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Mayo Clinic: I Had Open Heart Surgery
The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota is like a theme park for healthcare. It is physically larger than two Midwestern football powerhouse universities and employs 40,000 people across its facilities there alone (never mind at satellites in places like Phoenix.) The impression is you can get anything fixed, literally whatever ails you, and I was here myself for a serious heart problem.
Here’s how good these people are: I was technically dead for awhile as they stopped my heart to connect it to a Dick Cheney-like pump device so they could work on me undisturbed (I came to with a strange desire to invade Wisconsin.)
The world I lived and briefly died in is what real privilege looks like; this is what semi-wealthy people (or those with decent insurance like me) spend their money on when the grandkids are too old for Disney and they are too unhealthy for the all-you-can-eat on some cruise line. You buy health. You buy time.
The attitude here is “we can fix it” though no one would be so crass as to use a simple marketing tag line around the GOAT of hospitals. Instead, the staff here work every problem to the, sorry, bone.My heart condition had previously been treated at two less-known hospitals in New York City, and you can tell the difference. For example, at Mayo the staff needed some data quickly from my hometown doctor, and his fax machine was down (FYI: never mind all the technology, doctors love to fax things to each other. There is still this odd niche market for those old machines the size of dishwashers.)Nonetheless, the quickest way around the problem of my doctor’s busted 1995 fax-o-matic was to email the data to the Mayo nurse on duty’s personal account, after which she would print it, and time travel-walk it to the doctor who needed it on paper in 2022.Yeah, I hear you, big deal. But as an example it sings Mayo — identify a glitch, find a creative solution if needed, have someone take personal responsibility, and solve the damn problem. If every business worked this way it’d be 1962 again in a very good way. Knowing that work attitude was behind the hands inside my chest was reassuring. You get what you pay for.
It wasn’t all fun. Immediately after my six hours of open heart surgery I was a prisoner of the intensive care unit. I was intubated to help me breathe but because of the same could not speak. My hands were restrained to prevent me from knee-jerk pulling out the tube. I literally could not move or cry out. They left MSNBC on the waiting area TV.
Health care is waiting. Yet despite all the waiting no one is just hanging around. It gives the place an intensity. It must be a helluva place to work. For me, maybe too much emotion, too much real drama as lives play out. Maybe like an airport in the old days before rage took over as our travel companion. You start to hear “They said I can go home” as the sweetest words, besting the here-ambiguous “I love you” which often stands in for difficult goodbyes.You start to get to know the people around you in an odd way. You hear those things, apologies, thanks, a father mumble about regards (or was it regrets?) People hug in public, not a Midwest-Lake Wobegon thing really, but here ok. There are often tears in the waiting parties eyes, held back as one partner heads off behind the double doors with a stranger to surgery. Here’s the end of for many a long road of visits and testing, always more testing wasn’t it, honey? The men’s ball caps betray they were not always so broken — Airborne, Republic of Vietnam, Korea, and ship names.It is in the end not a place that promotes conversation. There doesn’t seem to be much of incentive to talk to one another as fellow patients, so you ask over and over again of the nurses where they’re from, how long they’ve been working here, those kinds of first date queries until everybody sort of knows the answers.My end of the hospital seemed to have older men as heart patients at least 9:1 over women. The wives pushing the heavy hospital wheelchairs in from the drop off cul-de-sac, after their husbands emerged from Ford Fusions like astronauts climbing out of Apollo 12, did not smile. They looked lost and scared. Their charges looked at one another, as if whatever they had done in life had not prepared them for this as one of many interim endpoints.I failed to strike up a real conversation with anyone. I was turning to them for unrealistic refuge and no one could be in a giving mood. While I was at Mayo it was unusually warm weather with sharp sunny afternoons but it stayed cold in each other’s’ shadows.If the fellow patients you might like to talk to are off limits, so are the people who do hard work pushing the mops and picking up medical trash, sharps, stuff wet with body fluids. You wonder what they think about having immigrated from the country where they started out life at a disadvantage now that they’re on the golden streets of America cleaning up after us. If Trump wanted to stop the rush on the border without that wall, he probably need do very little other than show videos of what jobs are ahead if someone makes it past la migra.This is not a Yelp review of Mayo, though I was cared for superbly. Most of the time I actually feel kinda awful, not because of anything other than the healing process being long and slow. Nature objects to people spelunking around inside your chest cavity for a couple of hours. You take each event — some pain, a positive prognosis — in context. It’s like evaluating a disagreement in a marriage for someone who says “I’ve been hitched only six months” versus one who says “We just celebrated our 50th.”The real currency is pain and what you’re purchasing at Mayo is time. The goal is, one of the better doctors said, adding life to years not just years to life. And so a long view is needed even when your body is demanding everything about you be in the short term. You need to understand all these passing things are simply part of a much larger picture difficult to get a hold of.
