There is No Crying in Medical Advocacy
What do you do when your best friend is really sick? Fix up his apartment.
When my 87-year-old mother had a stroke; the bad, can’t walk, thinks ISIS is a disease, blows out half your brain kind; I stayed at her apartment in Daytona Beach while they had in her rehab to see if anything could be done.
I wasn’t working at max health myself: My wrist had been shattered in a bike accident, I couldn’t drive, as I didn’t yet have full use of my hand, so Herb, my best friend, came down from New York to help.
I couldn’t sleep, either. In the middle of the night, I would get up and straighten up Ma’s big walk-in closet.
My mother was of the Why Spend Money When I Can Fix It With Something I’ve Got Lying Around the House school of decor.
She had repaired the microwave handle which had broken off with a twisted metal coat hanger. Her walk-in closet had a plastic hanging system, which she’d probably bought on sale at The Dollar Store; a jerry-built storage system of milk cartons and plywood; interconnected metal skirt hangers, many of which had contorted themselves into bizarre shapes in a desperate attempt to make a run for it.
I especially hated the twisted metal hangers. When I wasn’t at rehab with Ma, I made Herb drive me to shopping centers, where I bought dozens of pink and black velcro hangers, and I rebuilt the closet: Four a.m., 6 a.m., left to right: knit shirts, pedal pushers, casual skirts, dress skirts, good pants, synagogue blouses, good suits. Lower level, cold-weather clothes for going north. Boxes on the opposite wall, waist level; shorts, because you wear a lot of shorts in Florida.
“What are you doing?” Herb asks one daybreak, hearing me.
“I’m making it nice for her when she comes home,” I say.
Then I amend it.
“I’m trying to fix it,” I say. “I’m trying to make believe it can be fixed.”
Three weeks ago Herb, who is 83 and has had slow-moving Parkinson’s for years, becomes so weak he cannot stand and we end up in the emergency room of NYU-Langone.
“Look, you know me,” Herb says after they bring him back into the big waiting room on a trolley and he’s got an IV in his arm. “I’d rather stick around, but death is no big deal.”
I am Herb’s medical advocate. I have the whole clutch of Health Care Proxy, Durable Power of Attorney to Communicate Health Care Decisions, If I Should Have An Incurable and Irreversible Condition Do Not Resuscitate forms.
You know that movie where they say, “There is no crying in baseball?”
There is no crying in medical advocacy. Not in front of the person you are looking out for, anyway. You finagle them a better room, you text the hot shot oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering to backfield the medical reports, you ask the barber who’s trimmed your friend’s hair for thirty years to make a hospital call, you track down the nurse to get your friend to the bathroom now, you call the President of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn you profiled twenty years ago about cremation, because one day, Herb looks that bad.
“Hey, Joyce, still driving Miatas?” he says.
The weird thing about Herb’s illness – which in his first days at the hospital leaves him too weak to get out of bed on his own -- is that nobody knows what it is. A flare-up of Parkinson’s, which would be strange, because a few weeks earlier, he’d been doing Tai chi? Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma? A virus?
After a week in the hospital, Herb is still too weak to go back to his place, a rent-stabilized one-bedroom which, not to put too fine a point on it, is a wreck. Herb’s home décor philosophy, whether it’s finding a new cleaning lady or replacing the kitchen appliances that were in the apartment when he moved in fifty years ago, is “I’ll Get Around To It.”
Mine is, “How can anybody live like this?”
You do not put a microwave on a tiny New York City kitchen table so that there is no space for anything else, I tell Herb. You have a shelf built for the microwave and you eat at the damned table. The landlord did not give you a new oven when the old one broke; he gave you an oven from an apartment that was being rehabbed because you’re a rent-stabilized tenant and he wants you out.
Naturally, for the last thirty years or so of our friendship, Herb has not let me set foot in his apartment. He has rightly understood he would be hocked to shreds.
Now, being stuck first in the hospital and then in a rehab center and needing such basic writer’s equipment as his computer and chargers, plus someone to check his mail and send in his taxes, and pick up the laundry, Herb has had no choice but to let me go in.
He also – and this is a testament to how weak he is – has agreed to let me get a few things fixed or replaced; the hall closet that is missing half its shelves; the space-devouring Louis XV writing desk that was there when he moved in, so naturally he kept it; the mammoth 70’s bachelor leather recliner which I’m certain, under a pile of throws and parkas, hides the mummified body of an editor who pissed Herb off twenty years ago.
I organize Herb’s closet. (Dress shirts, casual shirts, winter jeans, summer jeans, suits.) I throw out the stack of newspapers Herb neatly tied together for recycling under a side table ten years ago and forgot. I decide that the empty cans of Pledge under the sink have no resale value. I track down the super, who sees the look in my eye and regards me with terror, and tell him that hall closet is going to be fixed now. I call up my sister-in-law with the great eye and ask her to track down a compact microwave stand with shelves and something with storage space to replace the horrible desk.
And here is the craziest part: In the beginning, when Herb is in the hospital, I am not even sure Herb will be able to come back to his apartment.
“This is insane,” I tell myself. “This is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”
It’s also eerily familiar. It’s what I did with my mother: I’m trying to make it nice for when Herb comes home. I’m trying to fix it.
The doctors, as I write this, think what wreaked havoc on Herb’s body was a virus or some sort of infection. He is now in rehab, doing reps with small weights, and hiking up and down the halls with a walker and a therapist.
I, however, still have the keys to Herb’s apartment.
A recliner with a mummified body will be appearing on a Greenwich Village street soon.
I love you. T%his is one of the 4 million reasons why.
I've been reading about you and Herb for years. I feel like I know him. I wish him an excellent recovery.