Alone -- And Scared

I met Beth when I started at USF in the fall of 1965.  We were part of a close-knit college crowd that stayed together loosely over the years.  In or around 2010, I was living in Texas and got a Facebook pop-up from a "Beth Walker."  I didn't recognize her married name, but we soon realized we had been friends way back when.

 

I was traveling between Texas and Florida, trying to see the last manned space launch.  While visiting with friends in Stuart, Beth reached out to me via computer and I suggested she come down and "hang out" with us.  She did, and the rest is history.

 

You see, after traveling back and forth for a number of years, Beth and I decided to be together for the rest of our lives.  And to take care of one another forever.  I moved back here to her beautiful property here in Odessa, although I've always thought of myself as a South Tampa boy (Hyde Park and Gray Gables, and the bay side of Westshore just south of Euclid).

 

I sold my house and most of my belongings and came to live with Beth July 3, 2016.  We were our own best friends, mainly because most of my Tampa friends either still lived south of Kennedy or how moved elsewhere.  In a way, we started out isolated because this is four acres of country, fronting on Lake Hiawatha.  There are nearby neighbors, but no one I could really call a "friend."

 

Beth had been a lifelong smoker but had stopped cold turkey about 3 years ago.  Still, they had to arthroscopically remove a wedge section of the lower lobe of her right lung in December 2018.  When January rolled around this year, I beseeched Beth to schedule her annual follow-up tests.  But she procrastinated -- and then the virus hit in March.  She finally pushed on and got the tests.

 

It was about three weeks before the 4th of July weekend, on a Sunday night when she received her test results online.  They were not good.  There was something growing again in the lower right lobe -- and it hadn't been there a year ago.  That meant it was growing fairly quickly.  

 

The very next day we went to the scheduled appointment with her lung surgeon.  Getting right to the point, he said he wanted to go in and arthroscopically remove (as in the past) the entire lower lobe.  The recovery, he said, would be fairly quick since the procedure was not too invasive.  He wanted whatever was in there OUT.  And so surgery was scheduled July 6, just after the holiday.  But what had changed was hospital visitation: it was now prohibited.  We went to get her COVID-19 test the week before and then showed up at 6 a.m. on Monday.  I pulled down Beth's mask, kissed her warmly on the lips, told her I loved her and whispered encouraging words.

 

It would be the last time I saw her alive.

 

She went under the knife around noon, but things went awry quickly.  The surgeon encountered so much scar tissue stuck to the lung that he had to open her up with a foot-long incision, remove a large rib just below her breast, and start cutting away the lobe from everything that had somehow grown attached to it.

 

Unbelievably, she called me that night, exhausted.  "I'm tired," she said.  "And I'm having trouble breathing."  My reply was to say something encouraging, like "Of course, look what you've just been through."  I told her to try to get some rest and I would call the hospital early the next morning to see how she had made it through the night.

 

The next day, I called bright and early but couldn't get anyone to answer until around mid-morning.  I got ICU nursing first, I think, and they said that they would be getting her up in the recliner and having her breathe into the spirometer to improve her lung capacity.  And then I talked to Beth once more.  She said, "I'm tired and I'm scared."  It was heart-breaking that I could not be with her. Again, I pleaded with her to get some rest.

 

The nurses said I would be contacted by a nurse and a physician late that afternoon.  But as the day wore on, there was no phone call.  Living out here in the country, I decided to take the car up the long driveway to get the mail and to stop by the old, broken-down barn where we feed a small colony of feral cats.

 

As I stopped the car to feed her little family -- she did love them so -- the phone rang.  It was the surgeon.  "Beth as taken a turn for the worse," he said.  She was unconscious, they had had to intubate her and put her on the ventilator.  "Her lungs filled up with fluid," the surgeon told me.  "We could hear her gurgling from across the ICU, struggling for breath."  He went on to describe some medical conditions, but when he used the term "ARDS," my ears perked up.  I had been reading about ARDS in conjunction with COVID-19, and I knew it was not a good sign.  I stopped the surgeon and said, "If this is possibly end-of-life, I need to be there."  He was silent for a moment, thinking.  "Yes.  We can make that happen now."  He said to head for the hospital.  Before I got to the house, just a few hundred yards down the drive, the phone rang again and it was the nurse.  "Just come to the emergency room entrance and we'll bring you right up, " she said.

