Live Like You Were Dying Read online

  A nurse in a white jacket appeared from behind a curtain, and I saw a beige-colored machine attached to the tube that snaked into my mouth. The woman smiled and nodded at Heather. “He’s coming around the bend now.”

  My words were slow in forming and fought against the tube that filled my throat. Heather placed her hand lightly against my arm. “You were in a fall at the mill,” she said in a slow, steady pace. “You had blood in your lungs. Your whole right side was just solid-white on the X-ray. They had to go in and put in a chest tube . . . but don’t worry about all that now. You just rest. Don’t try to talk. Just rest. There will be plenty of time for talking.”

  I tried to lift my hand to brush the hair from the side of her face. It was my wife’s face that I wanted to see now more than ever. But the darkness wouldn’t let me.

  Lucky, survivor, blessed—these were just a few of the words that people used to describe my experience. A parade of doctors offered words like tamponade and other hogwash-sounding terms to describe what had happened to me. “Blood on the lungs” remained the easiest way to understand how close I’d come to cheating death. A few more minutes of waiting for the paramedics, and most likely I’d have drowned in my own blood.

  When I came off the ventilator three days later, I was moved to a private room. A nurse with pink lipstick painted over thin lips delivered cards from family back in my hometown of Choctaw, Georgia. Here, though, only the teachers who worked with Heather—and one next-door neighbor—took notice of my accident. That’s when I started realizing how few people in this big city knew me.

  My grandmother, Grand Vestal, sent a card covered in wildflowers that she had painted herself, using the flowers that grew in her pasture as inspiration. She signed the card from both her and my father. Even though my father was her son-in-law, she took care of the emotional side of his business just like my mother always had.

  “I couldn’t get satisfied until I heard your voice,” my grandmother said through the phone that Heather held up to my ear. Her words hazed my mind until all I could picture were the gray braided pigtails that hung low around her shoulders and the way her earth-stained face would tighten whenever she was concerned. My grandmother was the keeper of my childhood memories, of days spent learning how to reap food from the soil that had first belonged to her Creek Indian people.

  “Don’t worry about me, Grand Vestal. I’m okay, really,” I said, trying to sound as lighthearted as possible. But something wouldn’t let me believe that everything would be okay. Carefree days at my grandmother’s were tucked too far away in the back of my mind. Time and responsibilities had shoved them inside a vault whose combination I no longer seemed to know. Now the projects that I’d left behind at the paper mill hindered me as much as the bandages around my chest.

  Jay Beckett and the rest of the gang from the construction company sent over a fruit basket that filled every inch of the portable tray table. “We can’t have this now,” the pink-lipsticked nurse said as she moved the basket from where the delivery person had placed it, clucking her tongue like a disapproving mother hen. “We need to keep gifts off of this table. We have to keep a place for our meals, don’t we?” By the second day, her use of the word we wore my nerves down to the quick.

  But the day that I was able to sit up in bed, the real gift that I’d been waiting for arrived. My daughter, Malley, stood in front of Heather with her arms folded across her stomach, only moving them once to push the auburn hair from her eyes. Her eyes were as green as my own, and every time I looked into them, I saw the best part of me. Heather nudged her forward slightly, but it was only when I reached out my arm to Malley that she locked ahold of me until my chest ached. I could only imagine what it must have been like for my twelve-year-old baby to toy with the idea of losing her daddy. Holding her and feeling the beat of her heart against my own, I could only relate by knowing how painful it was to watch my own mama die of pancreatic cancer two years before. I guess whether you’re twelve or thirty-nine, the pain and fear that come with loss sting just the same.

  When my family doctor came in carrying my ever-growing medical file, Malley was sitting in the chair beside me. We’d been playing a match on the new electronic tennis game that she had bought. A man no older than myself, the doctor had a soul better suited for a man my father’s age. His smile was slanted and his eyes tired.

