Monday, July 27, 2009

The T-Bird

My father has a white late-model T-bird with tan leather seats and he's pretty proud of it. He made FD drive him to the hospital in it a few weeks ago. You sit pretty low in this car. He just loves it.

Last week he was admitted to the hospital so the professionals could encourage his kidneys to pump out some of the water he he's gained. Twenty-eight pounds later, they released him. But while he was there, the subject of his pace-maker popped up. It's due for a new battery in a few months, and one of the wires doesn't work.

The young cardiologist says to him, as he sits helplessly connected to various IV's, kindly (he thinks) but with a voice full of authority, "If they told you that you had a body wracked full of cancer, would you bother with a new pace-maker?"

A mean thing to say to an old guy, I thought, when I heard it. Wish I had been there, would he ever have heard it from me in the hallway.

Let's put it another way, give the guy a fighting chance.

"If you had an old car, a really, really old car, one that needed a lot of work, would you bother putting a new engine in it?"

My father would say, in a heartbeat, "If I liked the car."

Flying a Little Angry. Still.

1 comment:

Go ahead. Tell me.