The ones that really make you think are the children’s cardiac unit patients I saw when allowed to walk around the ward. These are mostly kids too young to tie their own shoes but who are getting open heart surgery because they were born the wrong way. Their rooms are decorated with Mickey Mouse but nothing can really make something like this seem joyful amidst 60- and 70- year-old men hunched over their walkers and other four-year-olds playing dully on their beds nearby.
Perspective? It doesn’t matter if you realized it, but it was all borrowed time, kid. It’s one thing when they say to a man my age it’ll give you another 10 or 15 good years and when you look down and see the cardio unit children who haven’t even had their first good 10 or 15 hearing the same thing.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The Neverending Trump Story
If you get to the end of this and think all it’s doing is defending Trump, you’ve missed the point.For the first time in months there is no front page COVID story. The replacement is the police killing in Minneapolis and chaos everywhere else. But the repurposing is familiar: blame Trump for the tragedy to defeat him in November.
For months there were ran charts and tickers of COVID infections, deaths, missing ventilators, anything countable that made things look bad. When the stock market was hemorrhaging money those numbers were in red up front. Today, if it’s COVID info you seek, look for it where it started, before it was rebooted from Wuhan’s Virus to Trump’s Virus, back in the business section. Somebody else’s blood is going to have to rescue Biden.
The precipitating news peg is the death of another black man at the hands of another white cop under another set of dubious circumstances. If 100,000 COVID deaths can’t shake your faith in Trump, maybe one more of these will. In the eyes of the media, it is of course all Trump’s fault. The problem with that is former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, now charged with murder in the death of George Floyd, previously shot one suspect, was involved in the fatal shooting of another, and received at least 17 complaints during his nearly two decades with the department.
Nobody prosecuted him for any of that, including never-gonna-be-VP Amy Klobuchar, as a county prosecutor. Klobuchar also did not criminally charge other cops in the more than two dozen officer-involved fatalities during her time as prosecutor. She punted those decisions to a grand jury. Current Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who was a lawyer and state legislator when Klobuchar was prosecutor, defended Klobuchar’s record as “a practice that was common at the time.” That’s another way of saying systematic.
One person Klobuchar systematically declined to prosecute was today’s villian Derek Chauvin. In 2006 he was one of six officers who shot Wayne Reyes after Reyes aimed a shotgun at police after stabbing two people. Small world. And that’s before anyone looks again at Biden’s own record on these things, from Cornpop on forward.
See, this week happened before. George Bush had Rodney King. Under Bill Clinton it was Amadou Diallo shot 41 times, remembered in the Springsteen song American Skin (41 Shots). For George W. Bush, it was Sean Bell. Eric Garner was strangled by police during the Obama term, alongside the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri.
Barack Obama said what happened last week in Minnesota “shouldn’t be normal in 2020 America” when in fact it has been normal for some time now, including under his watch. After the police killing of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland in 2015, Obama called the protesters “criminals.” Oops. But the media has him covered now; Vox jumped in this round with “being a former president is different. Now that he is out of office, Obama is more free to try to lead the social change his candidacy once promised.” Change? Leadership? Obama’s Justice Department did not prosecute Eric Gardner’s killer. Obama’s Justice Department did not prosecute Michael Brown’s killer. So today there is still no justice, no peace. Blame Trump.
If that Minnesota cop was a violent racist, he certainly didn’t take the red pill from Trump’s hand, not with two decades of personal complaints and two decades of signature national violence and two decades of prosecutorial somnolence behind him. Remind us again, who was the black Democratic president of the United States during most of that time? Who was his black Democratic attorney general? And someone is trying to use racism in 2020 to take down Trump?
