When I wrote this
short story, back in 1972, I used a lot of my experiences and memories.
The ending is one of the logical outcomes that
I envisioned for myself.
The Inevitable
At seven o'clock,
the LDS Hospital nurse tells the couple they can
go in.
Darrell, maybe 27
years old and about six feet tall, is a husky construction worker whose firm
powerful hands, tanned to a smooth brown during long hours working under the
sun, tightly holds his wife’s small, delicate hand.
As they pass the
nurses counter, the young mother of three quietly murmurs, "Why?"
Shelley, who has dark
brown hair that is set in large sagging curls, normally has a smile and sweet
words for everyone. Today she’s just somber.
Looking up at
Darrell, her watery blue eyes meet his.
Approaching room
309, they hesitate, glance at each other and then push open the large, wooden
door and enter.
The small room
has a large, metal-framed bed in the middle. To the left, the August sun shines
through a narrow oblong window as the wind whips a lose screen against the
pane.
The walls are a
barren white. There’s a half-empty cup of water and a water pitcher on a small
table to the left of the bed. White sheets cover all but the face and arm of
the young man lying quietly in the large bed.
As the couple
enters, the young man smiles and, for a moment, he seems well – except for his
chalk-white face.
"It's about
time. I was beginning to wonder," Mike Norton says in greeting his
visitors.
"The nurse
wouldn't let us in," Darrell answers.
"She sure is
good looking," Mike says. I asked her to marry me and my wooden leg when I
get out of here."
"What . . .
what did she say," Darrell hesitantly asks.
"What they
all say when I'm joking – sure," Mike laughs.
He must have
laughed too hard because he begins coughing.
Catching his
breath for a moment, "Those white blood cells are really battling."
Then he coughs again and again.
Darrell and
Shelley move closer. Mike reaches out and grabs Darrell’s hand, and Darrell
holds tight.
Mike, Darrell's
younger brother, is short and was once a little chubby with fleshy cheeks that
made him look a lot like a chipmunk. Now, his cheeks are gaunt and pale. His
hazel eyes, though circled by storm clouds, still have a sparkle.
Mike has lost ten
pounds since entering the hospital three days earlier. He mentions it to his
brother, then adds: "When I was in the hospital back in ‘70, I lost about
25 pounds – in two hours!" As he speaks, he pats the empty space where his
left leg should have been.
Mike looks at his
sister-in-law, and Shelley forces a smile.
Forty-five
minutes slowly pass, punctuated by long stretches of silence, as they chat
about the past – mostly about Mike and Darrell’s hunting trips with their
father.
When Patricia,
Mike’s young blonde nurse, enters carrying a syringe, Mike moans: "Not
again!"
"Again,"
Patricia says. "Where this time?"
Mike points to
his right thigh.
As Patricia moves
closer, he adds, "I bet it's morphine. I'll be a drug addict when I get
out of here."
Patricia says
nothing as she drives the needle into Mike’s thigh, injects the drug, removes
the syringe and quickly leaves the room.
Five minutes
later, the drug begins its work.
"Just what I
need, sleep! Here we have a few minutes, Mike says, and I can't keep my eyes
open."
"Go ahead
and sleep. We'll stay as long as we can," Shelley says.
Darrell, now
sitting in a chair up close to Mike’s bed, holds tight to Mike's hand as his
little brother seems to sleep. Darrell and Shelley exchange glances as Shelley
takes a seat in the corner of the room.
"I can't
believe it," Mike thinks, "Why me? Where -- how did it begin?
Remember . . . .
"President,
got a minute?” Mike asks as he leans on the door frame leading into President
Smith’s mission office in San Jose,
Costa Rica.
“Sure,” President
Smith answers as he beckons Elder Norton into his office.
“It's my leg,”
Mike tells his mission president. It isn't any better. I can hardly stand on
it. Do you think I should go see a doctor? I’m thinking it might be a re-injury
to my knee that I banged up in a snow-tubing accident about three years ago.”
“Maybe you ought
to, Elder. You’ve been hobbling around for way too long. Go see a doctor as
soon as you can get an appointment. You need to get back to your missionary
work."
"July 7,
1970, was the first operation," Mike remembers.
"You'll be
out of here in a couple of days," encourages Dr. Steinworth, Mike's Costa
Rican German doctor. Dr. Steinworth received his medical degrees in the United States before setting up his practice as
a bone specialist in his native San
Jose.
"I'll never
figure out what made me go to a bone doctor,” Mike half thinks, half dreams.
“Usually any doctor would have been all right.”
