Here Comes Trouble

by Michael Moore

  Whatever “slowing down” she had done back at home was not evident once she was firmly planted in Manhattan. No longer forced to take the ferry and the bus to get into the city from her sister’s house on Staten Island, she was now “sitting pretty,” as my dad would say, in our West Side apartment. He would walk into my condo building and, without fail, remark that I was “sure livin’ high on the hog!” This was beyond anything he could have imagined on the factory floor of AC Spark Plug, and while he enjoyed the amenities and the view of the city, he remained appropriately skeptical for a man of his means.

  The night before Thanksgiving, my wife and I took them over to West Eighty-First Street and along Central Park West so they could see the balloons being inflated for the Macy’s Parade the next day. It was cold and we bundled them as best we could, and for a short time they enjoyed being with thousands of New Yorkers marveling at the deflated Snoopy and slightly inflated Bart Simpson lying on the ground (though they had no idea who the latter was). It was a peek behind the curtain, one of many they had been given, due to my Life After Flint—a trip to the Cannes Film Festival with a walk up the stairs of the Palais, a seat at the Emmy Awards next to Sid Caesar the night we won, a chance to have people like Rob Reiner tell them that “your son’s film has the impact of an Uncle Tom’s Cabin”—that alone being worth the price of admission if you’re a parent, slightly embarrassing if you’re the son.

  But now my mother wanted to see Ground Zero, the site of the recent massacre of 2,752 people. I acquiesced and, thinking that Thanksgiving Day would find it the least crowded there, I loaded them in the Beetle and headed down the West Side Highway.

  By mid-November of 2001, the authorities had opened up more streets in Tribeca to traffic, and it was possible to drive right up the perimeter of the World Trade Center’s former location. The place was every bit the disaster area it had been for the past two months, and smoke could still be seen wafting its way up from the ruins.

  I slowed down so they could get a better look. I glanced over at my mother, who was sitting in the front seat with me. There were tears in her eyes, and I would have to go back to the death of her sister to recall such a look of sadness on her face. It was like her facial muscles had just collapsed on their own. She looked down, and then away, and then back again at the destruction. This was not the New York of Ed Sullivan or the Rainbow Room or giving your regards to Broadway.

  This was the future not promised, her world of tomorrow, and I was sorry for her to see it.

  “Mike! Mike!”

  I was sitting in the living room of our home in northern Michigan, planning which movie I was going to take the family to in the next half hour. The choice was between Men in Black II or Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. It was the Fourth of July weekend, 2002, and my sister Veronica had flown in from California with her kids to be with my wife and daughter and our parents. It was Saturday, early evening, and we had spent the day on the lake, taking the kids tubing, and giving Mom and Dad a spin on the boat. My mother hung on to her hat and laughed and admonished me to slow down as the kids on the inner tube shouted to go faster.

  Afterward, before dinner, I sat with my mom in the Adirondack chairs on top of the small hill beside the lake. She rolled up her pants to get some sun on her legs and closed her eyes, and you could see it all felt good to her.

  For the past three weeks I had taken off from work and come to Davison to hang out with them. I took them out for a wedding anniversary dinner, and we did driving tours of all their old haunts from their years of growing up in the Flint area. We visited the graves of all the ancestors, some with birthdates going back to the late 1700s. We planted flowers, we visited the free legal service provide by the UAW (they wanted to update their wills), and we went to a Tigers ball game in Detroit. It was, without a doubt, three of the best weeks I ever spent with them. Though my mother was fading in energy, she participated in everything. But I noticed her time in the bathroom seemed to be getting longer and longer. My dad complained about it, and I agreed we should take her to the doctor and get her checked out.

  “Mike! Mike!!” It was my mother’s voice, but it wasn’t coming from inside the house where the rest of us were. It was coming from the back deck. I went out to see what she needed.

  When I came out the door, it was clear she was very, very sick.

  “I need to get to the bathroom—” She threw up at that moment, and what she threw up was pitch-black gunk. My dad, by then, had come outside to see what was the matter, and he and I helped her up and took her inside. My wife called the local hospital to see what they suggested.