  “When am I going to be able to check out?” I asked. “Did you know that there are 427 specks on that ceiling tile? Now, that shows you how bad this place is wearing on me.” The doctor rubbed his chin and looked at Heather. “He’s back kicking, I see.”

  Heather laughed and winked at Malley. “Now you see why we want him to stay in here as long as possible.”

  It hurt when I laughed, so I held it in and felt the blood rush to my face. Malley laughed harder and pointed at me. “Look at him. He’s getting bashful.”

  As soon as the laughter faded, the doctor rose up on his toes and coughed. “No, we’ll have you out of here in no time. First I want you to have another X-ray. You know, to make sure you’re all clear of the blood. For once it’ll be a relief just to see three cracked ribs.”

  Relief never came. The same doctor now stood over me, pointing to the new X-rays on the lighted screen behind my hospital bed. I could only hear his words and watch Heather’s reaction as she gripped her necklace tighter. “It’s just happenstance that we found it,” the doctor said. A single white spot remained on the screen.

  “A smudge,” I first suggested, but all Heather did was look down and offer a smile as tight as the nurse who cared for me. Later I studied the X-rays on my own and gazed at the foreign white object on the lung pocket outlined before me. While the doctor talked of specialists and second opinions, I stared at the spot, trying to will it away, to force the smudge from the screen and away from my life.

  This isn’t me, I kept thinking. During hunting season I can outrace a fox and stay squatting in a tree stand for hours on end without even a single muscle cramping. I can climb sixty-foot towers at work and never lose my breath. The smudge on the black celluloid had to be nothing more than somebody’s fingerprint. A mistake most likely caused when the X-ray was processed. “Sugar Boy, just dismiss it from your mind with a good old belly laugh,” I heard my grandmother call out from the brightest corners of my mind. Her mind-over-matter techniques had been freely dispensed throughout the years. Time and time again her wisdom reigned over any advice I’d ever gotten from a licensed doctor. Even so, my mind couldn’t talk my fingers out of lightly touching the thick bandages, the place of shelter for the white smudge that they claimed lived within me. I fought the image of the smudge setting up camp inside my lung. Shooing away the feeling of depression, I forced myself to follow my grandmother’s prescription.

  On my last night in the hospital, I stared out my window at the parking-lot lights, shining down like imitation stars. The real stars were what I longed to see. Self-pity swarmed around my room. Swatting back, I could almost hear Grand Vestal’s raspy voice reminding me that laughter is the best medicine for a troubled soul. So when the dinner tray was placed before me, I prepared the ingredients for my home remedy. remedy.

  An hour later, a nurse’s aid entered. “You didn’t eat your food,” she said and noted something on a card.

  “No ma’am, I think I’ll just keep this apple juice. I might get thirsty later in the night.”

  The next morning I placed the unopened container of apple juice under the sheets. The nurse with the pink lipstick entered the room with her usual singsong welcome. “And how are we doing this morning? Did we have a restful night?” She asked the questions without so much as looking up from her clipboard.

  “Awful,” I replied.

  “Well, that’s nice. We need our rest. Now, you know the routine: it’s sample time,” she said, shaking the plastic cup in the air. “Do we need help getting to the bathroom this morning?”

  I never answered but instead shook my head, if only to make her look
up from the clipboard. “Now, are you sure? We wouldn’t want a fall.”

  Nodding, I smiled, and she managed to smile too, albeit a forced one. “Well, if we start feeling lightheaded, just pull on the safety string in the bathroom. I’ll be right outside the door.”

  After she left I opened the container of apple juice and poured it into the sample container. The nurse came back into the room wearing plastic gloves and carrying a red marker. Before she could remove the container from the tray table, I touched the side of my head and moaned.

  “Are we having some pain? On a scale of one to ten, rate it.”

  “No, I just . . . I think I got sort of woozy using the bathroom. Everything started spinning around, and my mouth got all dry.”

