The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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I got a message a few days ago from a friend’s wife that my buddy was in the hospital and not doing very well, maybe I ought to hustle down there before it was too late. So I dropped what I was doing, jumped in the jalopy and headed south to the hospital where I worked graveyard shift weekends for ten long years back in the 80’s. If you want to hop a time machine, this is one way to do it. That Pain Motel was small back when I started, had an ER with maybe 4 or 5 rooms that burned up in a fire about 1982, then had one with about 10 but now sports 70 or so. Big city hospital.

I parked in the multi-story garage, got my temperature checked at the front door, followed signage to one of the two 8 story towers that now engulf my old haunts, took an elevator up to what they euphemistically called the End of Life Wing, got my buddy’s room number at the nurses’ station and went to the end of the hall to see him. His son was coming out of his room and we introduced ourselves. He said he had to step out a few minutes, that Dad was in a coma, had been for the past two days, but go on in, he might wake up any moment. Disappointed that I got there too late to find my pal conscious, I went in and sat down. After a few long minutes where I never saw a muscle twitch or a nostril hair ruffle, I finally put my hand on his forehead to check for temperature.

Now, I’m no doctor and I don’t play one on TV, but I did work in that hospital for 10 years so when I tell you he was dead, you can be pretty sure he was. There were no monitors attached to see if it had gone flatline, but this was, after all, the End of Life Wing. I stayed awhile longer, said my piece just in case and headed out. His son was exiting the elevator as I was entering. ‘You leaving already?’ he asked. ‘Yeah, kind of a poor conversation,’ I said. ‘Stick around, he might wake up any minute.’

I’m not entirely immune to the idea of a miracle. Like I said, I worked there ten years and saw plenty of death and dying and okay, once in a blue moon someone come back to life in one of our Code Red drills in the ER. You get inured to pain, blood, horror, suffering and death working there. You see people who should have died but didn’t and you see folks who died when they shouldn’t have. My friend’s dying was no surprise, just a bit early and unannounced. I didn’t say to his kid his dad was gone and he ain’t coming back. Hope isn’t a fool’s errand, but then again, there always came a time when we stopped CPR and quit putting the paddles to the patient. The doc sometimes would ask us assembled in the room if anyone had any ideas. We never did. And no one ever said, let’s stick around, the patient might wake up any minute. Then again, the patient was never our father.

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