  “Pepto Bismol,” my wife said, relaying the message. This did not seem like a job for a pink liquid. My mother continued to throw up. “I think we should take her to the hospital,” I said. I did not want to call an ambulance as that would take a long time (the nearest one was at least eight miles away).

  We walked her slowly out to my dad’s Ford, and my wife and sister made her comfortable in the back seat. I got behind the wheel and headed down our long driveway to the road. We lived deep in the middle of nowhere (in 2002, our road still wasn’t wired for cable TV).

  As I reached the end of the driveway, I had a quick decision to make: Do I take her to the nearest hospital—or do I take her to the better hospital? The nearest hospital was in a small town twenty-three miles to the north. The better hospital, the best in northern Michigan, was in the opposite direction, forty-five miles away, twice the drive. So there was the dilemma. Your mother is seriously ill, you don’t know why, but it doesn’t look good. Do you get her help immediately or, if she’s much worse than even you realize, do you drive the longer distance and end up with a better array of doctors and facilities available?

  What would you do? You’d get her to the quickest hospital, right? Right? That’s what I did. I chose the nearest hospital.

  I got there in record time—less than twenty minutes—and we took her in, told them the problem, and they saw to her right away. There was only one doctor on duty, but it wasn’t long before he looked at her.

  “It seems that her intestinal tract is blocked. We’re going to take some X-rays.” And, sure enough, the X-rays confirmed the doctor’s suspicions.

  They gave her liquids that they said should help. It didn’t. They gave her an IV and they said that should do the trick. It didn’t. While waiting to see which procedure would get the expected results and then seeing no results, the clock had peeled away the hours; it was well past midnight.

  “OK,” said the doctor finally. “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to give her a series of four or five enemas and keep her overnight. This should work and she should be able to go home tomorrow.”

  We went with her to the room they had given her and we stayed until they were ready to start the enema procedures. At that point the nurse suggested, “It’s almost three a.m.—why don’t you go get some sleep and come back in the morning?”

  Our mother agreed. “Take your father home and let him get some rest. I’ll be fine. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  For reasons we could never later explain to ourselves, we took her advice and, amazingly—shockingly—left her alone there in this tiny hospital. We went home and crashed quickly—and just as quickly we were awoken a few hours later.

  “Is this Michael Moore?” said the voice on the phone. “This is Dr. Calkins, the surgeon here at the hospital. The enemas didn’t work on your mother, and she’s taken a turn. We need to operate. How soon can you be here?”

  In less than twenty minutes we were there. Mom looked embarrassed and sorry to be putting everyone out for the trouble she was causing. “Did you get some sleep?” was all that was on her mind.

  “Don’t worry about us,” I said. “How are you doing?”

  “Well, nothing seems to be working. They want to operate,” she said with a weak voice.

  I took the doctor aside and asked him to explain to me what was going on.

&nb
sp; “Your mother’s intestines are shot,” he said matter-of-factly. “We will more than likely need to take a piece of them out.”

  “Are you sure that’s necessary?”

  “If we don’t get in there, she could go into septic shock. The bacteria trapped in there may have already seeped through the lining of her intestine. This is a common procedure; I’ve done many of them. Shouldn’t take more than an hour or two. She should be fine.”

  “Fine? How many of these did you say you have done?”

  “I do one or two a year—and I’ve been doing this for thirty-some years. As it is now, I’m all you got ’cause I’m the only one here—and I think we should get going.”

  We went back in the room and the nurse brought in some paperwork for my dad to sign. She then asked my mother to sign the consent form.

  “Would you sign it for me, Frank?” she asked my dad.

  He took the clipboard and signed it, slowly. We squeezed my mom’s hand and told her everything was going to be OK. She assured us everything was going to be OK. I fought hard not to cry. They took her away and we went to the lounge to wait for the hour or two.

  Four hours later the surgeon had not come out, and a pall fell over the room. Whatever the news was, it wasn’t going to be good.

