I got this t-shirt at a PFLAG conference in Columbus, Ohio twenty-two years ago, Sept. 27, 2002. I didn’t remember the date but I know it because it’s printed on the shirt.
Heading to the airport to fly to Columbus for the event, I pulled over to rest a moment. “What’s wrong?” Gabi asked.
“It’s nothing,” I said. “I just need to rest for a minute. I feel a little pressure in my chest and in my left arm. It will go away in a moment.”
I told her I knew it would go away because it always did. It had happened before, quite a few times, and was always fine in a minute or two. She tried to talk me into going to the ER, but I insisted I was all right. Besides, we had tickets for the flight. She finally gave in and said, “OK, but as soon as we get home, you’re going to see a doctor.”
I said OK.
In Columbus, before any meetings started, I told Gabi I was going to go for a walk. No place in particular. I wouldn’t know where to go or how to get there because I’d never before been to Columbus. What I was really looking for was a place to buy a pack of cigarettes. Pall Mall unfiltered, just like Kurt Vonnegut who wrote:
“I am committing suicide by cigarette,” I replied. She thought that was reasonably funny. I didn’t. I thought it was hideous that I should scorn life that much, sucking away on cancer sticks. My brand is Pall Mall. The authentic suicides ask for Pall Malls. The dilettantes ask for Pell Mells.”
I had been trying, not very hard, to quit. I could go a day, sometimes two or three days, without smoking, but then the urge to smoke would hit me and there was nothing I could even think about other than how, where and when to get my hands on a cigarette. That, my friend, is addiction. So I bought a pack of Pall Malls, smoked one, and hid the pack.
Fred Phelps of “God Hates Fags” fame—who was also famous for picketing the funerals of soldiers and people who died of AIDS—picketed our conference with a handful of his minions. They didn’t come into the hotel but stood on the sidewalk out front waving their hateful signs. They were there the entire time. We ignored them.
A young man showed up at our door. He had found Gabi’s website online and had exchanged a few emails with her. He lived in Columbus and found out we were going to the conference and came to the hotel in search of us. Not only did he admire Gabi for her activism, but he had read my first novel, Until the Dawn, and said he loved it. He was the first person not already a close friend or relative to tell me they had read and liked my novel. What a confidence boost that was.
Not all of my relatives were so complementary. One brother-in-law could not get that it was fiction and said to his son, “Who the hell are all these people? I don’t know any of these people.” The story was set in his hometown, and I guess he expected it to be about people he knew. One of my sisters and a relative of Gabi’s were offended by the language—the not-infrequent “F-bombs” I assume.
Back home the next day, as promised, I went to see my doctor. He examined me and put me on a treadmill and asked a bunch of questions, and sent me to see a cardiologist who said I needed bypass surgery immediately. He told me to go to the hospital, which was directly across the street. “Don’t drive,” he insisted. But I didn’t have any other way to get there (Gabi doesn’t drive). I think the hospital kept me overnight before wheeling me into the OR, but I can’t swear that my memory of that is correct. Anyway, they opened my chest and did a triple bypass. While I was in the OR, one of the nurses came out into the waiting room and told Gabi that the blockage I had was what they called a ‘widowmaker’—not exactly a reassuring thing to tell a woman whose husband is undergoing surgery. But the surgery was successful.
The timeline has to be quite different than what I remember. It seems to me that the whole sequence from going to the conference to the operation to coming home with a repaired heart took only a few days, but the conference was September 27 to 29, and according to my medical notes I had the triple bypass on 10/28/02, a balloon angioplasty in November 2002, and then a stent put in on 2/11/02.
I was released from the hospital on Halloween Day. I remember that because my nurse, a male nurse, was dressed as Nurse Rached from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
They sent me home with a heart pillow, which they said I could sit on and hug to my chest when I felt pain. I remember that the recovery was excruciatingly slow and no fun at all. Months later, or perhaps it was a year or two later, the young man we met in Columbus moved to Seattle. He came to Olympia a few times, and we visited him in Seattle once. We met him where he worked. It was in an industrial area south of downtown. While driving through the area looking for the address he had given us, Gabi commented, “This is the backside of nowhere,” and I said, “That’s the title of my next novel.”
And it was.