We were tired before the waiting even began. We had gotten up at 7 a.m. Sunday, had driven five hours to arrive at 11 p.m., and hadn’t gotten out of the hospital till after 1 a.m. Monday. It was close to 2 a.m. before I escaped into sleep, and it was only a little after 7 a.m. when my alarm woke me up. And Dale had spent the night sleeping in his clothes on one of the couches in the living room.
We got up, washed our faces, had a tense, silent breakfast of eggs and toast and coffee at the People’s Drug Store counter, and were reassembled in the fourth floor waiting room – still outside of visiting hours – by 7:30. Dannis was there when we arrived. The Schlachters were in with David.
Three orderlies came by with a bed on wheels. They came back with Dave lying on it. I got the merest glimpse of him. They had shaved his head.
The Schlachters came out to the waiting room, because another patient was being admitted to Dave’s semi-private room. Now the little waiting room held six of us, two in their sixties, four in their twenties. And now we really began to wait.
Silence wasn’t very comfortable. Neither was speech. Long spells in which nobody said anything, then someone would make a comment and someone would seize on it, and someone would extend it, and extract a reply. When it could no longer be maintained, the painful silence would resume as if it had never been interrupted, as in fact it hadn’t.
At nine, we asked the nurse at the desk if the operation had started. She didn’t know and said she couldn’t find out.
It didn’t take long for the chairs to become very uncomfortable. “Of course you couldn’t expect the chairs to be comfortable,” Dale said, getting up to stretch. “This is a waiting room, nobody could have expected that people might have to wait in them.” It earned him some feeble smiles, which is pretty much what all our attempts at gallows humor met that day.
Was it ten-thirty? Possibly later. No word.
“The décor isn’t much,” Toutant said, “but you have to admit, at least we don’t have to pretend to be awake while somebody is lecturing.”
Eleven. I started to pace, then thought it might annoy the others. Stopped. Started again, unconsciously. Stopped. Made myself sit down.
“You boys are missing a lot of class.”
“Yeah,” I said, “Isn’t it great?”
Andrews said this was the closest thing to a legitimate excuse for cutting classes we had ever had.
I suddenly realized that I was scheduled to work at the Safeway Jr. from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. I wondered how I would manage to stay awake.
Eleven thirty. Dennis stretched, and looked at his watch for the thousandth time.
Noon. Mr. Schlachter straightened out of his chair and announced that he and “the boys” were going to have lunch across the street.
Breakfast at People’s. Lunch at People’s. a monumentally joyless lunch. We stretched it out as long as we could, and still we were back in 40 minutes. No word.
Mrs. Schlachter said she was going to get something to eat downstairs. She was back in 15 minutes. She smiled wanly and said she’d found she wasn’t very hungry.
More waiting. By now I hated the walls, the chairs, the public-address system.
One-thirty. Dennis got up abruptly, left the room. He was back a moment later. “I know that nurse,” he said. “She’s in one of my classes. I asked her to find out how long now.”
Andrews snorted. “That figures. The amazing thing, when you come to think of it, is that it has taken this long for Crabb to find a woman here he knows.”
We all grinned at that, tired, half-hearted grins.
Dennis got up again when he saw her coming, and went out to meet her. He returned looking a little less tense. “She’s an O.R. nurse,” he said, “so she could go on in. She said they’re finishing up now. ” Mrs. Schlachter redoubled her attack on her handkerchief, but I thought, maybe this was good news. Hadn’t they said it was life or death? And he wasn’t dead. And they had been working on him for a long time, long enough to find the problem and get rid of it.
More waiting.
Finally at 2:30, Dr. Tenley entered the room and asked to see the Schlachters in the consultation room. When we all rose to accompany them, he said this was for family members only. Mr. Schlachter said, “After last night and today, they’re family,” and Dr. Tenley gave in, and we all filed into the little consultation room with its blackboard, and its grey walls, four incongruous red plastic chairs. Bill and I stood against the wall as the doctor explained. It wasn’t good news.