The Vacation That Got Out of Control

For me, it started with a simple change of address.  I was moving around the corner but the space would not be available until the new year - three and a half weeks hence.  The chiropractor would be closed down the last half of December and wouldn’t be needing me, so what the heck, I was going to jump on the chance to go up and visit my sister, Jenny in Portland for a couple of weeks and then make it back to the southland in time for Christmas with family and friends.

So I stepped outside of my comfort zone and did something I’d never done, but always wanted to do – bought a train ticket for one and took a two-day ride up the coast on my virgin train run. 

What a glorious trip!  Through Santa Barbara to the central California coast, then inland and up the Central Valley to the Bay Area, up through the middle of northern California to central Oregon and the beautiful Cascade Mountains.  The train had an amazing observation car that was all windows and just a joy to travel in to catch the incredible views.

I hadn’t been in Portland two days when I got a call saying our oldest brother, Chris had been brought into the emergency room back home in California. He had apparently been bitten by a poisonous spider on his leg which had doubled in size, and he was in critical condition.

We jumped on the next plane and flew back down. By the time we arrived, he was out of surgery but in a medically-induced coma intended to help his body cope with the trauma. 

The doctors had to make three large, deep incisions in his left thigh and groin to surgically remove the flesh-eating bacteria and dead tissue in his leg. The infection had gone septic – had entered his blood stream and therefore his entire body was now fighting infection.

We sat by his bed for ten, twelve, sometimes eighteen hours a day in the intensive care unit watching over him, just hoping that our being there made a difference. 

He had a whole flock of doctors that came and went at various times, mostly just silently coming in, checking his heart rate or his chart or his various IV bags (he was hooked up to seven!) and leaving after a minute or two.  There was a primary doctor, a cardiologist, a respiratory therapist, a urologist, the surgeon, an infectious diseases doctor, and countless other nurses, nurses aides, etc. 

Tina, the Belizian head nurse in the ICU was kind enough to let us set up camp in his room and stay there all day and into the night, even though hospital rules permitted only ten minutes every two hours.  It was torture to sit there at first with the incessant beep, beep, beep of the heart monitor tracking his feeble, racing heartbeat, and the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh of the respirator forcing air into his lungs. 

Every time an alarm would go off, my heart would stop.  But I soon learned it usually meant either one of his IV bags had run out, or his heart monitor had worked loose, causing the machine to register a flatline – which it did far too regularly!  But in no time at all, those sounds became the comforting, soothing song that gave my weary heart succor.

His primary doctor, whose name took us weeks to get right because no two people pronounced it the same, and we almost never saw him in person the first couple of weeks (it turns out his name was Dr. Darshana Sarathchandra Jenny dubbed Dr. Doom-and-Gloom.)  

From the first day, Dr. Doom-and-Gloom had nothing but skepticism.  He said flat out the first day that this would probably kill Chris within five days time if not sooner. 

Wow!  Okay.  What do you do with that?  I just told him I could not accept that.  Chris was always the rock in our family and he just had to pull through.  He would pull through! The very young Dr. Sarathchandra just shook his head at me and said I should prepare myself, and walked away gloomily.  

But I got busy praying, and asking everyone I know to pray.  Before the next 24-hours was over, people all around the world were praying for Chris (thanks to the wonders of Facebook!)

Chris’ blood pressure kept dropping and his heart kept racing faster.  The medication didn’t seem to be working and the doctor just said to brace ourselves.  But I sat by his bed and prayed and when his blood pressure dropped too low I would tell the comatose Chris he needed to work hard; he needed to pull through this – and his blood pressure would rise.  Or when his heart rate would get too high, they would want us to leave the room, I would insist on staying.  I would stroke his hair and lay my hand (or my head) on his chest and tell him he had to slow down his heart, and he would!

The doctors said it was coincidence.  But I knew that in his deep, deep fog, he knew someone was there with him, pulling for him, going through this with him.

After three or four days, the doctors grew concerned because the affects of the coma-inducing medication should be wearing off and he should have begun to come out of it, but he didn’t.  So they said, maybe because of his large size, it would take longer, maybe a week….

But the one week marker came and went….

I began playing oldies to him off my iPhone – Neil Diamond, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Simon and Garfunkle – and this seemed to help control his heart rate and blood pressure somewhat too.  Though the doctors told me I was imagining it….

Around day ten…or twelve…or fourteen…they all run together now….I was growing discouraged, talking to this mountain of a man who just lay there motionless, seemingly unresponsive to the doctors’ efforts.

“C’mon, Chris!  It’s time to wake up!  You can do it!  Open up your eyes.  Just one eye!” I coaxed, reaching up to gently pry open his left eyelid.

