Who Is This Man I Just Met?

My dad just had one of these surgically implanted in his chest.

He woke up in the middle of the night a few weeks ago, gasping and choking. They took him to the hospital. He had an arrythmia -- his heart was beating too quickly to pump any blood. His heart was beating 240 times per second. His body was starved for oxygen. They gave him the paddles. They saved his life.

See, several years ago my dad had chemotherapy to treat a lymphoma in his stomach. They gave him the maximum recommended lifetime dose of a particular drug. Then, a few years later, the cancer returned, this time in his lymph nodes.

The oncologist, whether through error or indifference, administered more of the same chemotherapy drug that he'd already had the lifetime recommended dose of.

With the second dose, the risk of irreversible heart damage increased exponentially. My dad developed congestive heart failure -- he, who'd had a heart like an ox, working incessantly even into his 70s.

He became short of breath. He had to take pills. He lost his FAA medical certification and thus, his pilot's license. My parents sued and got a malpractice settlement from the oncologist. Money that didn't change the fact that a few weeks ago, my dad woke up in the night, gasping and choking.

Now, he's got the defibrillator implanted. If his heart rhythm goes haywire again, this device will sense it and deliver the shock to 'reset' the heartbeat. It's like having paramedics with paddles, just waiting on standby in one's chest cavity.

There's no telling if the defibrillator will ever be called into action. He's taking pills to treat the arrythmia -- pills whose side effects include possible thyroid, liver and lung damage -- to prevent ever needing a shock, hopefully. But there still exists significant risk.

What it means pragmatically is that he will have to have checkups every few months for the rest of his life. Currently, he can't drive for at least several months until the doctors determine that his condition is stable. He owns a garage, and he can't drive. He was repairing trucks for the British Army in Palestine during World War II, and he can't drive. He once leapt back and forth from a jeep to a tractor, driving them both across 100 miles of Syrian farmland, and now he can't drive.

They had to transfer him to a hospital in L.A. to do the implantation, so I was the family member closest to him. I showed up early at the hospital and found his room. They'd transferred him from the Fontana hospital the night before, taken him from his family to a place he'd never been in preparation for a procedure that he was very nervous about.

When I walked through the door, his sunken cheeks, drizzled with two weeks' worth of white beard, lifted in a smile. "There's my boy," he told the nurse. "This is my son David." And his voice cracked, and he reached for me, and I had never heard him cry before.

My mom had been very upset that the hospital hadn't taken his diabetes into consideration when providing meals. It had been a point of pride for him to control his blood sugar with diet and exercise. Lying in bed, day after day, had driven his blood sugar dangerously high. They gave him insulin for the first time. He listened to the nurse read off his blood sugar readings. "I've never had it this high," he said. "Unbelieveable."

He had some pretty severe mood swings. The doctor wanted to put him on antidepressants. I declined. I was determined to be his antidepressant, myself.

He wanted to know if I was going to church. I knew it would set him so at ease if I was. I didn't say anything. "You should find a church. Lots of good churches out there," he said.

We got to talking about family. "Like to see you settle down," Dad said. "Get a Master's, while you've got the chance. Have some security."

My only brother has no biological children, although he has one adopted son. My sisters have kids with different last names.

Dad got kind of quiet. "I'd like to see an [our last name] grandchild before I die."

He lay in that hospital bed, listening to doctor after doctor deliver their own brand of shackles: the appointments; the medicines, with possible side effects. At first he was hopeful that with the defibrillator installed, he'd be able to reapply for his pilot's license. Now, he can't even drive.

Watching his face fall with every succesive pronouncement, I felt as if my own heart was failing. I read all the forms and pamphlets. I pestered the nurses to remove the IVs, to allow him to dress, to give him the dignity of walking down the hall instead of being pushed in a wheelchair like an invalid. Hospital policy dictates that discharged patients must ride in wheelchairs, to protect the hospital from lawsuits if they fall on their way out. I refused this. My dad had been off his feet long enough.

I helped him dress. I pulled on his socks and tied his shoes. I helped him pull on his sweater. He can't move his left arm above his head for eight weeks, while the surgery heals. His hands were purple from bruising where they'd stuck IV needle after IV needle.

He walked slowly down the hall, face gently downed with beard, his glasses off, shuffling a bit, hands clasped, thin from the half-eaten meals. For once, without the ubiquitous baseball cap and toothpick. He looked so different. So ... beaten.

I drove him home to San Bernardino during rush hour. I called in sick to work. We took a shortcut that wasn't very short. I drove more carefully than I think I ever have.