 

How scared Beth must have been.  So all alone.

 

I went into the house.  I had been using a couple group text messages to update Beth's closest friends on her condition, and I sent out a message that alerted them to the fact that Beth was in trouble and I was heading for the hospital.

 

I got in the car and headed straight for AdventHealth North Pinellas.  I was in downtown Tarpon Springs when my cell phone rang.  "Where are you?" said the nurse.  "I'm just five minutes away," I replied.  "Oh, OK.  Just call us from the parking lot when you get here and we'll get you right up."

 

At the hospital, a nurse just going on shift -- who wasn't aware of Beth's situation -- took me up to ICU.  She started to bring me into ICU but we were stopped.  "You can't bring him in here.  He has to talk to the surgeon first," they told us.  I was taken around to the waiting room where the surgeon arrived within a couple of minutes.  The first thing he said was, "You need to sit down."  Just like any nightmarish movie ... only it was real.

 

"Beth has expired," he said.  He went on to say they had been trying to revive her for the past two hours.  Her heart and stopped and they could not restart it.

 

I was taken in to her, they closed the curtains around us, and I took her cold hand and held it.  I talked to her and cried softly.  I stood up to kiss her on the forehead and -- she was still warm.  I touched the side of her neck and it, too, was warm. I knew at that moment, that when they called me in the car, that they were trying to notify me she had passed away.

 

I sat with her for about 20 minutes, gathered up her belongings, and headed how via the back roads of Keystone.  I don't know how I made it home.

 

And so, here I am today, totally alone.  Out in the country with just a few neighbors.  Unable to go anywhere because of the coronavirus.  And dealing with the death of the woman I vowed to care for for the rest of her life.

 

My heart is broken and I move like a zombie through the hours of each day, stuck in the house that was for a few months our coronavirus prison.  I keep thinking I'll hear her voice or see her coming through the door.  But isolation is my sentence.  How long must we suffer?

 

 

Written with care and emotion,

I am ...

(Email written Aug. 19, 2020, to a local newspaper reporter wanting stories about COVID-19 isolation.)

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Good Morning, Vietnam!

I certainly wasn't happy about getting orders to Vietnam.  Aware that a high percentage of GIs who were drafted were put on the front lines, I tried to reduce my risk and limit my exposure.  After much thought, my college roommate and I both enlisted at the same time in the U.S. Navy Reserve.

After flunking out of two colleges, I was afraid of losing my military service deferment.  The war was dragging on, with no end in sight.  The newspapers were filled with stories of U.S. firebases being overrun by Viet Cong.  I was no hero and not ready to give my life up for some cause I didn't fully understand and appreciate.

What I could appreciate was the fact that I came from a nautical family.  On my father's side, men had gone down to the sea in ships for generations.  Dad was, in fact, a Danish sea captain -- with permanent captain's licenses from Denmark and Panama.  Also, I was a card-carrying member of the U.S. Merchant Marine, having shipped out on the S.S. Bradford Island sailing coastwise on April 28, 1966.  I grew up on the Tampa waterfront and was comfortable around ships.  What could be more natural?

I figured I was insulated from the war zone.  I didn't think about the massive warships we had off the coast of Vietnam, pounding away with 16-inch guns, or the "brown-water Navy" comprised of river patrol boats (PBRs) and various kinds of landing craft.  No, I was focused on getting that "Mediterranean Cruise."  Ha!  What a joke.  And, what a fool I was.

First off, after graduating from a two-year "junior" college, I returned to my hometown and re-entered the university as a junior-level student.  But I started back to school at the same time I committed to six years of military service.  The Reserve obligation was actually only two years of  "active duty."  You attended meetings once a month for the first year (which would take me through my junior year in college), then you reported for active duty.  After that, you were supposed to do two more years of monthly meetings followed by one year of no-drill/no pay.

I was "on board" with this arrangement, as you might say.  Regular Navy, as well as other military branches, required a four-year stint -- all active duty.  If I got that "Med Cruise" like I wanted, it was going to be a sweet deal.

July 1, 1968, was my date of enlistment.  I had to attend "boot camp" for two weeks in late August of that year.  I had 12 months to get my junior year of college done and I buckled down -- sort of.  There were the occasional late nights out in the "hippie" bars near the university.  Things were looking up and I was beginning to think I had made some smart decisions.