“Don’t do that!” my sister snapped at me, the endless vigil wearing on us both.

“Okay, then, what do you want to listen to now?” I asked him jovially,  “You’re probably tired of Neil Diamond by now.  You want to hear some Beach Boys? Bob Marley? The Beatles? Simon and Garfunkle…?” I asked, holding his hand.  

I had taught myself to just talk to him all throughout the day so that he would hear my voice and know he wasn’t alone.  But when I got to Simon and Garfunkle there was a definite squeeze.   Very feeble, but definitely a squeeze!  I about jumped out of my skin and my voice jumped two octaves.

“Simon and Garfunkle?!  You want Simon and Garfunkle!?!  Jenny!  He squeezed my hand!!!”  And he squeezed it a second time – this time even a weaker squeeze, but still a definite squeeze.

I gave him Simon and Garfunkle and excitedly proclaimed the good news to everyone at the nursing station immediately and every doctor who came in the rest of the day.  Dr. Doom-and-Gloom scowled and said it was likely just an involuntary twitch.

But a couple days later, more than a week overdue, he finally, very effortfully lifted one eyelid just a crack and you’d have thought he had just scaled Mt. Everest at the jubilant celebration!  Over the next three days, both eyes slowly began to peek open for short periods of time as he struggled out of the coma, and we were ecstatic, though all of the doctors cautioned that he was far, far from out of the woods. 

His heart was still very weak and in arrhythmia, he could not sustain a minimal blood pressures, it appeared he had become diabetic….

But I told the doctors that was all right.  These things were just temporary.  He was going to come out of this okay….  They just looked at me and I am certain thought I was delusional.  But I wasn’t.  I had faith…and hundreds of friends and strangers around the world praying for my brother.

Then, early on Christmas morning, before we could get to the hospital, I got a call from Dr. Doom-and-Gloom saying that he was so sorry, but Chris had contracted a secondary infection in the ICU – a very deadly bacterial infection that can often kill even healthy patients.  So it is almost certain that it will prove fatal to Chris in his immune-compromised state.  He just said he was sorry to give me such bad news, but my brother would be dead within two days.

Chris’ legs swelled up and turned lobster red and formed huge blisters.  Then his kidneys shut down and they put him on daily dialysis – yet another tremendous strain on his already beleaguered body.  Surely this would be the last straw, the young Dr. Sarathchandra said.  But we kept watch and prayed.

Slowly, miraculously, Chris pulled out of the most critical zone.  Slowly, reluctantly, Dr. Gloom-and-Doom began to pepper his comments with the occasional “if he pulls through this…” and social workers began to talk to us about getting ready to move him to a rehab facility if he recovered.

I took my brother, Tom, and set out to interview rehab facilities in the Greater Los Angeles area, and we set our heart on the Burbank Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center – just a stone’s throw from the Burbank Equestrian Center.  But the social worker told us that it didn’t work that way.  We didn’t get to choose.  We just got assigned to whichever of the three his insurance contracted to that happened to have a bed available on the day that he was discharged from the hospital.  It was all a crap shoot and we had no say in the matter.

But we’d seen the other two, and they were horrible compared to Burbank!  He just had to go to Burbank!  It was a much more serene setting, an the staff seemed so much more friendly….

Well, we might not have any say in it, but I knew Someone who does!  So I put it to prayer too.

That day we got good news.  Chris had improved enough to move him to the other end of the ICU ward – after being a guest there for over a month – and sleeping right through both Christmas and New Years!  And his kidney function had improved enough that they were now doing dialysis only every other day!

Then the magic milestone was reached.  Chris’ blood pressure finally rose to the bare minimum acceptable for him to be released.  Faster than you could snap your fingers, the decision was made, he was to be released from the ICU and moved into a surgical ward – to avoid any further chance of protracting another new infection from the ICU.  (I think the hospital really wanted to get him out of there quick for liability reasons!)

But then they jockeyed back and forth with administration and his insurance and the rehab centers and decided to just move him directly to rehab immediately, and what do you know, there was an opening at Burbank!  So we packed up all of his things and they had a half dozen paramedics show up with a gurney to cart him off to a waiting ambulance to transfer him to his new digs!

Five weeks after arriving in the ICU – and on my birthday, no less! – we moved to the new facility.  I could not have asked for a more wonderful birthday gift!

Jenny got on a plane and flew back to Portland and I spent the next five months helping Chris metamorphose from a man flat on his back who could not even hold a pen to walking with a walker and occasionally even a cane!  I went daily for months to help him at the rehab center, helping him with physical therapy, keeping up with the doctor appointments and social workers, ambulance trips, dialysis trips and running interference with work and disability (the folks at JPL are the absolute best by the way!)  And we made some of the sweetest friends there among the nursing and physical therapy staff.