Wait, breaking news! Trump is threatening to kill Americans! In what the New York Times characterized as “an overtly violent ultimatum to protesters,” Trump tweeted the phrase “When the looting starts, the shooting starts” and threatened to deploy the National Guard to Minneapolis.
Now of course the Times knows but didn’t let on to the rubes it knows that it is very, very close to impossible for the president to federalize the National Guard for domestic law enforcement (we slogged through the explanations two years ago in another faux-panic Trump was going to order the Guard to enforce immigration laws.) The Guard generally answers to its state governor, and in the case of Minnesota, Governor Walz already called for full mobilization. It was just a tweet, carrying the weight of a feather. So it’s fitting the punishment is a tagged violation of Twitter rules and not impeachment this time.
The problem with COVID as the Trump Killer was the wrong people ended up dying, and not enough of them. Had the early predictions of millions of deaths sweeping across the nation had any truth in them, that would be hard to ignore. Had the early predictions of COVID zombies using their last strength to fight over the remaining ventilators come to pass, that would have landed a knockout punch.
COVID also killed the wrong people. One can imagine Democratic strategists shouting “Find me some white cheerleaders in Wisconsin who will never realize their dreams, dammit!” Instead, the dead were a majority poor and black, with about half of all COVID deaths in the U.S. in ravaged and neglected parts of the New York City area no one really cared much about before all this. You can see some of those areas on TV today, filled with protesters fighting cops. A few efforts at trying to tie COVID into a greater tapestry of economic inequality didn’t get very far; nobody had much concern for Amazon warehouse workers when they themselves were out of work and waiting on packages of Nutter Butters.
COVID was fundamentally a crisis of economic inequality; the bodies in New York City are the proof. If it was a failure of leadership, then that failure must be traced back some 50 years, and has less to do with a lack of PPE in 2020 than it does with a lack of national healthcare and a living wage contact traced from Nixon to whoever the next guy turns out to be, because both candidates have promised to do nothing new enough to fix those things.
It is sad and cruel and horrible to say no one cared in the end enough for the virus to beat Trump but that is what happened. Remember it in a few weeks when the news has forgotten George Floyd.
The failure of Trump not failing as a leader during COVID, or with police violence, follows a long string of similar stuff, beginning even before his inauguration. For three years we were told the president was literally a Kremlin agent doing Putin’s business out of the Oval Office based on blackmail. Then there was something about the Ukraine that rose to the level of actual impeachment that is still hard to explain and seemed to implicate Biden as much as Trump. Trump will kill us all was a meme Democrats threw against the wall multiple times, with various North Korean and Iranian wars and of course the virus. And now, forget all that. It’s racism, stupid.
Former cop Derek Chauvin didn’t wait for Trump to send out a tweet, or even take office, before becoming violent. He’d been at that for two decades. The systematic racism in Minnesota has roots deep into (d/D)emocratic governance, and wasn’t enabled by a few tweets. This is the same answer for the virus; the economic inequality which drove the virus in places like New York City has very little to do with Trump or his supposed lack of leadership, same as it had nothing to do with the made-up ventilator shortage. It is no surprise in 2020 two leading causes of death among the poor and black are police shooting and COVID.
These things run deep within our society. How obvious does it need to be, it’s not Him, it is Us. The media trying to bundle the latest crisis up and slap a “Trump” label on it, like before with Russia, Ukraine, war, and COVID, will do little to hurt his election chances, and do much to make it clear everyone continues to look the other way. If it is just a Trump problem (or a he’s on Twitter problem), it lives and dies with Trump, whenever that is. That assures us following Biden or Trump this year, or Donald Duck in 2024, there will be another virus which reapers through the poor, and long before then another street killing in a place that should be as far away as Minnesota.
If all we do is play politics with tragedy that’s all we’ll ever do toward resolving tragedy. Resolution lies in looking forward to seeking fundamental solutions over looking backward to assign blame. People in the comments below will claim this is defending Trump. That is as wrong as it is irrelevant. If anyone thinks more violence is the answer, or that this will elect Biden, or that his administration will change things, you’re missing the most important point: the revolution has been televised. You’ve watched it already, you just don’t realize which side won.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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