The Peshtigo Times
September 14, 2005
Silent Killer
June 1, 2004 was a sunny and cool day in the town of Wagner – a town in northern Wisconsin better characterized as fifty-five square miles of forests and fields sparsely populated by the houses and barns of 759 residents, including my parents.
It was 3:30 p.m., the eve of my mother’s birthday. My mother was curling her hair in the upstairs bathroom, getting ready to go out for the evening. My father was fixing their daily Manhattans.
My father had just opened the fridge to retrieve the requisite olives and cherry juice when he suddenly felt the sharp blow of a baseball bat across his lower back. He fell to the floor with a fierce groan somewhat muted by the breath-robbing intensity of pain. There was no one else in the kitchen. There was no baseball bat. A muscle spasm from hell, he thought, as he lay sprawled on the floor in the onset of a cold sweat that could have lasted up to two more hours, at which time he’d be released by one of two things: surgery or death. But at the time, neither one of my parents realized the stakes were this high.
Upon hearing my father’s breathless cry of pain, my mother dropped her curling iron and ran to the kitchen. She helped him to the couch where she massaged the painful area with Biofreeze. But that did nothing to appease the agony. It was something else, not a muscle spasm, maybe a kidney stone. In any case, he needed to get to a hospital. Minutes later, my father lay reclined in the passenger seat of their 1998 Honda Accord with my mother at the wheel. The nearest hospital was eighteen miles away in Marinette, Wisconsin.
Halfway to the hospital my father made a shocking admission. “Carol, I’m blind.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Would I kid about a thing like that?”
My dad’s view of green meadows, oak trees and poplars was suddenly hijacked by a picture of snow, just like the picture on a television without reception. Eyes closed. Blackness. Eyes opened. Snow. Either way, he was blind. This was not a symptom of a muscle spasm or a kidney stone.
My father’s loss of vision was due to a loss of blood to his optical nerve – the result of a ruptured aorta, the body’s largest artery, which originates from the left ventricle of the heart and brings oxygenated blood to all parts of the body, including the eyes. This leak diverted the necessary supply of blood for his eyes and other vital organs to his abdominal cavity instead, creating a hematoma – a mass of clotted blood. It was the pressure of the hematoma that produced the sensation of getting whacked with a baseball bat. His heart, in an effort to outpace the speed of its fatal leak, beat all the more quickly, a labor ultimately in vain without immediate medical attention.
My parents reached the hospital at 5:00 p.m. By this time, there was half a gallon of blood in my dad’s abdominal cavity. He looked white as a ghost. The paramedics reacted to the sight of this wraith with impressive rapidity. They took his vitals while he was still in the car. Noting his irregular pulse, they immediately put him in a wheelchair and rushed him to the emergency room. His blood pressure was 50; a healthy blood pressure, by contrast, is 120.
My father, to those who know him, is more notorious than Arnold Schwarzenegger for reciting one-liners in the midst of gloom and doom. So when the nurses started undressing him, his response was, “I hope this isn’t going to be a porno film.”
Thirty minutes later, the nurses met my mother in the waiting room to explain his condition. When my mother learned of his immediate need for surgery, she requested that he be transferred to Green Bay. Green Bay is where you’re supposed to go for operations of this magnitude, life-threatening operations; and it’s only a thirty-minute helicopter ride away. But that wasn’t enough time, and fortunately there was a reputable thoracic surgeon on staff.
Dr. J. Bryan Flynn, a stocky, well-built man in his mid-fifties, took my mother by the arm to give her the grim news.
My father was under siege by an abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA), a time bomb that kills approximately 15,000 Americans every year. An aortic aneurysm is a bulge in the artery, which is most common in the elderly or those with high blood pressure. If detected early, elective surgery can preempt the rupture with very little risk. Unfortunately, many people do not know they are at risk; they do not get adequate screening and are therefore more likely to find themselves under the knife after a rupture, when the risks are much higher.
Dr. Flynn has been doing AAA repairs for 23 years. On average, he does eight to twelve elective surgeries and four to six emergency surgeries per year. As he explained to my mother, the survival rate of emergency patients who reach the hospital and have surgery is 30 percent.
