DEPARTMENT:

The Procedure

I remember sitting in a doctor’s office at The Queen’s Medical Center last year, reading a book. My hair kept getting caught in plastic Christmas stars stretched around the room, and in the corner a Mylar tree twinkled and tried to look festive. Beside it was an incongruous display case with a model of a female Borg—the formidable race from “Star Trek” that incorporates technology weirder than stents into their organic bodies. They’re the ones who say, “Resistance is futile.”

My husband Dwight had a Procedure called an angiogram scheduled the next day, and he was consulting with, according to the framed Honolulu magazine clippings on the office wall, one of the best cardiologists in Hawaii.

Dwight and I have been together 25 years. We live on the Big Island in a house with the same bachelor decor as our first apartment, just more of it. No kids, no sweat. We work at hotels—him at night, me during the day—and in between we enjoy the company of friends over sunset beers, good jokes and sci-fi.

When Dwight’s stubborn cholesterol numbers wouldn’t go down, the doctor put him on a treadmill and discovered an anomaly (a good Federation word), which warranted an angiogram. In a hospital. In Honolulu. The week before Christmas.

Catherine Bridges Tarleton and her husband Dwight live in Waikoloa on the Big Island.

They would insert tubing through his leg up into his heart, then inject dye and take pictures of the arteries. If they “found something,” they’d do an angioplasty—inflate a balloon to open the artery. If there was total blockage, they’d install a stent, a tube that would hold the artery open until new transporter technology allowed them to beam out the obstruction.

That was his Procedure. My Procedure went something like this: Arrange air, room and car. Take time off work. Pack a bag and make sure I have a book to read. Argue with myself.

“I can’t go. I can’t deal with it.”

“Yes, you can. You are a professional, mature woman. Over 50, remember?”

“I have too much to do here. He doesn’t really need me and I don’t have the right clothes. I’ll get lost driving from the hospital.”

“You’ll be fine.”

“NO. I am not like Sarah who has Sam’s hospital bed in the living room and oxygen tubes stretched all over the house. No thanks. Not me. No kids and no patients. No diapers, no enemas.”

“Listen, I am going. I will figure out what to do. You can come or not. I don’t care.”

Two days before we left I fell down the stairs and sprained both ankles. On my butt in the driveway, I convinced myself to stand up. “Nice try. But we’re going anyway.”

After the consultation at Queen’s, we wandered around Ala Moana Center (I was still limping) and wondered why all the Christmas things looked so joyless. Then we went to the Chart House for a drink.

The bartender bought us a round and said, “Good luck tomorrow.” I thought of all the bars Dwight and I had been to and thought, To be able to sit and lift a glass with someone you love is a gift.

His Procedure went fine and we got a reprieve. No angioplasty, no stent. There was some minor weakening and the ghost of a heart attack that apparently compensated for itself. Prescription: Take a baby aspirin every day.

The next day we were home, wondering what that was all about. Other people, other wives, might have started changing things, thrown out the beer and ordered a treadmill, but I was overwhelmed with one thought: Maybe we’re doing something right.

Growing old is the Procedure. We can worry about it or read a book, make jokes, have a drink, argue with fear and sometimes win. We don’t get to pick how we will die, but if we’re very lucky we can pick how we will live. We’re going either way. Resistance is futile.—Catherine Bridges Tarleton

Humorous, touching, inspiring, thought-provoking—we welcome your personal observations about Life After Fifty. E-mail your 800-word essay and phone number to Editor Cheryl Chee Tsutsumi at cheryl@tradepublishing.com.

 

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