Despite what all those doctors predicted (and thanks to the prayers of all those around the world who were lifting him up!), his kidneys came back to full function and he no longer needed any dialysis.  They decided that he is indeed not diabetic, but that it was most likely a medically-induced diabetic state caused by all the stress from the trauma to his body.  His very deep surgical wounds that were severely compromised by the secondary infection, and had to heal from the inside out, took much, much longer to heal, but had finally closed up completely.  And as a plus, he lost a hundred pounds along the way!

Finally, by the end of June, some seven months after I set out for my two-week vacation, Chris was ready to do it on his own.  He was finally ready released from most of his doctors' care - so his three and four doctor's visits a week had dwindles to one every other week, and he finally felt well enough to start back to work part time.  That meant I was finally free to pack up my things (I had been sleeping on friends’ living room floor for the seven months in order to be closer to Chris - I have the best, dearest friends in the world, by the way!) and move back down to Orange County to pick up the threads of my own life.

I had lost my job, my home,…and at many times, my sanity, but I had gained a second chance with my big brother, and an even stronger faith in a loving God. 

God is so good.

I had gone three miles down the freeway, my car packed to the gills, when a hit-and-run semi truck side-swiped me doing fifty mph and left me up-side-down on the side of the road.  But that is a story for another day….

The Secret of the Two Red Coffins

The timing was bad.  What a time to have to leave town!  We’d just had water flood damage days earlier and had to move all the furniture from the dining room and my bedroom into the living room and sewing room. 

I pulled up soggy carpet and padding and found black mold – on the flooring beneath the carpet and on walls behind book shelves and desks.  We sprayed a bleach solution on all the wet and moldy surfaces and ran fans ‘round the clock for days on end.

And in the midst of all this, I was called off to Idaho to help my older sister, Jenny, pack up her entire household to be ready to move out by Sunday, the 31^st.  (She’s going back to school in another state and renting out her house for the next two years.)

But bad timing on unexpected trips to Idaho at the call of my sister was nothing new.  

In the midst of the Los Angeles riots in 1992, I got a call from her when her husband of two years was hit and killed by a train.  She called and I came running then, too. That's just what family does.

This time, when I arrived in Coeur d’Alene to report for packing duty, very little had been done.  She was somewhat overwhelmed.  And we were often interrupted by meals with friends who wanted to see her before she moved away.  We had just three and a half days to do it all.

I set out to be as helpful as I could be, packing boxes full of bedding and dishes; taking photos off the walls and bubble wrapping them to store them away safely for moving.

Together, we packed up boxes of books to donate to the library, and a couple of boxes of fabric to donate to a quilter’s guild.  She was doing really well at parting with old, unused stuff.

With time at a premium, we were knocking things out at record speed.  But each time the subject of her bedroom or the garage came up, I noticed she’d put me off.

The stuff in her bedroom was mostly papers and stuff that she had to sort through herself – some of which was still in boxes from the last move - home stuff mixed with office stuff.

And the garage – well, it was the garage.  Hers was huge!  And she had parked her one car in there, with the rest filled with the stuff of life: 
canoe, kayak, power tools, table saws, snow blowers and lots of just old, dusty stuff. As garages go, though, it wasn't terribly over- packed at all.

We had to have everything boxed up before her volunteer friends from work came to help load the U-haul in the morning to haul everything off to the two storage spaces she’d rented.

And by Friday evening, we were down to the bedroom and the garage, I was pretty much stumped.  She kept putting me off.  

I could understand the paper-sorting being a one man job, but I could easily tackle the garage.

But I know that packing up your entire life and moving out of state to go back to school is a traumatic life experience.  So I was trying really hard to tread lightly and not to press her, even as the deadline bore down on us.

I could clean out the back room where she was going to store what tools and such she planned to leave behind, and then move that stuff in.

 

Then I could tackle either packing up or marking for “give-away” the rest of the garage stuff while she worked on the mountain of paper sorting in her room.

But she started getting all weird on me.  

Don’t touch that....  We can’t do anything until the back room is spotless....  

(It is a furnace room/potting shed/pass-through to the back yard, for goodness sake!!)   

She actually wanted me to vacuum the concrete floor!

Are you kidding me?!!!  I was running out of energy this late in the game, and patience too.  My back was killing me and I was going on less than 5 hours of sleep for a week now.

She had to be crazy!  With all we had left to do, everything had to come to a standstill so I could vacuum the corners of a storage shed?!

The more I tried to talk reason, the more agitated she got and dug in her heals.  So, with my asthma being what it is, and her vacuum kicking out a musty odor, I suggested she might do the vacuuming while I got things ready to move into the room.