  The nurse clucked her tongue and leaned down closer. The pen attached to a string around her neck swung in circles.

  “Where am I?” I asked in a half-voice, half-moan sort of way.

  She clapped her hands close to my face and then moved closer until the smell of her hairspray almost overpowered me. “We’re in the hospital. Now, do we know our name?” “Thirsty,” I moaned.

  “What? Speak up.”

  “Thirsty,” I said again.

  Before she could move completely away from me, I snatched the sample container from the tray table and gulped it down right in front of her.

  By now she was literally having a running fit, jogging in place and waving her hands. “No, no!” she said in a high-pitched screech. “No, no . . . That’s our . . . that’s our sample.” Openmouthed, she looked around the room, as if a security camera might have captured her momentary lack of control, and then fled from the room faster than I ever thought she could move.

  Leaning against the pillows, I laughed an old-fashioned howl and ignored the pain. For the first time since being admitted to the hospital, I finally felt stronger than the fear of the unknown.

  Chapter Three

  After seven days of what felt like hard time, I was released from the hospital. I’d never been so grateful for anything in all my life.

  “Daisies,” I said, pointing to a bunch of wildflowers growing around a stop sign near the entrance of our neighborhood.

  “What?” Heather asked, leaning over the car console, closer to me.

  “I never noticed those daisies before,” I said.

  Turning the car to the shoulder of the road, she got out and plucked two of the flowers. Back inside, she handed them to me. “What did you do that for?”

  “Because I felt like it,” she said and continued driving. “Two flowers to remind you that you’ve got two people who love you more than you know.”

  At home Malley had made a sign that spelled out “Welcome Home” in gold stars. “Do you know how many boxes of stars it took me to make that sign?”

  Right then I knew something had changed. Looking down at the scattered pieces of adhesive paper that were left from Malley’s workmanship, I never once mentioned that she needed to clean up the mess. I guess the difference was, now I chose not to speak the words, even if they ran through my mind. “How ’bout two daisies for payment? To remind you that you have your mama and me to love you.”

  As Malley twined the flowers together into a bracelet, I sat on the leather sofa that I’d bought for Heather the Christmas before last. “Did anybody from work call here today?”

  “No, were you expecting them to?” Heather asked from the kitchen. The sound of water being poured into a pot rang out into the living room.

  “Just wondering,” I mumbled. Curious to know if the guys all showed up for work without me there, I toyed with the idea of trying to drive to the job site but gave up on the idea, knowing how bad Heather would throw a fit. How many had taken sick days? Were we still on schedule? The questions swirled around in my head until I gripped the edge of the sofa cushion, fighting to keep myself from picking up the phone.

  After dropping Malley off at school, Heather and I fought the rush-hour traffic into town. Sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic, we inched closer to the skyline and the approaching exit for Emory University Hospital. The tall buildings seemed bigger than usual, and I pictured them squeezing up against us, pushing out all the air until breathing was something I had to work at doing. Never letting on to Heather, I kept a steady drumbeat with the music that played on the radio. With each tap of my finger against the car door, I pictured the anxiety being knocked out of my system and rolling underneath the tires of our car.

  At the hospital we sat in the lung specialist’s office, listening as the ticking of a steel clock competed with the humming of an air vent. Certificates lined one wall, while the clock and a painting of a woman stared out from the other side of the office. The surgeon who had advised me to have the mass cut out had directed us to this doctor whose last name was as long as the degrees that framed his wall. They all claimed that this man was the best lung specialist in the South, if not the whole country.

  When he walked into the office, he smiled warmly and patted the copies of my X-rays that he carried alongside a file stamped with my name. He was an older man with a row of sparse hair that circled his bald crown like spring grass around the edges of a freshly tilled field. Tapping a gold pen against his desk, the doctor looked at me and shook his head.