For a moment,
Mike’s back in his LDS
Hospital room with
Darrell and Shelley where all that breaks the silence is the beeping monitor
behind Mike’s head – that, and an occasional slight bang as the loose screen
slaps against the window pane.
Through the
still, Darrell keeps a firm grip on Mike's hand.
Quickly, Mike’s
mind is back in Costa Rica
and the memories of his last two months there in San Jose.
"'Oh it
hurts –I can't stand it,” Mike remembers himself yelling at one point in his
post-surgery “recovery.”
“You won't
believe it,” he recalls writing in his diary. “I stayed in the hospital for a
week after the first operation when they removed a broken cartilage – from that
tubing accident – and three weeks later, July 29, I was back in again. What
luck!
“Elder
Galan, my companion at the time, got a call and needed to go meet someone
downtown. I didn't want him to go alone, so I limped along leaning on a cane.
My hand went numb.
“After getting
off the bus at the downtown plaza, we had to cross a street, which was maybe 30
yards wide. The light was in our favor, but it also favored the guy in the Jeep
Land Rover, who sped around the corner, heading straight at us. Elder Galan
jumped out of the way, but when I tried, I twisted up my bad left leg. I ended
up with my hands on the front of the Rover. The pain in my knee shot through
me, and I began to fall apart. The driver of the Rover took me to the hospital
– all the while listing to me moaning and crying like a baby. It was the worst
pain I think I've ever experienced. Finally after arriving at the hospital and
waiting what seemed like hours, someone gave me a pain injection and it quickly
began to do its job. Then, after rolling me all over the corridors in a wheelchair,
I ended up on the X-ray table."
"My old
friend the X-ray table," Mike says, startling Darrell.
"What about
the X-ray table," Darrell asks.
"Ah,
nothing,” Mike mumbles. “I was just thinking." Mike quickly falls back
into his memories.
"Dr.
Steinworth finally came, and I just held tight to his arm. Three days later,
they released me and I spent a week laying around at Dona Marta’s home. What a
nice lady – fed me in bed."
"That was
the last entry I made in my missionary journal," Mike recalls.
"You'll have
to leave now," Patricia tells Mike’s visitors as she enters with a new
pitcher of ice water.
"He's
sleeping," Darrell quietly tells the nurse.
"You better
leave. You should be able to see him tomorrow," Patricia suggests.
Darrell releases
his grip for the first time and quietly walks out with Shelley. Patricia sets
the ice water pitcher on the tray next to Mike's bed. She then notices him looking
up at her.
"You weren't
asleep," she asks, already knowing the answer.
She stands at his
side with her fingers curled around the bed rail, pausing for a moment in
thought.
"When did
you know you had cancer," her eyes ask? But without asking or getting an
answer, she turns and walks out.
"When was
it," Mike asks himself. "The third time I went into the hospital in San Jose – or was it
later?"
Mike remembers
Dr. Steinworth saying, "I think it's either infection or some form of
cancer — benign or malignant. You'll have to be admitted today so we can find
out for sure.”
Mike beckons back
the memory and even the date, Aug. 22, 1970, when President Smith and Dr.
Steinworth came into his San Jose
hospital room. It was three days after the exploratory surgery to determine
whether the cancer was malignant. From the look on their faces, it wasn’t
Christmastime.
“We're going to
fly you home tomorrow so the doctors in Salt Lake
can take care of you,” President Smith told Mike. The next day he was headed
home.
“Let me remove
those two arm rests between the seats so you can stretch out," said the
slender airline hostess with a permanent smile as Mike hobbled down the aisle
aboard the airliner that took him on the second leg of the trip – from Miami to
Chicago – of a 12-hour flight from San Jose to Salt Lake City.
"The moment
I really knew and accepted that it was cancer was in Dr. Olsen’s Salt Lake
office. The date was the 28th of August."
"'We'll have
to remove your leg above the knee," Dr. Olsen explained to Mike. We want
to make sure we get it all.”
“I cried, I
really cried then,” Mike remembers – but mostly when no one was around.
“All the crying
stopped,” Mike recalls, “after the conversation I had with the Lord the night
before the amputation. About 11:30 p.m., the hospital was resting, the room was
dark and no one could hear as I began a prayer – a vocal prayer. Across the
room was an old man who was snoring up a storm and who really couldn’t hear
anything if he had been awake.
“I talked with my
Lord: 'I don't know why this is all happening to me, Father, I'm really not
worrying about that. But I need help — I really need it. I can't hack it alone.
This thing I can't do myself. I love playing basketball and dancing and hiking.’
"What will I
do? I want to be normal. I want to love. I want to find a girl that loves me. I
can't die, yet, I haven't married yet. I've really had a great life, but I’m
only 20 years old and, Lord, I want to do more. I need thy help – I need it.’
