2017

I’m sitting at my desk when the phone rings. A blue jay is feeding her baby in the coral tree outside my window. She is determined and direct, pecking her catch in gentle spurts into the little bird’s gaping beak. The fledgling squawks hoarsely for more. I pick up the phone.

It’s my son’s oncologist. My heart no longer jumps into my throat when I hear his voice; we speak frequently now, comanaging my son’s leukemia–a case that is proving anything but ordinary. I have no idea why he is calling today.

My 72-year-old dad is in neurologic intensive care in a strange hospital in a strange city far from his home and from mine. In the midst of my fully-booked morning of seeing patients, I am trying to reach my diminutive stepmother on the cell phone that she does not know how to program to hear her layperson’s interpretation of what the strange doctors are telling her.

Unable to get through to my step-mother, I step into the next exam room to see Mr. P, a 72-year-old man with stable coronary disease and gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). He has difficulty hearing and is here with his protective wife for a routine checkup.

The rescue squad was heading, fast, for the hospital with a patient on board. Needing help, they picked me up at my office en route.

It was a pleasant, warming spring day in the North Country. There was still plenty of snow in the mountains, but hikers were up there already. Some, from what we called “the flatlands,” wore sneakers. She shouldn’t have. She slipped. She fell.

The phone call came just as Dad and I had finished lunch and were about to enjoy some window-shopping at the mall. It was the nursing home informing us that Ma had again fallen out of bed and was again being taken by ambulance to a nearby emergency room.

It is 1959; it’s my first night on duty as a medical resident at a VA hospital. I am called to the ER.

I enter the ER where the nurse, appearing frightened and perplexed, is talking on the phone. She places her tremulous hand over the receiver and says to me, “It’s a Korean war veteran. He thinks he’s in action and is speaking to his command installation and is screaming for more back-up, more shelling. We are trying to trace the call.”

She hands me the phone.