  “The conventional side of me tends to agree with what the surgeon told you.” The doctor raised his arm in the air like he was fighting a war. “Let’s get on with it and take this mass out.” His words rolled over us and he chuckled before shaking his head again. “But the side of me that’s been treating patients for thirty-two years says to hold off, to wait awhile.”

  “What about this thing inside of him? You’re telling us to just ignore it?” Heather was leaning closer to the edge of her seat and licking her lips, ready to pounce.

  “I never meant ‘ignore it.’ Monitor perhaps, but not ignore.” The doctor rotated the pen between his fingers like it was a minibaton. He smiled and looked straight at me. “Mr. Bishop, I don’t pull any punches. Quite frankly, I don’t have any left to pull. What your surgeon advised you is conventional thought, but the one thing that I’ve learned is that convention is worth about a pound of manure. Your lungs have been through a trauma that nearly cost you your life. You’re still mending . . . this idea of yet another surgery so soon . . . well . . .”

  “What about treatments?” I asked.

  “That’s a fair question,” the doctor said. “But I’m not an oncologist. I’m a pulmonologist. The best advice I can give you is, whatever action you decide to take should be your call, not a physician’s.”

  “Any other people with cases like mine?”

  “I’ve seen patients who have had similar cases, yes. Some ended up having benign tumors that occur in embryonic tissue, meaning that they’ve always been there. Others ended up having a malignancy. I guess my question is, how is this X-ray on my desk going to change the outcome?”

  “Uh, now, I don’t mean any disrespect by saying this, but isn’t that why I’m paying you?” I asked.

  The doctor tipped the pen toward me and smiled. “No disrespect taken. Better phrased, what if you never had the accident? What if you never knew that you had this mass? What would you be doing differently?”

  He made notations in my file but never gave me the opportunity to answer his question. It was a homework type of question, and I studied on it day and night. Try as I might to forget it, the sound of this doctor’s voice never left my mind.

  That night I dreamed that an alien-looking creature the size of one of Malley’s old Barbie dolls ripped through my skin and ran away before I could ask it why it had invaded me in the first place. Jolted awake and covered in sweat, I rolled over and groaned. Pain shot through my chest, but I still managed to put my arm around Heather. She and Malley were my world. The spot, whatever it may be, was helping me to realize that more now than ever before.

  The morning after my visit with the lung doctor, decisions fit for a four-year-old, such as what cereal to eat i
n the morning, seemed complicated. What would the spot in my chest want to eat? Would oat bran drive it from my body, or would a hefty batch of sugarcoated nuggets do the trick? I finished a huge bowl of both cereals and heard a car in the driveway. From the kitchen window, I saw Jay Beckett close the door of his black Range Rover.

  Jay sat across from me in my easy chair while I fought the pain of sitting upright against the sofa. His wire-rimmed glasses sloped down his slightly crooked nose, and he didn’t waste any time by pushing them back up. “So, it’s going good, huh?” Jay kept placing the cup of coffee back and forth on the table. Finally, he settled for putting the mug down and leaned over like a defensive center ready to strike. “Pretty good,” I said, nodding in hopes that he would believe the lie.

  “I tell you something: the guys down at the mill are having a time. I mean, a devil of a time trying to get those repairs done on schedule without you.”

  I knew I would feel it sooner or later, and there it was: guilt. For the past twenty years I’d given heart and soul to that mill, without any memorable vacation to speak of, and after ten days away, I was getting antsy. The mill needed me. Jay stared at me over the top of his glasses, seeming to know exactly what I was thinking.

  “Don’t you worry about a thing. We want you well . . . yes sir. We take care of our people. You know that.”

  “I appreciate it,” I said. “But that mill project is my baby. You know I want it done right.”

  “Done right or not done at all,” Jay said and tried to laugh. “You remember that one? That’s what you said the first time you pitched us to the mill and almost got sick from the smell of the place.” Jay laughed and ran his hand through his black hair, now tinged with gray, just as he had the day he convinced me to bypass college for a quicker payout.