One day, while living at home with my parents and going to school, I went outside to the mailbox.  When I came inside and opened a fancy-looking envelope (like the kind you get with an invitation in it), I started to laugh hysterically.  My startled mother became alarmed and asked me why I was laughing.  "I just made the Dean's List," I said, incredulously.

You see, I had never expected to become a decent student, much less make the Dean's List.  My track record was horrible and all I wanted to do was make sure I wouldn't flunk out again and get drafted into the Army or Marines.  Reading the card, at that moment I seriously doubted I had made any smart decisions.

I finished my junior year -- and the next letter I got was from Uncle Sam, saying "C'mon on.  Time to go."  I reported for active duty in Charleston, SC for active duty on July 10, 1969.

I remember Charleston was a sweatbox.  Hot, humid and lots of thunderstorms -- much like Tampa.  Each day we'd get up, report for some ridiculous work detail to kill time and go down to look at the bulletin board to see if our orders had come in.   Day after day, sailors were getting orders to PBRs!  That's right, river patrol boats deep in the interior of Vietnam.  Now, this was something I had not planned for.  A week passed and then there were a few days when the orders slowed down.  Nothing was happening.  SOMETHING was happening.

Then came the morning when I, with a group of anxious sailors, jockeyed for position to see the board.  There, at long last, was my name.  Next to it was the place where I was supposed to report for duty.  It said "Danang, RVN."  I must have reread it five times.  My heart must have sunk.  Later, after returning home, I would joke with friends that the Navy had apparently begun naming ships after cities in Vietnam because I couldn't believe I was going to Vietnam and not some ship.

When you get sent to Vietnam, you first get some special training.  They send you to "Counter-Insurgency School."  The point is to train you for if and when you get captured.  Because the Navy felt sorry for me -- you know, I may never come back -- they gave me three weeks of leave to be with my family before reporting on August 26, 1969, to Little Creek, VA -- a Marine base.  There the Marines ran us ragged, trying to harden what looked like Pillsbury Doughboys.  We learned how to shoot M-16s, M-79 grenade launchers, M-60 machine guns and 50-cal. machine guns.  And we got physically fit.

The Navy must have really felt sorry for me because they gave me another week's leave for a final goodbye.  I said farewell to my friends and parents.  It wasn't tearful, I don't think.  I can't imagine what my mother must have felt.  I recall standing in the living room, dressed in my crisp Navy whites.  My mom took my picture.  I smiled.  I went to the airport.

In those days, the military chartered civilian passenger jets to move their troops around the country and in and out of Vietnam.  My Tampa flight landed in L.A. where I hopped a chopper for Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino.  I climbed aboard an American Airlines 747, bound first for Hawaii, then Guam, and finally Danang.

The flight was long and grueling.  I remember the stewardesses were nice, probably feeling sorry for us.

On touchdown October 3, 1969, I couldn't see much.  We walked down the plane's stairs into a bright, sunny day.  It was beautiful.  There wasn't much to look at.  The terminal was an open-air wooden structure built by the Americans for troop movement.  I must have been in a fog, but I somehow got my seabag and followed directions with a bunch of other GIs.

I walked up a ramp into what almost looked like a cattle trailer, painted Navy grey.  Pulled by a semi-tractor, we proceeded to wind our way through the crowded streets of Danang.  There were seats all along the edge of the trailer, with hand-holds much like subway trains.  The door was still open on the side, and I could see the scenery moving by in an almost dream-like stream.

In traffic, we came to a stop.  I could see out the side door.  Just a few feet away there was a young Vietnamese girl, wearing the traditional straw hat.  Wow!  I was really here.  These people were beautiful.  I was sure they were incredibly grateful for another truckload of soldiers, all willing to fight and die for Vietnam's freedom.

"Hey, Baby-san," yelled one GI from the cattle car.  "Boom-boom?"

Little did I understand the slang, the lingo, the obscenities that GIs would use to address the locals.  Nor could I believe how adept the little girl, working tirelessly in her garden beside the road, was with spoken English.

"Fuck you, GI," she yelled.  Besides being fluent in English cursing, so too was she adept at finger gestures.

Good Morning, Vietnam!  My life was about to change -- forever.