A Lucky Life Interrupted by Tom Brokaw

Author:Tom Brokaw
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2015-05-11T16:00:00+00:00

Spring

By early April I was feeling stronger than at any time since the diagnosis. Ron Olson, my fellow Mayo board member and the first to know, called on a Saturday evening to get a report and I said, “Best I’ve felt in a long while.”

Sunday morning I awoke feeling “fluie,” an expression favored by Meredith’s doctor father at the onset of flu. By that evening it went from onset to full-blown. I was miserable with congestion, aches in other muscles, swallowing difficulties.

With germ-fighting blood cells on the other team a flu infection can quickly go terminal. So for only the second time in my life I was quickly rolling down a Sloan corridor in a wheelchair, headed for treatment against this potentially perilous condition.

Once again at the check-in: “Tom Brokaw, two six four oh.”

The Sloan urgent care physician in charge asked on entry if I’d had a flu shot. Of course, just last September. “So did I,” she explained, “but I’m just back after eight days out with this strain. I think our flu shots were for last year’s flu.”

There it is again, the body’s constant adaptation to help or hurt us, the vast, intricate systems reacting to whatever enters their spheres of influence.

Scientists in the lab and physicians in their practices are learning more every day about the connectivity of this universe of parts and fluids and still they have untold miles to go, stopping and starting for clinical trials, new imaging devices and investigations into the sources of new, dangerous conditions that pop up every day.

My spacious room quickly became a ward of its own.

Saline solution drips, antibiotics every six hours, teams of internal medicine specialists and their residents, pulmonologists with breathing aids, nurses, and Jennifer, who flew in from Nashville, where she had been for a friend’s fiftieth birthday.

Two nights, three days of intense, round-the-clock care and I was able to return home with the cautionary warning that I seemed to be susceptible to bronchial episodes and it would require close monitoring.

As every hospital visit seemed to, this one turned up another memorable immigrant story. One of the young pulmonologists had an engaging personality so I probed some. He was Chinese.

Medical school? I asked.

He chuckled, “Beijing but also Taipei; I’m Taiwanese but I was educated in Belize.”

What?

He explained that when he was ten his father, the proprietor of a modest Taiwanese restaurant, saw a video promising to teach Chinese kids English in Belize in six months. So the dad sent my new friend to Belize at age ten with his slightly older brother and there they stayed for eight years, learning English and a good deal more.

They returned home on long, circuitous flights for summers and then went back to Belize. Steven Hsu said his parents were what the Chinese call “tiger parents,” very demanding, and he adored them for making him what he is today. When the family restaurant had some economic difficulties he and his wife, a bank analyst, bought his parents a bed and breakfast in Belize.

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