A Beautiful Lie

A long time ago in a Galaxy Far Far Away… I’m sorry, I couldn’t help myself with the next Star Wars movie just around the corner. More accurately, quite some time back, before I had much sense, I used to smoke. I smoked about a pack a day, give or take.

One afternoon, after having put in a double shift at the police department, I found it difficult to sleep so I put myself to work on some projects I had been neglecting around the house. I was building some closet space and a window seat in the middle bedroom of a post WWII house. Those houses were built under the assumption that nobody had enough money to buy anything extra so they skimped out on closet space, only the bare minimum in any room. I built a huge pantry in the middle of what had been a useless formal living room, walling it in so that it looked very natural. I actually had some carpentry skills and what I lacked I made up for with imagination. My father in law was impressed with the archway I had put between the middle bedroom and our master bedroom. He said I had used about twice as much wood as needed, then added that it would be solid, that was a compliment, I think it was.

While I was bending over to put a nail into a piece of sheet rock I felt a muscle pull in the middle of my back so I had to take a break. The more I relaxed the more it hurt so I decided to work the kink out by doing some rudimentary exercises; some twisting and stretching, a few sit ups followed by some push-ups. The more I did the more it hurt, that and I was beginning to get winded so I had to take a few minutes of break time sitting down again. I began to become concerned when it got so hard to take a breath that I found my self leaning over. It was at that point that Lucy decided it was time to have the folks at the local ER check me over.

We drove the short distance to the hospital and I let the witch doctor check me over, listening to my chest, tapping here and there and then looking at the X-rays.

“You have a collapsed lung.” He pointed to a patch on the X-ray and even I could see that it was different than the other side.

“So, what do you need to do, pump it back up?” It was a feeble attempt at humor. I found out that the way to fix the problem was to cut a small hole in me, insert a tube to let the air and fluids vent away from the wrong side of the lung so that it could then repair itself. It also hurt so bad that I left my fingerprints in the stainless steel examining table that I was sitting on. Did I mention that because of the nature of the injury they were not able to administer any kind of anesthesia? When the first part, the cutting of the hole and the insertion of the tube was completed the witch doctor then took a horse needle and pushed it through my chest, in between the ribs and into the plural cavity so that he could suck out the excess fluids that had accumulated. This was done three or four times while I had to watch. Boy, was that fun.

I woke up in a fog a little later and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of my shirt pocket. I had one hanging from my droopy lips while looking for my lighter when a floor nurse happened to walk by the open door to the room. There was a look of horror on her face as she sprinted from the hall to where I was, swatting the cigarette from my mouth and crossing herself Catholic style afterwards. How was I supposed to know those tubes hanging out of my nose were feeding oxygen to me? It’s a good thing I was too groggy to find my lighter or I would be reporting what actually happens on the other side of life.

The next morning the witch doctor came in and listened to my lungs some more. I would have felt a little better had he looked the least bit confident. They took some more X-rays and it was verified that the procedure had not been successful. About the only thing good that came of it was that a real doctor, one who had performed this particular operation more than once, was called to do it the second time. I can’t say for sure that negligence was involved; but why did the first idiot cut the hole in my lower back while the second time the hole was cut in my upper chest? Is it possible that the first idiot had the book upside down?

I saw a comedy skit where Mr. Bean, the English character, went to the dentist and after the dentist left the room Mr. Bean decided to drill his own tooth. He looked at the X-ray, placed the drill on his tooth, filled it and THEN had doubts about whether or not he’d looked at the film backwards. He then flips around to the other side of the X-ray, drills the tooth on the other side of his mouth and fills it. Once more there was doubt about having read it wrong so he flips the X-ray top to bottom, repeats all the steps and then does it one last time. When the skit ends Mr. Bean has so much tooth filler in his mouth that he no longer can open it.

Could the witch doctor have been such a klutz as to have gotten the position of the drain tube backwards and upside down? I will never know, don’t really want to know. If I were the kind of litigious patient who wanted to win the malpractice “lottery”, then maybe it would have been important. What made me angry was that my insurance company paid him even though his procedure was a total failure. If I did a locksmith job as badly as that I would not expect to get paid.

Yes, I had to put my fingerprints in the steel table one more time. This time instead of going in via my back I got to watch as he cut a hole in my chest. I got to watch as he forced a jagged tube into and down the little hole he had just cut and yes it really did hurt.

Did I mention that when the witch doctor cut the hole in my back that he accidentally sliced through a nerve that controlled all the muscles that are associated with the “six pack” stomach muscles? All at once the body hair on my stomach; but only the ones on the left side, they all went off in a different direction, as if struck by a tremendous force of wind. This was back when I still had a real six pack stomach. Just something I remembered.

The next morning I woke up to find that everything was working and that my lung had been restored to full or nearly full capacity. The “real” doctor inspected everything and said that I would be able to go home soon. He pointed to something over on the other side of the room and the next thing I knew he had jerked out the tube, the tube that moments before had been inside my chest. It’s hard to describe being set on fire from within, but that’s about as close as words come to the feeling and pain. He later told me that the distraction was necessary so that I wouldn’t “flinch” had I known what he intended to do. He was right and I gave him the benefit of doubt for having caused me to yell at an octave I didn’t even know I could reach.

A few days, maybe it was more, went by and I had to go in for a check up and to have the stitches removed. It wasn’t near as scary or near as painful as when they were put in. The doctor sat me down and went down a list of instructions; the last one had to do with the fact that I had just quit smoking. It had something to do with my thin build, yes I was skinny back then, at least comparatively. So I quit smoking that day.

When I got home Lucy was waiting to hear what all had happened at the doctor’s office.
“You do know that the doctor told me you had to quit smoking?”, like I hadn’t heard that or that I would have forgotten. I had been smoking since I was in junior high, gotten suspended from school when I got caught. It was a rotten habit that would be difficult to kick. The alternative; what was the line Tevia would say in Fiddler on the Roof, “On the other hand”? Well, there was no “other hand” for this; I had no choice but to quit.

I started chewing tobacco to replace my smoking habit. I replaced one bad habit with another as I managed to heal in spite of myself. A month went by and I was satisfied that I had indeed overcome the habit of reaching for a smoke. I began to notice that Lucy was acting a little peculiar. Something was wrong and there were times when she would avoid looking at me in the eye. If I hadn’t known her better I would have suspected some foul deed.

It began to gnaw at me and I finally confronted her. “What’s wrong?” I asked, not giving her a chance to look away.

“I’m sorry.”, tears were streaming down her face as the sobs came out in blurts. “I lied to you.” She sniffled away some and continued, “The doctor never told me that you had to quit smoking. I made it all up just so you’d quit.” Lucy had never lied about anything and it had been eating a hole in her soul. It hadn’t mattered that the doctor really had told me to quit, she had lied; a beautiful lie, in a way that could only be called love. How could anyone be angry with a woman who would lie in order to save your life from a rotten habit like smoking?

I’d tell you how I gave up chewing tobacco but, as they say down in East Texas, “That’s a whole other story.”