"I had never
felt anything so strong as I did after that prayer," Mike remembers. “I
was given an answer – and the strength to go on.
“Whether I lived
a long full life or not didn’t matter as much as knowing that there is a loving
Father in Heaven and life after this one. I knew I would be whole once again –
and maybe even be able to play some basketball there.”
"September
1, 1970, I was wheeled back into my hospital room – one leg less," Mike
thought back. For a few days I was really sick, and then everything went much
smoother. The doctors and nurses even got mad at me for being so jovial."
The next
milestone came a few weeks after being released from the hospital following the
amputation: "Look, I've got my new leg!” Mike announced to his family
after returning from Intermountain Limb and Brace Co.
“I'll dance
again,' he added. It was the sixth day of the first month of the New Year.
“Are you going
back to school?” asked a friend soon after Mike began using canes instead of
crutches with his artificial leg.
“I'll start in
about two weeks – January 20th, to be exact," Mike boasted.
Mike, torn away
from his memories and back into the present, coughs uncontrollably. As he
reaches for the buzzer, he wheezes in a breath. The room is dark except for the
light from a small lamp to the right of his bed.
“Four years of
college in three years. Not bad for a guy who can only cough and wheeze
now," Mike says as Patricia comes in.
"Here, let
me help you," she says, wiping his chin.
Mike coughs
again, and she wipes his chin again.
"On a scale
of one to 10," she asks him?
He mumbles: “Nine
point five.”
Finally, the
coughing eases and Mike relaxes. "Why did it come back after the
amputation?" Mike asks himself.
Opening his
water-glazed eyes, he looks at the blood serum dripping from a clear plastic
bag into the plastic, narrow tube that leads to his arm. His heavy eyelids involuntarily
close.
"I wonder
what its like?"
Mike imagines his
weary eyes opening again, "What time is it," he faintly asks?
He doesn't hear
the reply – he’s off again into the past.
"I remember
the time I scored 26 points playing on our church basketball team. What moves I
had!"
Tears slowly form
at the corner of his eyes, then roll down his cheeks.
"Lord!"
Mike, for the
first time, becomes conscious of the slow thump of his heart.
"Tha-thump.
Tha-thump. Tha-thump."
"Everything
is all right," he says to himself.
His listless eyes
open slightly. There are people standing next to his bed, but who are they?
"Hi,"
he tries to say. Nothing comes out but a soft moan.
All he can hear
is his heart:
"Tha-thump. Tha-thump. Tha- . . . .
Not only is it interesting to read this fictional version of my cancer ordeal forty years after the fact, but even more so to read my own critique of the story.
Critique of “The Inevitable”
December of 1972
The goal in writing this short story was to help others better understand how I feel when I think about my life and about death.
The story was written to convey an emotion, possibly mixed emotions. What emotion? It’s hard to explain, but not so hard to write about it and let others explain to me.
It was written to tell my story. Of course the ending is fictitious but is still the most important part of the story.
There are three reasons why I had Mike die at the end:
First: I didn't want to do the story in a strict chronological order – from the beginning to his death – but to start at his death bed and go back to the be¬ginning, then return to his death bed, then go back into the past again, and again return to the death bed until the past was the present. I felt that the death bed could be the best revolving door to the time changes. I felt this part was a strong point of my story: the time changes.
Having the death bed as the revolving door to the time changes allowed me to remind the reader that Mike was dying as the reader examined the past events in Mike’s life, thus giving them the ability to see what was happening while knowing the end result.
Secondly: Having him die allowed the reader to see the past in the eyes of death. I accomplished this goal quite adequately.
Thirdly, I felt that it would mean more to the story if the young, returned missionary died – a note of irony to show his faith when, that which killed him, he received on his mission.
The story could have been written in first person, but too many things that I wanted to do would have been lost. The most important difference would be that if it was written in first person, the reader would be less sympathetic toward the writer who was telling his own sad story. In third person, I was able to step one step back and tell the story -- allowing the reader to be more sympathetic toward the main character.
The story written in third person allowed the reader to see more of the actions of those around him and outside of the room and even look at himself.
Writing in the omniscient form as pertaining to the main character, allowed the writer to do two things:
First, go back in the past through Mike’s present thinking, seeing what he thought and what had happened. I felt I accomplished what I wanted in this area.
Secondly, the goal of showing the feelings and emotions could really come out when the readers could read for themselves what Mike was thinking.
There were two conflicts: conflict between life and death, and conflict between ideal of the young man living out a good and happy life and his dying – or reality.
I feel I was successful in what I wanted to accomplish in this story.