So you don't feel neglected while I tend to other matters, here's a replay of a column than ran here on September 16, 2013. It's the story of one of my father's several heart attacks — not his first and not his last. It's another one of those…
I was just getting out of the shower one morning when the phone rang. It was my father calling with one of those simple, declarative statements that changes your entire life for a while if not forever. He said, "I'm having a heart attack."
This was in the mid-eighties, around 1984. My mother was working part-time at a grocery store wrapping packages. He was home alone in the house I grew up in, which was located (Google Maps tells me) 4.4 miles from my residence then and now. He'd had a heart attack before and he knew the symptoms so I said, "I'm sending an ambulance!"
He screamed, "No! No ambulance! I will not get into an ambulance! You come and drive me to the hospital!"
There was a reason for no ambulance — maybe not a good reason but a reason, nonetheless. His father had died in an ambulance. His father had been stricken, probably but not definitely with a heart attack, in the Temple on one of the High Holy Days. An ambulance was called but he refused to get into it. A Jew does not ride in a motor vehicle on such days and I guess he thought being on the verge of death is not a good time to be displeasing God. Or something.
Anyway, the rabbis and other learned men urged him to get in and he refused. An argument ensued…one that was settled in a simple manner. He passed out and they just picked him up and put him in. Sadly, he was dead before they got him to the Emergency Room.
That should have been a teachable moment: When you're sick, get in the ambulance. But my father somehow learned the opposite: When you're sick, stay out of ambulances. When he phoned with his simple, declarative statement, there was no time to debate the proper lesson to be learned. "I'll be right over," I told him.
I could usually make the drive in fifteen minutes but that day, I set some world record for drying, dressing and driving…and made it there in ten. My father was not unconscious but he was getting there. I guided him into my car and then drove like Gene Hackman in The French Connection, only faster, all the way to Kaiser Permanente Hospital. I parked illegally, commandeered a nearby empty wheelchair and rushed him in through doors marked "Emergency."
The room was packed and there was a little man — Filipino, I think — doing Triage, deciding who'd be seen and in what order. I told him, "This man is having a heart attack." He handed me a long form and told me to fill it out, place it in an "in" basket on his desk and take a seat.
I said, louder, "This man is having a heart attack. He'll be seeing a doctor in one minute or you'll be seeing one in two."
The little man began telling me to sit down as he gestured to people around us with hangnails and bad coughs. "All these people ahead of you," he was saying. I raised my voice even more. I yell about once every two years and it usually has to be something like this to get me there. My father also began yelling, getting up out of the wheelchair and gasping out loud, "They're making me wait?" We were making quite a scene, deliberately so.
By now, it was about 11:15 AM. There was a doctor who'd been on the night shift and was leaving to go home. He was walking through the Emergency Room en route to his car and he saw what was going on. He hurried over and said to an attendant, "Take Mr. Evanier's father into Examining Room 2! I'll take care of him myself." In two instants, my father was led inside, the doctor followed him in —
— and I was just standing there, stunned. I went from yelling to stunned in about ten seconds.
The immediate problem had disappeared so quickly that it took me a second to wonder something: "How did that doctor know my name?"
I stopped a passing nurse and asked who that was. She said, "That's Dr. Barnett."
I asked, "Dr. Carl Barnett?"
She said, "Yes. Do you know him?"
Yes, I knew him. He was one of my best friends in high school.
I hadn't seen him since graduation and didn't even know he'd become a doctor…and by the way, at his request, I've changed the name here. It wasn't Carl Barnett. I don't know why he doesn't want me giving his name but I'm grateful enough to the guy to do anything he asks. He spent two hours past his shift time treating my father, then personally briefed the doctor who'd be taking over.
One of my most vivid memories of my father is from when I was brought into the Examining Room. He was sitting up in bed. His shirt was off but it was draped over his chest and there were wires connecting to the monitoring patches that were all over him. The doctor had told me my father was out of pain and more importantly, out of danger…from this heart attack, at least. Another was way too possible.
He was sitting there looking weak and sad, and when he saw me walk in, the very first thing he said was, "Well, it looks like I've had another heart attack. I hope this doesn't mean you're prone to them."
That was my father. And lest my friends be concerned: I have lived well past the age when he had his first one without cardiac incident and my doctor says my ticker is in perfect shape. And besides, I don't work for the Internal Revenue Service.
I walked "Carl" to his car, thanking him every possible way I could. He finally turned to me and said, "I'll tell you how you can thank me. You can answer a question for me." I said of course I would and he asked, "Do you write comic books?" I told him I did. He asked, "Scooby Doo comic books?"
I told him, yes, sometimes. Then I realized why he was asking. Several years earlier — in an issue with no credits — I'd named a number of characters after friends from high school, him included. Someone had shown him a copy and he realized all those names could not be a coincidence. As he explained, "I got to thinking, who did I know in high school who could have wound up writing Scooby Doo comic books? Then I realized! Had to be Evanier!" I've since stuck his name in a few other comics I've written.
Thanks in large part to him, my father went home a few days later. It was seven or eight more years before he had his next heart attack and a few days after that that he had his last one and he went away. I'll probably write about that some day here but not for a while.
I told you about this one because I wanted to share one memory of him so you'd understand one of the main things that was so great about my father. There he was in the Emergency Room, having just had a heart attack. And the very first thing on his mind was concern not about himself but whether his illness was a bad omen for me. See why I loved that guy? I mean, above and beyond the fact that he was my father.
