death of the Minnesota man “was kind of a bummer.”
“He didn’t seem a bad guy, but he was a pretty old dude to be going to school,” Dan said. “This is sure going to f’-up my semester.” Police were unable to determine exactly how long the man was in the vehicle, but officials noted that his 2002 Chevrolet Suburban appeared to have been idling until it ran out of gas. “Judging by the smell, he’d been in there a while,” said one officer, who asked not to be identified. Police ruled out foul play. No other details are available at this time. An autopsy is pending.
I realize the thoughts I’m having are self-defeating. Feeling sorry for myself and being scared aren’t going to help. I didn’t come back to USC to fail, and I’m not going to quit again. It’s time to pull myself up by my sorry-ass bootstraps.
Though it is early, I call my pal Pete Krause.