But, no.  The tools (rakes and shovels and hoes) couldn’t go in the back room until I took the trash can that would hold them out into the back yard and scrubbed it down inside and out with soap and water…

Jenny, it’s just a trash can, and it’s not that dirty!  

All we’re going to do is put dirty garden tools into it and put it into a back room where it will get dusty and bug-inhabited anyway, I thought.

She blew up at me.  And I decided it was easiest just to do what I considered the ridiculous, and get on with it rather than waste time trying to talk reason. 

All I could hear was the tick…tick…tick… of the U-haul-loading countdown.  

Well, that and the increasingly noisy sucking sound of the last of my limited energy being flushed down the drain.

But understanding the enormous amount of stress she was under, I grabbed the trash can, some Dawn dish washing soap and an old broom, and begrudgingly set about my insane assignment. 

And with it all cleaned out, I helped her to sort through the forest of gardening tools, paring down to the essentials.  

She really didn’t need four shovels, five rakes and three sledge hammers.  We slated 2/3 of them for give away and stored the rest – rakes, hoes, shovels and sledge hammers.

With that done, she went back to work sorting papers and I came back into the garage and tackled the shelves.

Eventually, as I got down to the last bits and pieces and odds and ends, I had to call Jenny back down from her bedroom.  Now what?

She was still  irritable and unable to focus, flitting from one thing to the next and accomplishing nothing.  

For me, it wouldn’t be surprising behavior, but it was really strange for her.  She is usually very opinionated.

“Okay, now what about these?” I asked her, indicating the long, narrow, red crates that had been buried behind the gardening tools and under piles of other odds and ends.

And that’s when the light came on - the real reason we were vacuuming gardening shed floors and scrubbing perfectly acceptable trash cans to store dirty garden tools.

This wasn't about papers or tools.

“I don’t know what’s in those,” she said, suddenly fidgeting anxiously.  “Those were from the logging site and were in the back of John’s truck when he died….”

And we stood there, staring at these two, red coffin-like boxes.  Five or six feet long by a foot and a half by a foot and a half.

“So you’ve been dragging them around all this time without looking inside?” I asked incredulously.

My big sister stood there, the look of a small girl being scolded on her face. 

I had no idea she had been hanging onto these things all these years.  Jenny’s just not the sentimental, emotional type.  And John died nearly twenty years ago, for goodness sake!

As the realization came over me, I felt badly.  

“Well, that’s easy to remedy,” I said, trying to lighten the mood.  I stepped over the long pile of moulding on the floor and reached for the opened lock on the top box.

“I don’t know what’s in there,” she repeated, anxiously.  “I’ve just never gotten around to looking in them.”

I opened the lid on the top coffin-like crate, carefully watching for black widow spiders, and there it was….

Not the body of Jimmy Hoffa.  Not B.D. Cooper’s fortune.

Just more garden tools!  

Just another box full of rusty, old, scarred and broken hoes and shovels and rakes and sledge hammers!  We both had a good laugh, breaking the tension.

She breathed a sigh of relief, and in the end, it was all very anticlimactic.  We just closed the lid and decided not to do anything with them at all.

We would just leave them where they were, and if the new tenant (a friend of hers) didn’t like it or needed the space, he was welcome to throw them out.

A good deal of the foot-dragging and anxiety and stupid demands (like vacuuming  storage sheds and scrubbing trash cans to fill with dirty gardening tools) stemmed from her fear of facing what was in those two coffin-like chests.

She could have been shed of them two decades ago, had she just been bold enough to face them head on and take that peek inside.  

But instead, she had dragged them through her life for nearly twenty years and at least two house moves.

And so it is, so often in life, for most of us.  We drag along our own caskets filled with fear.  

And over the years, if we don’t deal with the fear, it grows and multiplies until we find it takes over half the garage of our lives in toxic red coffins.

We were up until after midnight packing boxes, and got up at 5:00 a.m. to finish it off before we had to pick up the truck at 9:00.

Her friends were lifesavers (because by that time, my back was in ruins and I could lift only the lightest of boxes.) 

There was a glitch in the plan when Bob and I got to the third floor of the storage facility with four dollies filled with boxes only to find the storage space they’d assigned us to, was already taken.  

(The other mover friends sat in the back of the truck relaxing while I took Jenny to the office to straighten it out.)

 
We got everything out of the truck and then up to the 3rd floor of the storage warehouse. 

And in the levity of completion, we got a little silly, racing the dollies back down the hall to the elevator!  When it was all done, we returned all the dollies back to their proper places on the first floor. 

Then we went back to Jenny’s so the help could all join in a cold beer.