Last Flight In

By Rick Boettger

I hope never to leave Key West again. Thus my recent return from Miami by air is the last time I expect to enjoy landing here. It is like returning to San Francisco across the East Bay bridge, the sight of my two most beautiful cities making it always a thrilling pleasure just to come home, no matter how exciting my travels might have been. In SF, it was Alcatraz off to the right, Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill, Nob Hill above the Transamerica Pyramid. Here, it is Fleming and Sunset Keys, Wisteria behind, then the Customs Building, all of Old Town, my big house near Garrison Bight, finally the Salt Ponds just before landing. Like SF, a good version of Paradise. We are blessed.

The trip was so NOT exciting. I went to a Kendall hospital to be with a friend after his kidney stone operation. With good cause, I have flown to Boulder, Madison, and now twice to Miami to do so. I am not a hospital and suffering junkie. Rather, I go to expiate my guilt over killing my Mother.

Twenty years ago I got a call from my Mom the day before Fantasy Fest parade night, worried about her arthogram test the next day at her local suburban hospital near Milwaukee. It was an odd test, the vessels of her brain, for the pain in her legs, but that’s what her Medicare doctor liked to do for everyone, and so that’s what she had. She was scared. I tried to reassure, her, it was a routine exam, they just inject a dye and see what your blood is doing on the CAT scan. I tried to laugh it off. I ended with, “Hey, everyone has to die some day. ….. Love you Mom, ‘Bye.”

“Some day” for her ended up being the next night, while I was having the best party night of my life down on Duval with a retired Colonel, active duty General and our wives, all as wild as the rest of the mob. She died from a brain hemorrhage caused by a botched angiogram and no care from a single nurse assigned to 25 patients in recovery. She had first suffered 8 hours of severe headaches from a blood pressure spike to 250/120. Her doctor had warned her, a headache was “code red,” meaning she needed emergency care. I read the record of her complaints, along with the BP readings. No doctor came until the next attending physician doing rounds at 4 am. His treatment of the BP triggered the hemorrhage.

I was called as her Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care advocate. She had wanted it to be my job, not her husband’s, to pull the plug in exactly this kind of eventuality, because Pete would have kept her alive as a vegetable until he died himself. So I spent two days in the hospital’s medical library verifying that that simple blotch on her medulla oblongata indeed meant that her brain was dead. When not in the library I reminisced with her, read old letters, sang her favorite songs, on the unknown chance she could still hear things, though not a muscle moved. She even needed a ventilator to breathe. With eight other local friends and family, I gave the order to turn off the machine, and we all sang her most favorite song, six times before her super-strong heart, after climbing desperately to 220 beats a minute, finally let her go. 250 attended her funeral, mostly waitresses she had trained in her senior years, having been a lifelong waitress, and families where she was babysitting Grandma to an army of little kids she played with in her humble above-ground pool. To know Millie was to love her. She was a saint.

I met with the angiogram doctor and five other hospital honchos, who apologized and accepted the record of her suffering. The poor nurse was on leave because she broke down with remorse and could not bear to face me. I did not blame her. Her being responsible for 25 was a product of our heartless system prioritizing profits over patient care at every stage. It was the fault of the system, not the nurse.

No, actually, it was my fault. In our system, it is the job of those who love you to vigilantly care for you at any hospital. When someone like me is in the waiting room, all the medical staff simply pay closer attention. And they will do what I demand, when the patient is too out of it to stand up for themselves. If I had been with Mom, she damn well would have gotten a doctor as soon as the headaches started, not eight hours later. My cavalier “Everyone has to die someday” is what killed her, more so than the system. I have never forgiven myself. I’d like to share the widespread belief that some wacky prophet two millenia ago, a perfect man, died to forgive our sins. Maybe that over-rules my own hard, unforgiving nature. Here’s hoping, or I’ll see some of you in hell.

I live with this as a cold corner of my otherwise Keys-warm life. And all I can do now for my Mom is do for everyone else what I should have done for her, simply be with them at the hospital, and advocate for them. For Cynthia’s brother in Madison, I got them to remove his ventilator tubes, not at all necessary, and causing a non-stop panic attack after his heart surgery. For her sister in Boulder, it was getting her the pain meds she needed after her back surgery. For Cynthia’s same back surgery during COVID, I couldn’t be with her at Jackson, but spent the week in a Miami Beach hotel, just to be closer to her—useless, as the cell phone connection would have been the same from my home in Key West, but I felt I just had to do SOMETHING, be as close to her as possible. Her, I only helped escape from the dreadfully prolonged aftercare the Miami hospitals do to keep those Medicare dollars flowing.

After my friend Mark’s second kidney stone operation in six months, all I had to do was be with him in recovery and fly him home. It had been a lot easier in Key West, just two hours of recovery at our local Surgery Center before driving 2 miles home. This time it was 20 hours with him through the afternoon and overnight before I got him a ticket to fly home with me (he’d had an ambulance ride to get down there). The invidiousness of the Kendall Baptist hospital system is well known and not the topic here. Why anyone would go to Kendall for care over the much better care I and Mark receive here is beyond me. Mark was tricked.

I’m writing this because I told this story to both my Key West and Kendall cab drivers on the way to EYW and from MIA to HBC-A. They both thanked me for sharing, and were glad to know the story. They said I am a “good man.” I say, I am a better man because my Mom’s final tragic gift to me was motivating me to do this minor care-taking work in her name. Nothing will bring her back or erase my terrible last words to her, so NOT the words and actions of a “good man.” It is small, but the best that I can do.

Moral: don’t blow off your Mom when she’s scared, it may haunt you to the end of your days. Do be with friends and family at the hospital, as you might save their life.

[livemarket market_name="KONK Life LiveMarket" limit=3 category=“” show_signup=0 show_more=0]