The first sign that I knew he was going to be okay was when he began to complain about my driving. "Stay in this lane," he said. "Let them pass you, if they want to pass you. Don't go too fast. You don't want to get a ticket."

I called him the next day and his voice came through the phone vigorously, strong and quick. I smiled. I asked him how he was, although I could already tell.

"I'm fine, dad," he said. He has a strange, Arabic custom of calling me dad instead of son. "How are you? Doing good? How's that car? You checking water and oil? Come by sometime during the day, I'll have Juan change the oil for you."

Take an entire day, drive hours out of my way for an oil change I could get for $19.95 at Jiffy Lube?

He's my dad. I'm there.

Good To Know

In my opinion, chocolate-dipped beef jerky was a success. Not quite a resounding success, but a triumph of ingenuity over logic all the same.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for milk chocolate and cheddar cheese.

In this, as in so many of life's little mysteries, I was wrong.

Hearing Is Believing

In three weeks, Nikki and I will be moving to a new, bigger, better place in West L.A. This will reduce her commute by about 50%. It will reduce my commute by about -100%.

So now comes the unpleasant prospect of sitting idly on the 405, fighting through canyon traffic on one of the four roads that lead over the hill from L.A. to the Valley, losing radio reception, and letting the quiet rumbling of my diesel lull me into another world. I have to be at work at 6pm, although typically I try to arrive by 5 so my drive happens in the 4:00 hour instead of later. With the new place, for appreciable time savings I’d have to leave in about the 2:00 hour. Which leaves me with time to kill.

The Buena Vista branch of the Burbank Public Library has become my friend. It’s two blocks from work and it has lots of quiet nooks with plugs for one’s laptop. Even the lady who glared at me, chomping deafeningly on cough drops, and then admonished me for the volume of my cell phone couldn’t dampen my spirits. Pity there aren’t more books there.

A much wider selection can be found at the Central branch, down the road a few miles. The Central branch is the kind of library you dreaded going to back in the days when you couldn’t research a term paper from your computer. The librarians are all dough-faced old ladies or mildly retarded teenagers with faces like a bulldog who’s been kicked by a brick. The bathroom is the kind of place I made a mental note of in case I need a dingy, dismal scene for some future movie. The place reeks of kid sweat and boredom.

I decided I’d like to read more by Chuck Palahniuk, so I look him up whenever I’m at the Buena Vista branch. Everything’s always checked out. Until the other day, when I found that the Central branch had an audiorecording of his book Choke.

So I trooped down to the Central branch, held my breath and found the audiobook section. Choke was a Book On CD. The Books On CD shelf was sandwiched between classical music CDs and the Mack Bolan: Executioner section of Books On Tape. There were all of about twelve titles, most of them things like How to Organize Your Existence. I had to ask for Choke. It had just been returned and was still by the circulation desk.

“What’s this about?” asked Dough-Face #6.
“Pretty popular, eh?” I said.
“I was just curious. There’s no summary or anything of it anywhere.”
I shrugged. “I don’t really know the plot. It’s by the author of Fight Club.”
“Ah,” she said, as if that explained everything, and yet nothing.

I thought maybe I could listen to it while doing something boring at work, or while getting dressed at home or something. It’s seven hours long. It languished in my car for a few days. I found myself wishing I had an iPod so I could listen to it in the car.

Then it struck me. At a red light I fired up my laptop. Started it playing. Turned down the screen brightness to save the battery. I’d never heard a book on tape. I didn’t know what to expect.

Music greeted me. A deep announcer’s voice. “Random House Audible presents Choke, by Chuck Palahniuk,” the voice said. It pronounced it PAL-uh-nuk. “Read by the author.”

Was this creepy, actor’s baritone the voice of the author? No, I discovered. Chuck Palahniuk had a vaguely nowhere accent and an even cadence that tended to make sentences sound sort of inquisitive. He read his work without much of the inflection that an actor would bring to the stage. His rhythms brought something more, perhaps, to the text than the way they probably appeared on the page, than the way I would have read them.

Occasionally he stumbled. He stopped for a breath before a nine-syllable medical term. He got a few steps ahead of himself sometimes, and broke the cadence of a sentence. It was nice. It was like he was Homer or something, telling the story around a fire, dredging it verbatim from perfected memory, breezing through vulgarities with the detachment of penance after confession.

When I got to work, I had a peculiar feeling like I’d just been at that red light, that I didn’t remember the rest of the drive. I’d been perfectly alert; my driving hadn’t suffered. But I think I found a way to make that impending commute tolerable.