This Doesn't Even Happen on Gray's Anatomy: "Me, Too" or Just a Moron?

I've just been re-watching the scene in which Izzie cuts Denny's LVAD wire so she can document a precipitous decline and snag him that new heart. Operatic tears coursing down her cheeks, Izzie begs Denny to let her "save" him this way, because she'll be all alone without him. Hot sex scenes in on-call rooms (my doctor friends tell me the real rooms have mice and disgusting sheets--you'd as soon sleep in them as slit your throat) get more air time than medical treatments, but the show's got some great drama and a host of medical moments that saved lives; there was the woman who diagnosed her own breast cancer after a Gray's Anatomy episode (her doctor had said "that's just a clogged milk duct," and he was wrong, sisters, he was wrong.)
What went wrong in my medical world today almost rivals what went wrong in Izzie's decision-making. At nine this morning, I went in for my monthly Faslodex injections and felt lucky to get the nurse who gives unfailingly painless ones. I was lying on the table with a large needle inserted in my rear end when a knock came at the door. A physician, male, didn't wait for the nurse to speak, just opened the door--wide--so that I could see feet walking past in the hall, and the heads at the other end of those feet could see parts of me that nobody sees without a medical or seriously romantic reason. He left the door open, appeared either to be staring through me as if I were not there, or having a good stare. He said something about wanting to use the computer. He entered. He used the computer. He complained about his day. Why didn't I scream at the jerk? The sense that I'd better not  disturb the nurse's steady hand--the expression on her face registered the shock we both felt--that needle still buried in my butt, and the necessity of waiting for it to be withdrawn,  the wound bandaged, and the other needle inserted, the irritating reality that I had to remain absolutely still or injure myself, hindered me from leaping to my feet and clocking the guy. 
Incredibly, he remained for the entire process of me getting my shots. I asked the nurse for his name; I asked whether he had a right to enter the room under the circumstances he did, and she assured me that he did not. 
As an American living in Germany for over twenty years, I'm often stymied by German notions of privacy. Sometimes Germans seem to feel that any mention of private life is off limits. In medical settings, however, I've been handed lab results in hallways filled with other doctors and patients who get to hear all about how low my neutrophil count is or whether I need hemoglobin. My name is called in waiting rooms when I go for my blood tests. Today's incident seems in a class all by itself. A university hospital, known for its oncology department, a doctor whose internet ratings seem impeccable--what the hell was the man thinking? "Never assume they're thinking," said an old friend, and yeah, I guess I shouldn't.

Remembering My Husband, Again

When my husband and I had been married for a few weeks, he had to go to a funeral. This was a duty call—an old lady whom he did not know well. When he left our house, he was eager to come back soon and have another champagne-swilling newlywed dinner with me. Instead, he returned quietly, somber, almost in tears.

            “What’s the matter?” I asked.

            “I don’t want to think of the day when one of us will be without the other,” he said. A chill went through me but we were so happy to see each other again that we quickly pushed the incident out of our heads. I knew about the weak lungs but he seemed hale and hearty—was hale and hearty for years. He was far more worried about how I would feel without him than about how he would feel when his lungs failed him, as we feared they might. To the last, the moments in his hospital room when he wanted to tell me what office to go to in Limbecker Platz to discuss my pension and I, watching his oxygen levels plummet from a low but stable seventy to a worrisome fifty-nine, wanted him to rest, his first concern was always me and our children, never himself.

 In Philip Pullman’s amazing steampunk novel, The Amber Spyglass, an angel flies day and night to reach the adamantine castle of the Miltonic commander of a mission to unite worlds a corrupt church is trying to keep apart. The angel struggles to deliver a military secret while an impatient young Lucifer throws herbs on a fire to help this celestial being hold himself together long enough to impart the information. Just as the angel is struggling to get out one more sentence, an orderly knocks at the door. The brief gust of air caused by the orderly’s entrance is fatal: the angel disperses into atoms, vanishing, his last breath offered up to the cause for which he’s sacrificed everything. This angel and his single-minded devotion to his cause remind me strongly of Josef.

            In my husband’s last hours, when he urgently discussed the odd repairs needed for our elderly home, our taxes, we took breaks, during which I urged him to rest; we held hands and told the jokes we always told about our lives, our children, our work. Finally, I promised I’d be back early in the morning. We’d finish discussing these things then. I was afraid for him, and knew that when he lay down and rested his oxygen levels rose. I felt he wouldn’t rest unless I left. “Maybe I can do more a little later,” he said. “I’ll try to get on my side now.” Those were his last words to me before, like Philip Pullman’s character, he dissolved.

            I think of one of Josef’s favorite poets, Walt Whitman, who said this about dying:

I depart as air—I shake my white locks at the runaway sun;
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeathe myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love;
If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;
Missing me one place, search another;
I stop somewhere, waiting for you.