  Finally, the doctor appeared.

  “I think it went well,” he said. “She’s recovering fine now. We had to remove about a foot of her intestine. I’d say the chances for a full recovery are about 90 percent.”

  Whew. You know how many times you’ve seen that doctor come through those doors—a thousand times—on TV shows and in the movies and it’s rarely good news. He explained to us that she will probably have to stay in the hospital for the better part of the week. He didn’t see any seepage through the intestinal lining and her vital signs were all good. In fact, we could see her within the hour as soon as she woke up.

  We thanked the surgeon and, with a sense of relief, headed back to the intensive care unit. Well, there was no “unit” or ward at this hospital. They had a small ICU area with two rooms. That was fine, just fine. She was OK!

  When we went into our mother’s room, she was hooked up to all the standard monitors and IV tubes, but she was awake and alert and very happy to see us.

  “Here I am,” she said, stating the obvious. I liked hearing that: first person, present tense.

  “Well, the doctor says you made it through with flying colors!” I said to her, as I pulled up a chair beside the bed. My sister and wife and father were equally upbeat in their assessments of her condition.

  “You’re gonna be OK, Mom,” Veronica said, giving her a kiss on her forehead. “In fact, you look pretty chipper there!”

  Our only concern until this point had been the effects of putting such an elderly person under sedation. We had known of friends with not-good stories of what happened to their parents when knocked out with anesthesia. Sometimes all their memory didn’t return, at least not right away. I decided to give her a pop quiz.

  “Hey Mom—you know what day this is?”

  “Sure,” she said, “it’s Sunday.”

  “Where did you and Dad go on your honeymoon?”

  “New York. Boston. Albany.” (I know. Albany. Don’t ask.)

  And now for the Final Jeopardy question. This was a family that loved to go to the movies.

  “Where did you first see High Noon?”

  “Cheboygan, Michigan. Nineteen fifty-two!” she responded without missing a beat. Wow. Crisis averted, roll credits!

  Everyone pulled up a chair, and we spent the next few hours talking about the good times and growing up and Dr. Wall and the time he was “blocked” just before her wedding and how he too had to go to the hospital and almost didn’t make it. Never had discussions about enemas been so heartening.

  The doctor and nurses on call would occasionally come in to check on her, change the IV bags, inspect the area where the surgery took place. She would doze off now and then, her body wanting to restore itself after the shock of surgery.

  By 9:00 p.m. it was decided that we would take shifts and stay with her for as long as she was going to be in the hospital. I offered to take the first shift until the morning. Veronica and my wife took Dad and the kids back to the house. I got comfortable with a book and my ever-present legal pad, sketching out the final fixes I wanted to make to my film before its release in the fall.

  Every now and then my mother would wake up and we would talk.

  “I’m very lucky to have the family I have,” she said.

  “We’re very lucky to have you,” I told her, patting a lukewarm washcloth on her face like she would do for us, so many years ago.

  “I’m thirsty,” she said. She was not allowed to have any food or liquids, not even water, during these first twenty-four hours. All we could do was to let her suck on a little Q-tip that had a tiny moist sponge on its head. I held one up to her lips, and she sucked on it with some desperation.

  “I’m parched.” I smiled. No one said “parched” in this century or the last.

  “Lemme do this,” I said, as I took another one and rubbed it around her lips. Like an infant looking for its mother’s nipple, she grabbed at the little stick with her mouth, her tongue, her teeth, wanting more, more.

  “Thirsty.”

  “I think that’s all we can do for now, Mom. I’ll just sit here with you and we’ll do it again in a little bit.”

  I sat in the chair next to her bed and got comfortable.

  “Here,” she said, as she lifted her head off her pillows and tried to reach for one of them. “Take one of my pillows.”

  I could not believe, in the state she was in, that she was worrying about me not having a pillow. And that even in her worst suffering, her instincts were still to be a mother, to look out for her son, to make sure he was OK, to allow him to fall asleep, to sleep peacefully and in comfort. On her pillow.

