The Lunch Box

Last Friday my brother and his wife joined me and some friends at a happy hour celebration near Golden, Colorado. The bar where we met has been around for years and is located near the Adolph Coors Company, where dad worked from 1970 until his retirement in 1982.

Dad started working for Coors at their ceramics factory, where he created unique porcelain containers that were used in medical research, among other things. Sometimes the ceramic items were flawed in design and he would bring home these crazy looking, rejected samples. Mom always found a way to incorporate those odd porcelain ditties into her everyday kitchenware.

During his early years at Coors, dad worked the swing shift from 3 pm until midnight. We had to remain silent in the mornings until dad awoke, usually not in a good mood. You see, dad was a confirmed morning person and this shift was not at all to his liking. But he did whatever was necessary to support the family.

One night, dad left work at midnight and started the long drive home. It was probably late summer, and he was riding in his beloved '63 Chevrolet pickup truck. This pretty white truck, dad's pride and joy, held a wonderful camper shell for our summer excursions, and in years past was outfitted with a stock rack in order to help my uncle transport cattle or the hay and feed for his barnyard animals in Castle Rock. Needless to say, dad loved that truck, almost as much as he loved us.

Unfortunately, on this night fate was not kind. A drunk driver, perhaps leaving the very same bar where we now enjoyed margaritas and beers in 2013, came around the corner and hit dad, sending that '63 Chevy careening over the side of a steep hill.

Dad was faithful about wearing his seatbelt so as the truck rolled, dad later recalled, he was held firmly in place and not in any danger of being ejected. He would have survived the crash relatively unscathed, were it not for the lunch box.

You know the kind. If you grew up in a blue-collar household in the sixties, I'm sure you would have seen your dad shuffle off to work in the mornings (or afternoons) with his trusty lunch box.

Sturdy and tough as nails, made of thick black metal, dad's lunch box came equipped with a thermos filled every day either with hot coffee or cold milk, a bologna sandwich, an apple and, if he was lucky, one of his favorite Hostess cherry pies and a baggie stuffed with cheap sandwich cookies mom bought at the day-old bakery.

The handsome white truck rolled at least one-and-a-half times, landing upside down on the railroad tracks below. Dad said his only memory was gripping the steering wheel and the "thud, thud, thud" of the metal lunch box as it flew around the cabin, slamming against his body and head. He came to, unable to see with one eye, his face covered with blood. Dad let loose the seat belt, then crawled out of the truck and up the hill, eventually flagging down a passing motorist. What a sight that must have been, a disheveled man emerging from the side of the road, one hand holding up a flap of bloody skin above his eye.

What happened next I'm not sure of, except that our backyard neighbor, Corky Snyder, collected dad from the hospital. I do remember standing at the front door, in the darkness just before dawn, watching mom and Corky help dad from the car. My father had a thick white turban wrapped about his head, which he wore for quite some time while his severe concussion and the 63 stitches--just enough to match the year of his beloved truck--healed.

Dad was bald for as long as I can remember. After the crash, he had a half-oval scar on the side of his head in the shape of a lunch box.

The sheriff's office located the drunk driver. He was a repeat offender, uninsured, and drove a cement truck for a local company. There was no chance of settling with him. Mom and dad would throw up their hands and say, "You can't get blood out of a turnip!" Dad couldn't shake the fact that despite surviving three long years in the South Pacific jungles during World War II, he could have lost his life to a drunk driver 25 years later, on an otherwise ordinary night.

When I was a young girl, every year I asked for a horse for Christmas; every year I got a plastic horse for my collection. After the accident, dad took a page from my book and asked Santa to bring him a new truck for Christmas. Sure enough, Santa came through, with a pretty little Matchbox truck that sat on the mantelpiece, year after year, as a reminder. Over time, it became one of our family's most cherished Christmas decorations.

My parents eventually purchased a used truck, blue, three on the column instead of four on the floor. It was never quite right and dad struggled to warm up to it. He still missed that pretty white truck and remained faithful to its memory.

Oh, and dad bought a new lunch box before he returned to work, one that gave him no grief the rest of his working years.

Scenes from a Surgical Ward

Apparently every hospital patient is treated to a pair of non-skid socks. I did not realize I'd be given such lovely footwear. You might not know this about me (few people do) but I was quite the sock queen in my younger years. I owned multi-colored toe socks and loved to buy socks with strange color combinations: ruffles, stripes, polka dots, any crazy pattern to suit my many sock moods. One night I even won a "Most Unusual Socks" contest at a local bar where I was celebrating with my brother, his wife, and a few friends. I don't remember what I won, maybe a free drink? Winning the contest was memorable, the reward was not.

Anyway, I was happy to get my neon yellow MediChoice® hospital socks. I loved the color and found them to be the most fashionable of the hospital garments I was required to wear. They were accompanied by a tired old gown with ties in the back, and a pair of white surgical compression hose that squeezed my legs so tight I nearly fainted, plus they looked like something you might find underneath the skirt of an 1890s spinster school marm. By those standards, my yellow socks made me look downright stylish.

