Code:

Code: blue.  Heart hospital.  Fourth floor.  Room 2071.

It repeats.

I pretend like I can't hear.  Like the quietly playing NCIS on the small TV in the upper corner of the room is much louder and drowns out the sound.

Code: blue.  Heart hospital.  Fourth floor.  Room 2071.  For the third time.

Or like the book in my hand is so interesting, so engaging I can't even hear anything.

But I hear it.

And I'm glad we aren't on the fourth floor.


We are on the first.  Surgery wing.  He's in the bed.  Waiting for a minor procedure.

Sure.  Minor.  Because when they stick this little thing that connects to your blood vessel so that they can administer chemo without poking you, without trying however many times it takes to find a vein, because you'll get chemo every two weeks for six months, when they stick that little triangular thing that is as thick as a stack of quarters called a power port into the muscle in your chest, it's pretty minor.  It'll just be minor sedation.  An IV knockout.  Not the gas.  With anesthetic shots in the area.

It's no big deal.  It's not like a bowel resection using a DaVinci procedure that turns you upside down and uses four small incisions and some huge machine operated by your surgeon to cut out part of your intestine and a tumor and 22 lymph nodes, one of which is cancerous.  That was five weeks ago.


I guess it is fairly minor.  I wait in the prep room with him longer than it takes for the whole thing to be over.  It takes longer in that small room where I hear, maybe twenty minutes after it sounded the first time:

Code: blue.  Heart hospital.  Fourth floor.  Room 2071.

It's only repeated once this time.


I'm finished eating my $5.50 omlette, with spinach and peppers from the hospital cafeteria where I go after he's taken out of the prep room, when the beeper buzzes.  This beeper, that looks like one of those things you get a restaurant like Olive Garden, tells me I need to go speak to the ladies at the desk where we checked in.  I have an update.

I have two conflicting emotions.  One in the pit of my stomach.  Update?  How did it go?  But before that line of thought can go much further, my humor sets in.  I look at the beeper.  How bad could it be? My table is ready.

And there is nothing bad when I get to the desk with the nice ladies in colorful scrubs.  He's going to his recovery room.  I get a slip of paper and instructions.


I arrive as he's wheeled into the room.  The doctor comes in, does some explaining, hands me the script for more pain pills.  Obviously still groggy, he tells the doctor a joke.  What did the driver say to the one-legged hitchhiker?

Hop in!

It takes the doctor a few seconds to get it.  But he laughs.  He must be feeling fine if he's cracking jokes.  Especially the one he got me to tell on joke day in preschool.

The nurse goes over things, and after crackers, water and a percocet, he's ready to be wheeled to my car.  I leave to pull it around.

I'm walking through the automatic sliding doors, when I wonder if the person in room 2071 coded again.

I didn't hear anything after that second time.

But that could be good.

Or worse.