  “That’s OK, Mom,” I said with a smile, trying to contain a laugh. “I don’t need a pillow. You keep it.” I arranged the pillow back in place, and her head now nestled in it comfortably.

  “I love my kids. I have good children,” she said with a sweet, faint smile.

  I put my hand on her face and gently combed her hair back with my fingers.

  “We love you, too, Mom.” I felt lucky to have her as my mother.

  A moment later the night nurse came in with an aide and said that she needed to give my mother some potassium in her medicine bag and change the top sheet of the bed. For my mother’s modesty and privacy, she suggested that maybe I could “just step out for a few minutes.” The nurse had hair fashioned into a long braid that extended down her back, the kind I guess you might see in a religious community. Her glasses were like something from the late seventies, and they framed a face that seemed frozen in time.

  I left the room and went out in the hallway to wait. It wasn’t long before I heard sheer human panic.

  “No—move her over. There! Stop! We’ve got a problem!”

  I rushed back into the room to see my mother in what I later learned was a cardiac arrest. The nurse was panicked and confused and I suggested we get the doctor down here NOW.

  “Yes, right.” She picked up the intercom phone and paged the lone doctor in the ER.

  My mother was struggling to breathe—gasping, gasping, gasping, her eyes locked on to mine as if to say, Please help me!

  “Everything’s going to be OK, Mom, hang in there!”

  I turned to the nurse and demanded action. “We need the doctor in here now! Do I have to go get him?”

  The doctor walked in and immediately saw what the problem was. “She needs to breathe! Where is the respirator?”

  The little ICU at this small-town hospital did not have a respirator machine in the unit at that moment.

  “Grab the portable!” the doctor shouted. The nurse went and got a small plastic device that she tore out of a plastic bag, then tried to insert it in my mother’s mouth. She had it ups
ide down.

  “Here, give it to me!” the doctor demanded. He took it from her, inserted it into my mother’s mouth, placing the tube squarely down her throat. “Here, pump it like this!”

  Jesus, oh Jesus, what the fuck was going on? He was having to show a nurse how to bring air into a patient’s lungs? This was madness. I wanted to jump in, help, do something, do CPR, something, ANYTHING, please God this isn’t happening!

  While the nurse pumped, the doctor told the aide to go down to the ER and get the hospital’s lone ventilator. He worked on my mother, gave her a shot of something, massaged something, and the only good news in this moment was that the heart monitor never went dead, never flatlined. The heart was still beating, there was oxygen getting into the blood.

  I picked up my phone and called the house. My sister answered.

  “I think you guys better get here now,” I said, trying to disguise my panic. “Something’s happened. Don’t kill yourself getting here. She’s alive. But struggling bad. Come now!”

  The ventilator arrived with another nurse, and the doctor wasted no time jamming the hose straight down my mother’s throat. Her eyes were no longer on mine. They were open, frozen, looking straight up and seemingly unaware of what was happening to her. At that moment a bolt of lightning struck the hospital and it lit up the room. I had not noticed that for the past fifteen minutes a thunderstorm had rolled in and was now in full fury. Deafeningly close thunder exploded, and the lightning continued to flash into the unit. I looked at the clock: 12:45 a.m. For some reason, with all that was going on, it occurred to me that I was born at 12:45 (but in the p.m.). How did I know this? For every year of my adult life, no matter where I was, at exactly 12:45 p.m., my mother would call me to tell me this was the moment she gave birth to me. Now, here I was, crumbling inside, helpless and lost, feeble and useless and impotent in this most critical moment where I was responsible for giving her life, or at least saving it. The voice inside my head kept pounding: YOU made the wrong decision! Yes, I had chosen the closest hospital, not the better hospital where I was certain I would not be witnessing a Mack Sennett version of intensive care where the Keystone Cops finally find the only ventilator in the mop closet and wheel it out, asking each other if they know how this newfangled contraption works. I was sick, sick, and I wanted to throw up.