It was estimated that my father’s aneurysm had begun to grow sometime around age 60. Monitored closely, it could have been electively repaired with extremely low risk when it reached the size of five centimeters. But, it wasn’t caught. My father would reach the age of 73, and his aneurysm the size of nine centimeters before it popped like an over-inflated balloon.
About 1.5 million older Americans are walking around with this silent killer lying in wait like a time bomb waiting for its cue. Those at greatest risk are men over sixty who have smoked more than 100 cigarettes in their lifetimes or have high blood pressure, obesity, or a family history of AAA. Men are about four times more likely than women to suffer from an AAA, and smokers six times more likely than non-smokers.
My dad, who has run close to five hundred road races in his lifetime, was in relatively good health. In fact, Dr. Flynn suggested that my dad’s artery-enlarging running mileage may have contributed to his successful recovery.
The next day my father woke up to find tubes stemming from every orifice, pressurized stockings on each leg to keep the blood circulating, and a lot of smiling faces, including those of Dr. Flynn and my mother. Unable to speak or use his dominant left hand, my father’s communication was restricted to scrawling on a notepad with his right hand. So, when he saw my mother, the first thing he wrote in letters that looked like those of a five-year-old was “Happy Birthday.”
My father couldn’t eat or drink for three days. A tube kept his stomach completely drained. Everything in his body had shut down, and due to his profound generalized weakness, returning to full operation was a delicate process. Therefore, his diet for those three days was restricted to an intravenous supply of saline solution. Craving nothing but a beer, he requested that the saline solution be replaced with Leinenkeugel’s Red. But two days after his surgery, the best contraband he could negotiate with the nurses was an ice cube.
On the third day after his surgery, the nurses took him off the respirator and got him up to walk. His organs were now in full retreat from the brink of death.
On the fifth day after his surgery, he was allowed to drink clear liquids. But still no Leinenkeugel’s Red. No beer at all. Just clear liquids.
On the seventh day, he got permission to drink full liquids…except for (to my father’s chagrin) beer, at least not until he left the hospital.
On the eighth day, he was back on a regular diet.
On Wednesday, June 9th, Dr. J. Bryan Flynn entered my father’s room with a no-nonsense attitude and dry humor that, in the eyes of less observant patients, sometimes overshadows the genuine care and concern he has for his clients.
“I thought you’d be golfing today,” said my dad, as he shifted his gaze from the cloudless sky outside his window to the doctor.
“You want to go home today?” Dr. Flynn was not one to mince words.
He was holding something that looked like a big nail clipper, for removing the staples from my dad’s foot long incision running from his groin to his sternum.
“Is it going to hurt?” my dad asked.
“Not me,” replied the doctor.
My father is now back to normal, drinking Leinenkeugel’s Red, but he had us all in a panic that night before my mother’s 67th birthday. But he looks back on his battle against the silent killer with celebratory pride, a pride shared by the hospital staff.
Some time after his surgery, he and my mother ran into one of his nurses, Krista, at the Marinette Farm and Garden feed store. He said hello to her in that way you do with people you know. Not recognizing him at first, she reacted with hesitant apprehension, to which my father quickly responded with a lift of his shirt and a flash of his scar.
“Oh! Mr. Weissgerber! How are you doing?” Krista said, suddenly greeting him with an enthusiastic embrace.
He also looks back on his near-death experience with a sense of humor, announcing himself at the appointment desk as Dr. Flynn’s “favorite carving turkey” (the same doctor also performed surgery for my father’s hernia). But with proper checkups, there’s no reason anyone should have to wind up a carved turkey.
Dr. Flynn recommends an abdominal ultrasound (which runs about $300) in all males with a positive family history after age 50, and all females with a positive family history after age 60.
But, whatever you do, don’t expect your insurance company to remind you to get a check-up. Insurance companies have a financial interest in your ignorance. Elective repairs are expensive. So are post-op hospital stays. But sudden deaths don’t cost them a dime.
All I know is…after my dad’s ordeal, I’ll be getting my first screening when I turn 50. And it’s not because I can’t wait ten days to drink a beer. I just want to be able to have one again.