           

A Very Merry Megxit and a Happy Haxit: Bon Voyage

They really are too good for the Royals, especially that creepy Uncle Andrew--and how could Elizabeth have loved this dilettantish pedophile more than thoughtful Charles?
Naturally Meghan and Harry announced their new role without asking Grandma first. Grannie's a queen, and queens tend to like to do things their own way. The queen's probably not evil, but if there's a grain of truth in The Crown, and I suspect there's at least a grain, then family feeling--all feeling--tends to be hardened into duty. Her idea of duty. During the Aberfan coal mine disaster of 1966, in which over a hundred children and many adults died, the queen delayed her visit to the village for eight days, and then, at least according to version of events depicted on The Crown,  felt unable to feel any emotion-- or to do more than squeeze out a single fake tear. Her emotional life appears limited; she's apparently shut it down in order to do her duty. Meghan Markle, letting go of the Royals, remarked, "I really tried to adopt this British sensibility of a stiff upper lip. I tried, I really tried. But I think that what that does internally is probably really damaging.” Exactly. Elizabeth seems to have been willing to pay that price because she believed she had no alternative. What would have happened if Harry and Meghan had followed protocol and allowed her to make all arrangements? Letting her take the lead might have been like letting Tony Soprano sing. All her mechanisms for taking control, and I'm imagining the worst, like making it impossible to fly baby Archie to Canada, could have come into play. All in the service of the gigantically expensive institution that divides Britons the way Trump divides Americans. Harry and Meghan have imagination and talent. My money's on them as global ambassadors. Madame Tussaud's just dumped their wax figures. Petty, yeah--but underscores the point that these two are neither wax figures nor stuffed shirts--they're doers. I bet they'll do something wonderful.

The German Dryer and How We Fixed it

The German dryer (a Miele, long-suffering, going on at least its eighteenth year) stopped drying things. My daughter and I gazed into its slightly malodorous innards, removed the still-wet towels, and tried to diagnose. Could she have forgotten to put in that weird triangular water-holder peculiar to the German dryer? 
Like German forms, German taxes, German, dare I say, personalities, the German dryer is complicated. Could it, I asked softly, be suffering from the pillow that disgorged its feathers? My fault for washing the thing. And trying to dry it instead of hanging it out in the only occasionally sunny back yard.
But I'd vacuumed the dryer's innards. Or so I thought.
Between the instruction booklet, which we perused, and the faintly-remembered directions of a German friend who'd once fixed the thing, we figured out that you have to take a ruler or a screwdriver or some piece of plastic and pop open a rectangular door at the base of the dryer--a door, I hasten to add, that doesn't look like one, has no handle, and cannot be opened by pressing on one corner. We used a screwdriver. Behind that door was--guess what?--another door, modeled like the kind of wall you'd expect to see from the Soviet side of Berlin back in the day. Once we'd unlatched this second inner portcullis, we found a contraption the size of a toaster--in fact, it looked as though it wanted to be a toaster--filled with damp dust bunnies and feathers. 
The manual said one was supposed to empty and clean this thingamajig around every six months. Today was the second time in its very long career, one filled with sand and chewing gum, that it had been cleaned. 
We were calculating dryer prices before I cleaned the thing. I didn't expect our poor mistreated dryer to work, ever again, clean or not. I also thought I'd probably broken the vacuum cleaner by forcing it to inhale damp stuff. But German machines are tough enough to endure American incompetence and forge ahead. And this one has. 
Yay! I wonder how many more years our poor dryer will put up with us? My German friends have calculated a total life span of approximately twenty-five years. That is one tough machine. A Miele, folks. The kind that beats Maytag any day.

Dinner for One: a New Twist

Unlike most Americans, I watched Dinner for One (and its parodies, especially Döner for One) every year with my German husband. This year he wasn't there, and I reinterpreted Miss Sophie, the nonagenarian with the imaginary friends, whose butler manfully assumes both their four different accents and personalities as well as the considerable quantities of alcohol each gentleman supposedly consumes. Heroically, he's prepared to undergo horizontal gymnastics with the energetic Miss Sophie, winking at the audience as he leads her up the staircase and utters the famous question: "Same procedure as last year?" In her dignified way, she remonstrates, "Same procedure as every year, James," and she's clearly looking forward to a good time, even as the audience hopes James won't be incapacitated by the vast quantifies of booze he's drunk. 
This year I thought about Miss Sophie outliving all her boyfriends. But she does just what any bereaved woman naturally does--I've been doing a great deal of this myself--she talks to the dear departed (even gets her butler to talk to them!) I talk to photos of my husband, I talk to him when I feel the urge as I'm cooking or when I wake up or when I'm taking a walk. I still feel mildly surprised that he doesn't answer, but my one-sided conversation reminds me of how nice it felt when he was listening, smiling, answering, asking questions of his own. To have outlived four serious boyfriends and still get a bang, so to speak, out of the butler bespeaks a certain fortitude, a heroism, a feminist triumph even. Miss Sophie was never crushed by grief--one feels that in her quiet comments on the soup and her decisiveness about the wine. She's a woman who has learned to live with sadness and make the most of what she has. My Southern father used to say, "you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear," but what else has Miss Sophie done with James?
And finally Netflix has its own version of this gem. I with I'd bought myself one of those "Dinner for One" coffee mugs I saw on the way home today . . . I can just see pouring myself a little red wine in one of those while watching this: