An excerpt from my upcoming book TRANSCEND: A Journey Toward Love
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My father & I in
his store, Christmas 1958
My early childhood was idyllic. My parents loved me, my father indulged in us all and I worshipped the ground he walked on. My life was perfect ... until 1967. The photo below was taken in September 1967.
The storm
When my siblings and I arrived at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton, we were sent to the intensive care unit (ICU). We found Mom crying in the ICU waiting room. She told us that Dad’s doctors informed her that he could die at any time! It was like somebody kicked me in the head! Perhaps I had been listening too much to Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band album because I thought I heard the last prolonged piano dischord of A Day in the Life. Everything began spinning out of control. It's impossible to describe the fear. That long night, Dad’s heart stopped and was revived three times.
Visitation protocols for the Intensive Care Unit were restricted to immediate family members and only one visitor per hour for ten minutes. That meant I could see the hero of my life for ten minutes every fourth hour. My first journey through the forbidding greenish-white metal doors with that terrible ICU sign above them was like entering Dante’s inferno. As far as I was concerned, the sign above the doors may as well have said, “Dying Room.” It was like an anteroom for the half-dead to twist and struggle against the clutches of their yawning graves.
In the middle of the large Intensive Care Unit was a raised observation center for a proficient and aloof cadre of nurses and doctors to peer out over their subjects. They watched beeping monitors, examined charts and fanned out across the room to various patient’s beds. One side of the unit was for cardiac care. Other assorted life-threatening conditions lined the other walls. The atmosphere was sterile in more ways than hygiene. It was like something out of a Robin Cook novel.[1] I walked past numerous beds, separated only by curtains and medical equipment until I reached my father. I was stunned at the sight of him! His skin was waxy grey! Electric cardio shock must have been in its infancy because he had numerous marks on his chest as though hot stove elements had been held against his skin.
Even in that very sick state, he kept up a brave and cheerful front, smiling at the sight of me. I had ten minutes in four hours to see Dad so I cut through the possibility of small talk. In four hours, he could be dead. I blurted, “I thought you were going to die!” He became serious but with his usual unflappable way he said, “I thought so too, Mark.” His candour startled me.
“Weren’t you afraid?” I asked.
“Yes. I was afraid of dying before you kids are raised. I was afraid of leaving your mother to finish the job alone.”
“Your heart stopped beating three times, Dad! How can you be so calm?!”
He looked at me intently and said,
“I want you to understand that Christ was with me. Mark. We all must die. You can either die with Christ or without Him, but we all must eventually die. This has been the point of everything I’ve tried to teach you, son. How you respond to Jesus Christ and His sacrifice at Calvary is all that matters when you die. I want you to give your life to Jesus and live for Him.”
Silence, then tears.
Growing up in a Christian home, surrounded by Christians, I had often heard the familiar refrain, “Have you given your life to Jesus?” As a child, I made a commitment to the Lord, but it was a cultural commitment of a boy who worshipped his father and wanted to please him, more than God. Now my father was dying.
The sickly quiet of the ICU was suddenly broken by a gurney bursting through the doors with an entourage of medical people frantically working on someone. A nurse unceremoniously ushered me out of the unit. I found myself standing outside the doors looking at some poor wretch’s wife with soggy cheeks. She had a lost, terrified expression on her face. I knew exactly how she felt.
Dad remained in the intensive for weeks (it seemed like an eternity). We watched other cardiac patients come and either recover enough to be moved to the wards or die. My family remained in limbo meandering in a shadowy nether land that swayed back and forth between life and death, alternating toward hope then despair, as doctors tried to stop the downward spiral of my father’s heart failure, and various related crises that befell him.[2]
The heart specialists worked valiantly to save Dad and their medical skills were spectacular: But I detested their detachment from the humanity of his suffering. Damn it! It was not the patient in bed four. It was my father! His name was Howard and he had a wife and a family who loved him. Our hearts were breaking! He wasn’t the sum total of his electro-cardiograms, blood tests and whatever else was on his chart. He was my father!
Heart transplant history
I should mention that the late 1960s was a revolutionary time in medical treatment of cardiovascular disease. Open heart surgery was making major advances, the first coronary arterial bypass surgery was conducted in Cleveland, pacemaker technology was developing quickly, and on December 3rd 1967, South African surgeon Dr. Christiaan Bernard performed the world’s first heart transplantation on Louis Washkansky. It was front-page news around the world! Sadly, Washkansky died eighteen days later just before Christmas.