September 14, 2005
Silent Killer
June 1, 2004 was a sunny and cool day in the town of Wagner – a town in northern Wisconsin better characterized as fifty-five square miles of forests and fields sparsely populated by the houses and barns of 759 residents, including my parents.
It was 3:30 p.m., the eve of my mother’s birthday. My mother was curling her hair in the upstairs bathroom, getting ready to go out for the evening. My father was fixing their daily Manhattans.
My father had just opened the fridge to retrieve the requisite olives and cherry juice when he suddenly felt the sharp blow of a baseball bat across his lower back. He fell to the floor with a fierce groan somewhat muted by the breath-robbing intensity of pain. There was no one else in the kitchen. There was no baseball bat. A muscle spasm from hell, he thought, as he lay sprawled on the floor in the onset of a cold sweat that could have lasted up to two more hours, at which time he’d be released by one of two things: surgery or death. But at the time, neither one of my parents realized the stakes were this high.
Upon hearing my father’s breathless cry of pain, my mother dropped her curling iron and ran to the kitchen. She helped him to the couch where she massaged the painful area with Biofreeze. But that did nothing to appease the agony. It was something else, not a muscle spasm, maybe a kidney stone. In any case, he needed to get to a hospital. Minutes later, my father lay reclined in the passenger seat of their 1998 Honda Accord with my mother at the wheel. The nearest hospital was eighteen miles away in Marinette, Wisconsin.
Halfway to the hospital my father made a shocking admission. “Carol, I’m blind.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Would I kid about a thing like that?”
My dad’s view of green meadows, oak trees and poplars was suddenly hijacked by a picture of snow, just like the picture on a television without reception. Eyes closed. Blackness. Eyes opened. Snow. Either way, he was blind. This was not a symptom of a muscle spasm or a kidney stone.
My father’s loss of vision was due to a loss of blood to his optical nerve – the result of a ruptured aorta, the body’s largest artery, which originates from the left ventricle of the heart and brings oxygenated blood to all parts of the body, including the eyes. This leak diverted the necessary supply of blood for his eyes and other vital organs to his abdominal cavity instead, creating a hematoma – a mass of clotted blood. It was the pressure of the hematoma that produced the sensation of getting whacked with a baseball bat. His heart, in an effort to outpace the speed of its fatal leak, beat all the more quickly, a labor ultimately in vain without immediate medical attention.
My parents reached the hospital at 5:00 p.m. By this time, there was half a gallon of blood in my dad’s abdominal cavity. He looked white as a ghost. The paramedics reacted to the sight of this wraith with impressive rapidity. They took his vitals while he was still in the car. Noting his irregular pulse, they immediately put him in a wheelchair and rushed him to the emergency room. His blood pressure was 50; a healthy blood pressure, by contrast, is 120.
My father, to those who know him, is more notorious than Arnold Schwarzenegger for reciting one-liners in the midst of gloom and doom. So when the nurses started undressing him, his response was, “I hope this isn’t going to be a porno film.”
Thirty minutes later, the nurses met my mother in the waiting room to explain his condition. When my mother learned of his immediate need for surgery, she requested that he be transferred to Green Bay. Green Bay is where you’re supposed to go for operations of this magnitude, life-threatening operations; and it’s only a thirty-minute helicopter ride away. But that wasn’t enough time, and fortunately there was a reputable thoracic surgeon on staff.
Dr. J. Bryan Flynn, a stocky, well-built man in his mid-fifties, took my mother by the arm to give her the grim news.
My father was under siege by an abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA), a time bomb that kills approximately 15,000 Americans every year. An aortic aneurysm is a bulge in the artery, which is most common in the elderly or those with high blood pressure. If detected early, elective surgery can preempt the rupture with very little risk. Unfortunately, many people do not know they are at risk; they do not get adequate screening and are therefore more likely to find themselves under the knife after a rupture, when the risks are much higher.
Dr. Flynn has been doing AAA repairs for 23 years. On average, he does eight to twelve elective surgeries and four to six emergency surgeries per year. As he explained to my mother, the survival rate of emergency patients who reach the hospital and have surgery is 30 percent.
