ONE SMALL HITCH

I've been to plenty of hospital waiting rooms, but I've never seen anything quite like the Cardiac ICU down in the Houston Medical Center. This place is more like a campground than a waiting room. Since everyone who has heart surgery stays in ICU for a while first, and doesn't get assigned a room right away, the families have nowhere else to go between the few designated visiting times - especially if they are from out of town. Each clan stakes claim to a particular cluster of chairs, rearranges them to suit their purposes, and builds a temporary nesting place.

The most interesting group today was a large middle eastern family whose patriarch was having a quadruple bypass. There was always at least a dozen family members there at any given time, but it was never the same ones - the group was constantly in flux. Each new group arrived bearing sustenance, so it had the appearance of a continuous feast. The older women wore black head-scarves and murmurred never ending prayers while fingering their worry beads. The younger women chased small children around, served food and fetched coffee for everyone else. Things got a little uncomfortable, at least for me, when a quartet of black gentlemen from the Salvation Army came in to sing for us, then tried to get us all to form a big prayer circle with a lot of evangelical chanting going on. The Muslims and I declined to join them. It's not that I'm against prayer - I'd been at it non-stop for weeks. It's just that I'm not overly fond of turning it into a big show.

Though John's surgery had ended around noon, I didn't get to see him until the 2:00 visiting session. That first glimpse was tough: tubes coming out of every orifice, plus his neck and chest; mouth hanging slack; eyes barely open and rolled back. In spite of appearances, they assured me that he was doing extremely well, and they gave him something to begin waking him up as I left. A short while later they came out to inform me that we'd run into a small hitch. It seems his trachea is so narrow that they had a devil of a time getting even the smallest size tube down it to start with, and now it was swolen from the abuse. They feared that if they removed it now, and for some reason he ran into trouble and needed it again, they would never be able to reinsert it. Of course, as soon as he began to wake up, he started fighting it. So, they decided the best plan was to put him back to sleep, give him steroids to reduce the swelling, and try again tomorrow.

I was crushed not to be able to see those puppy dog eyes before I left, and that he never even knew I was there all day, but grateful that he was doing so well otherwise. As I sat there listening to the stories unfold around me, I realized that not everyone was so fortunate. A couple of groups had been haunting this room for weeks, and all were devasted this morning to learn that the 24 year old daughter of one group had lost her battle during the night. I promise you, I am counting my blessings. Still, I just wish that, when I went in for my next visit at six, the nurse had not felt compelled to tell me about the tears in John's eyes and the fear on his face, when they told him they needed to put him back to sleep for a while longer.