Not to be deterred, Dr. Bernard performed the world’s 2nd heart transplant in early January of 1968, on a retired dentist by the name of Philip Blaiberg. Again the daring of Dr. Bernard was front-page news.
Back in Canada, the head of the cardiac team at Edmonton’s Royal Alexandria Hospital was a man I shall refer to as Dr. T. He called a meeting with the families of all the cardiac patients in the Intensive Care Unit and forbade newspapers or discussion of the Philip Blaiberg case because he didn’t want to see false hopes raised in his patients. Dr T believed that Dr. Bernard’s sensational transplant operations in South Africa were premature and doomed to failure because anti-rejection drugs were still in their infancy.
Dad’s case was remarkably similar to Dr. Bernard’s first patient, Louis Washkansky. Although we were warned not to get our hopes up for transplantation possibilities for our loved ones, it was impossible. Desperate people grasp at any hope.
My father’s heart specialist had a god-complex. His colossal ego was fed by an extraordinary skill of saving patients other doctors were losing. Dr. T was a blunt, egotistical rude man with an audacious bushy moustache. When he entered a room he expected its occupants to shrink back in awe and genuflection of his gigantic, superior intellect. His patients were a series of sustained arrhythmias, myocardial infarctions and faulty ventricles; I’m not even sure he actually knew his patients’ names. They were specimens—challenges to help build his formidable reputation and prestige in the medical community.
Dr. T showed my mother Dad’s electro-cardiogram. Instead of explaining the medical problem, he announced, “That’s the heartbeat of a dying man.” Good explanation. My mother broke down and cried like a mere mortal.
The first man I saw die
One day while visiting Dad, a man three beds away went into full cardiac arrest. Within seconds nurses and doctors pounced on him. The scene reminded me of wolves attacking a crippled prey—except this pack was trying to save a life not take it. It all happened so quickly that nobody had time to throw me out of the ICU. A nurse made a haphazard attempt to close the curtain, but the patient’s feet were still visible. I could hear shouts of medical lingo between doctors and nurses jostling around the bed, then the rude sound of electro-cardio shock paddles being applied to the man’s chest. His body convulsed! There was a pause, then, the paddles were put to him again, again and again! With each shock, his feet moved less. Finally, the medical team stopped their frantic work. Somebody closed the curtain around his bed and they walked away. I watched the whole thing unfold with wide eyes and my jaw on my chest.
It was the first time I ever saw a man die! I slowly turned to look at my father. I don’t remember what he said – or if he said anything at all – but we held each other knowing the next feet to bounce up off the bed might be his. Perhaps we said nothing because we were at that stage of emotion when one dares not speak for fear of weeping. Besides, my ten-minute visitation was over. At the double doors of the ICU, I stopped and turned to look at him again, wondering if he would still be alive in four hours so I could see him one more time. He gave me a sheepish wave and smiled. Such a terrible moment!
It was one of those inscrutable moments in which we live a lifetime; a lifetime’s worth of love and sorrow – much of it still unlived – simultaneously flood our hearts. Our souls cry out in primal anguish, our pain throbs like a raw, gaping wound. Such moments are stark and terrible, yet to leave our souls unstirred would be a crime against our individual humanity.
I longed to be far away in a boat bobbing on a lake with Dad in a cool morning mist like we used to do. I think that moment was the only time I’ve ever heard the lonely call of a loon in a hospital.
My dad recovered enough to live another two years. He died in front of me shortly after Christmas in 1970, as we were downhill skiing. I held him in my arms as he left this world for the next.
That summer the Beatles Let It Be album was released. It had Paul McCartney’s song Long and Winding Road. The first time I heard it I broke down and wept.
I’m an old man now. It’s been nearly 55 years since I saw my father’s face. Yes, it has been a long and winding road since Christmas 1967. It won’t be long now before I see my father again.
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To hear The Beatles, Long and Winding Road click here
Mark Davis Pickup
[1] Robin Cook writes medical thriller books. His first published book was Year of the Intern (1972). At the time of my father’s heart failure ICU treatment (1968), Robin Cook was unknown.
[2] When I was writing this portion of the book I consulted my mother, brother and sister to get their recollection of those terrible days. I encountered a curious response: They railed against being asked to drag up those terrible memories. My sister refused to revisit that time while my mother had distinct mental blocks. My brother had memories but was guarded and only offered clarification on one or two specific points. It was as though I asked them to recall a nightmare too horrible to contemplate again.