It was estimated that my father’s aneurysm had begun to grow sometime around age 60. Monitored closely, it could have been electively repaired with extremely low risk when it reached the size of five centimeters. But, it wasn’t caught. My father would reach the age of 73, and his aneurysm the size of nine centimeters before it popped like an over-inflated balloon.
About 1.5 million older Americans are walking around with this silent killer lying in wait like a time bomb waiting for its cue. Those at greatest risk are men over sixty who have smoked more than 100 cigarettes in their lifetimes or have high blood pressure, obesity, or a family history of AAA. Men are about four times more likely than women to suffer from an AAA, and smokers six times more likely than non-smokers.
My dad, who has run close to five hundred road races in his lifetime, was in relatively good health. In fact, Dr. Flynn suggested that my dad’s artery-enlarging running mileage may have contributed to his successful recovery.
The next day my father woke up to find tubes stemming from every orifice, pressurized stockings on each leg to keep the blood circulating, and a lot of smiling faces, including those of Dr. Flynn and my mother. Unable to speak or use his dominant left hand, my father’s communication was restricted to scrawling on a notepad with his right hand. So, when he saw my mother, the first thing he wrote in letters that looked like those of a five-year-old was “Happy Birthday.”
My father couldn’t eat or drink for three days. A tube kept his stomach completely drained. Everything in his body had shut down, and due to his profound generalized weakness, returning to full operation was a delicate process. Therefore, his diet for those three days was restricted to an intravenous supply of saline solution. Craving nothing but a beer, he requested that the saline solution be replaced with Leinenkeugel’s Red. But two days after his surgery, the best contraband he could negotiate with the nurses was an ice cube.
On the third day after his surgery, the nurses took him off the respirator and got him up to walk. His organs were now in full retreat from the brink of death.
On the fifth day after his surgery, he was allowed to drink clear liquids. But still no Leinenkeugel’s Red. No beer at all. Just clear liquids.
On the seventh day, he got permission to drink full liquids…except for (to my father’s chagrin) beer, at least not until he left the hospital.
On the eighth day, he was back on a regular diet.
On Wednesday, June 9th, Dr. J. Bryan Flynn entered my father’s room with a no-nonsense attitude and dry humor that, in the eyes of less observant patients, sometimes overshadows the genuine care and concern he has for his clients.
“I thought you’d be golfing today,” said my dad, as he shifted his gaze from the cloudless sky outside his window to the doctor.
“You want to go home today?” Dr. Flynn was not one to mince words.
He was holding something that looked like a big nail clipper, for removing the staples from my dad’s foot long incision running from his groin to his sternum.
“Is it going to hurt?” my dad asked.
“Not me,” replied the doctor.
My father is now back to normal, drinking Leinenkeugel’s Red, but he had us all in a panic that night before my mother’s 67th birthday. But he looks back on his battle against the silent killer with celebratory pride, a pride shared by the hospital staff.
Some time after his surgery, he and my mother ran into one of his nurses, Krista, at the Marinette Farm and Garden feed store. He said hello to her in that way you do with people you know. Not recognizing him at first, she reacted with hesitant apprehension, to which my father quickly responded with a lift of his shirt and a flash of his scar.
“Oh! Mr. Weissgerber! How are you doing?” Krista said, suddenly greeting him with an enthusiastic embrace.
He also looks back on his near-death experience with a sense of humor, announcing himself at the appointment desk as Dr. Flynn’s “favorite carving turkey” (the same doctor also performed surgery for my father’s hernia). But with proper checkups, there’s no reason anyone should have to wind up a carved turkey.
Dr. Flynn recommends an abdominal ultrasound (which runs about $300) in all males with a positive family history after age 50, and all females with a positive family history after age 60.
But, whatever you do, don’t expect your insurance company to remind you to get a check-up. Insurance companies have a financial interest in your ignorance. Elective repairs are expensive. So are post-op hospital stays. But sudden deaths don’t cost them a dime.
All I know is…after my dad’s ordeal, I’ll be getting my first screening when I turn 50. And it’s not because I can’t wait ten days to drink a beer. I just want to be able to have one again.