AWho’s Minding the Store?
A
Pam and I moved to Annapolis shortly after we got married so I could look for work in Washington. I had started out to be a journalist, but by the time Pam and I had gotten together, I’d sunk to working for politicians.
We’d caught the tail end of the era when Annapolis was still a relatively small town, a very pleasant place to live where waterman worked the Chesapeake Bay for crabs and oysters, and you might run into the mayor while standing in line at the post office.
I managed to get a job in DC working for a U.S. Senator and Pam began work as a nurse at the local hospital. We had a little condo, and a little boat, and on weekends we’d sail out Back Creek toward to the Naval Academy or the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.
But a rapid and massive spurt of growth started in Annapolis. Anne Arundel Hospital went from being a small community affair located downtown (where you could walk to work on a nice spring day) to a giant medical center with a sprawling campus on the edge of town. In addition to handling the explosion in the local population, the new facility was picking up overflow from neighboring counties where the hospitals had been overwhelmed. And it was no longer much fun to work there if you were a nurse. Pam started spending more time filling out forms then she did caring for patients.
The nurses Pam worked with complained that there was no place nearby to buy uniforms. These gals had a choice between driving to inner city Baltimore or into DC every time they needed a new outfit — as if they weren’t already risking their lives everyday at work.
We spent a couple of weekends scouting out locations and by sheer dumb luck found a vacant store would turn out to be ideally situated for such a purpose. All of Pam’s retirement money from her years as a nurse in Florida went into the enterprise. We rented the place and purchased just enough goods to open for business. At first, we both worked the store part time and with helpers, but within a few years we were both able to quit our other jobs and live by working our own business. We worked a lot and we weren’t getting rich, but we owned our own business. We drove nice cars and we dined out when we felt like it. We had Sushi a few times.
Now the shop was dark and closed.
∞
And now Kawasaki Sushi was closing up too. So, fortified by rice wine, I made my way back to the hospital and started making phone calls to Pam’s relatives as I waited for the surgeons to announce their verdict.
“How’d it go?” Pam’s mother asked from Florida, on the other end of my pay phone in the Hopkins lobby. She was referring to the ablation procedure.
“Not so good,” I said and I explained about the “complication.” In the sharp intake of breath you could hear the bottom drop out. “She’s OK,” I said. I told her that Pam was undergoing surgery right now to repair the mitral valve. She asked if she should book a flight and come up. I said I would if I were you. “Don’t worry,” I told her.
Maybe I should have told her to sit tight for now, there’s no hurry. Summoning the relatives was the equivalent of breaking the fire alarm glass in case of emergency; certainly not to be done lightly. But it was one of the things I was pondering back there at the sushi bar. Between courses of futomaki, I kept going over the demeanor of the players involved, especially the surgeons. While they affected confidence on the surface, it was clear from watching them communicate with each other that they were far from certain they could fix Pam’s broken heart in time to head off grim scenarios.
I was starting to get a bad feeling about the whole thing.
It was during the next call that I found about the Iron Law of School Bus Driving, which is this: You never back up – NEVER.
So when the foul mouthed fishwife who lived across the street got into a Mexican standoff on a narrow road with a rookie driver from a rival company and let fly most of her repertoire in front of the kiddies, her contract with the Marlowe Brothers School Bus Company was summarily terminated – never mind that she was in the right.
Now I had someone to look after our store while the siege was on up at Hopkins. I called her Doris, and she chain smoked generic light 100’s, but you could trust her to open and close the store and sit behind the register. Probably.
∞
By and by Dr. David Yuh came to the waiting room. I’d never met the man before.
He said Pam had made it through O.K. He couldn’t repair her mitral valve, he had to replace that, but she’d come through it OK and I’d get to see her soon enough—and by the way, they went ahead and took out her pacemaker and all of the leads, it wasn’t doing any good anyway.
Pam first made Dr. Yuh’s acquaintance when he applied a bone saw to her chest. They never did shake hands. He seemed like a decent guy, friendly enough in a formal way. He said they like to get open heart patients off the ventilator on the same day as surgery, and the patient should be out of bed by the second day.
I got to see her for a few minutes post-op. Although they do a good job of trying to prepare you for what someone looks like just after open heart surgery, that’s really not possible. Judging by the puffed-up head on the pillow, this person you laid eyes on just a matter of hours ago seems to have tripled in weight. Her lower face is mostly covered by the breathing tube apparatus and her eyes dart about like those of a trapped animal.
So what do you say? Everything’s OK. The worst is over. You came through it fine. You hold her hand and look into her eyes and give smooth reassurances.