Well, that is if you don't count the huge stitching on the ankle announcing my sock size: "XX – LARGE" which reminded me of renting roller skates or bowling shoes with a gigantic number on the heel that displayed your shoe size for everyone to see. Being a big, tall girl, mine was always a much larger number than all the other petite darlings at the roller rink or bowling alley.

But I digress...

In the recovery room, I had a very cool nurse who probably had a name but due to my drug-induced state I could not possibly tell you what it was. She was inspecting the enormous scar on my lower back when I asked her whether I looked like Frankenstein back there. Her reply? "Oh no honey, we use super glue now!" Of course I thought she was just making this up and told her so, but apparently she was totally telling the truth. No stitches, no staples, just some weird kind of surgical-grade Gorilla Glue holding my skin together. I was hoping they didn't keep duct tape in the surgery room, too. That would freak me out.

The surgical center had all private rooms and I got some pretty nice digs, including a walker in a hot rust-red color. The nurses and aides made a point of telling me that I scored the best room: the one with the red walker. Everyone else on the ward was stuck with your basic silver metal walker. Lucky me!

Eight hours after surgery I was ready to take my first walk. Mollie, the day nurse, tied up the back of my lovely gown. Before we ventured from the room, she assured me that all was quite discreet and there was no hint of my backside hanging out. Mollie held tightly to my gown as I plodded along, much like a baby taking their first steps in mom and dad's living room. At that moment, I was so grateful for my non-skid neon yellow socks.

You spend a lot of time in bed at the hospital and it's really not much fun. One of the nurse aides, Stuart, helped me get out of bed later on. I wanted to watch TV sitting up so I could feel like a normal person. It's not easy getting out of bed and into a chair when you're attached to a multitude of tubes and lines. Stuart carefully guided me to the chair, and we giggled about how if someone walked by, they might think we were engaged in a slow-motion ballroom dance.

The night nurse, Hans, was a fun fellow. One of his primary duties was to ensure that all of us made it through the night with minimal agony. Much of his evening was spent assisting my next-door neighbor, Charlie, who was in a horrible amount of pain. I felt so bad for Charlie after I heard Hans tell him that he couldn't have more pain medication for another 25 minutes, did he think he could manage that long? Then there was the elderly woman two doors down calling out in the middle of the night, "Hello? Hello?" with no response, then she began crying. I wanted so badly to get up, go straight to her room, hold her hand and comfort her. But I simply could not move.

Have you ever noticed that doctors and nurses have this fixation with numbers? In the hospital, it drove me crazy when they insisted you assign an identifying number to your level of pain. For instance, 1 = You're ready to shout out a James Brown version of "I Feel Good!" 10 = Well, honestly I never want to know what 10 feels like. Hans visited my room regularly with his rolling computer stand to check on me. "How are you doing? Do you hurt?" Well, yeah, Hans, actually I do hurt. A lot. "Give me a number," he'd say. Umm, 6, maybe 7? What kind of drugs do I get for a 7? It all seemed so silly, so subjective.

Then came my second night on the ward. I wanted to sleep on my side, not my back, so the aides accommodated my request with lots of pillows and shuffling about to get me in just the right position. Later I awoke in agonizing pain. All I wanted, a simple thing really, was to turn over onto my back, and discovered it could not be done. I pulled and tugged at the pillows, and attempted to move the mechanical bed but pushed all the wrong buttons. It was then I realized my lovely yellow socks were dangling off the foot of the bed. Now, I'm not good at asking for help, never have been. But obviously it was time to hit the buzzer.

Along came Cliff, the night aide. When Cliff asked what I needed, I burst into tears, like a little girl lost in a great big department store who couldn't find her mommy. And that's what I really wanted to tell him, I need my mommy! Through the sniffling and blubbering I managed to explain my predicament and tell him also that I was in a great deal of pain. "When was the last time you had meds?" he asked. I struggled to remember but decided it was about seven hours ago.

Hans showed up soon after, surprised to find me crying. "My Deb is in pain?" he asked, incredulous. I had worked so hard to be a low-maintenance, easy-to-care-for patient so that the nurses and aides had extra time for the patients who really needed them. "Tell me your number right now," Hans asked. Without hesitation, I told him it was a good, solid 8, maybe even flirting with 9. Hans administered the most wonderful drugs ever and the pain subsided quickly. He and Cliff moved me into a more comfortable position, then asked me questions like, "Do you want the light on or off?" or "Should I leave the door open?" -- questions that seem nearly impossible to answer after a heaping dose of pain medication.

But what I want to say more than anything is that these people are angels. In spite of the cheerful disposition I maintained during my stay, I spent a rough two days in that hospital and many of the other people on my floor were in much worse shape. The nurses and aides did their level best to make sure that our experiences were as good as they could possibly be, given our circumstances. They were our heroes. So if you know someone who is a nurse or nurse aide, be sure to give them an extra thank-you from me. I'm sure they don't hear it nearly often enough.

Oh, and I got to keep my neon yellow socks. I love them and had them on the other night, just because my toes were kind of cold. They keep me from slipping on our hardwood floors. I wish they had given me more than one pair. You know what, I just might wear them the next time I go out dancing! (which probably won't be for a while yet...)