MY LIFE IN THE MOUNTAIN WEST: The Smell of Hospitals in Winter

Three weeks ago, I was making dinner on a Sunday evening. Maggie was kneeling next to me as she often does, hoping for a bite of whatever I was handling.

I heard a noise unlike any I have ever before heard, a low grumbling, perhaps the sound of someone preparing to throw up, perhaps a death rattle.

I assumed it was Maggie making a primal noise to get fed and, though it was strange, I went on preparing dinner.

20 seconds later I heard it again. A sickening thought occurred to me: Was that my father?

I haven't mentioned this because there is no need, but lately he has been dealing with yet another issue in his years-long struggle with cancer, and I immediately decided, upon hearing that bizarre noise for a second time, to check on him.

I turned the corner just in time to see him land, unconscious, face first on the tile floor, splitting open his nose and forehead.

If I had been half a second quicker, if I had been more vigilant the first time I heard that noise, I could have caught him, or at the very least softened his fall.

I cannot describe the sound accurately, but imagine completely soaking a bath towel in water and then swinging it full force into a tree. The noise you are imagining is roughly what I heard.

Blood immediately pooled out from his face.

Well, I thought, there's a 25% chance I just watched my father die right before my eyes.

It was the worst thing I have ever seen... and I once accidentally watched a 20-second clip of the Grateful Dead on YouTube.

I called 911 while my mother held towels against his face to staunch the blood - though my father regained consciousness relatively quickly.

The paramedics responded faster than I expected and took him to the hospital.

This photo really does not do justice to how much blood there was. (Several towels were soaked.)

My mom rode in the ambulance to the hospital and I drove her car there, assuming (correctly) that he would be there overnight and she would stay with him and want her car there.

(The favor Monica did for me, to which I alluded yesterday, was picking me up from the hospital late on Sunday night and giving me a ride home.)

In addition to the obvious stitching, they wanted to keep my father in the hospital for several days to keep an eye on the internal bleeding and swelling.

The next day I visited in the morning to find my dad eating this pathetic grilled chicken sandwich. Even by hospital-food standards, this looked sad.

(I fired one of the cooks at my work last summer because he was lazy, had a shitty attitude, and was a bad cook. I have heard that he is now working in a hospital cafeteria. It would not surprise me if it was this hospital, and it would not surprise me if he made this exact item; it looks like the kind of lazy-ass thing that he used to throw together.)

I accompanied my mom down to the cafeteria to get food. (Of course, I offered to pick up anything she wanted in town and bring it to her, but she couldn't think of anything. I think she was just exhausted from sleeping in a hospital chair all night.)

She got this cheese quesadilla.

"Get a bottle of Smart Water," I told her. "This is going to be loaded with salt."

"I have water in the room," she said; the next day she revealed to me that I was right and she should have bought water because this was so much saltier than the food she normally eats that her feet started swelling,

"What I really want," my father said, "is one of your Basque cheesecakes."

So I made him one that night and brought it to the hospital the next day.

They ended up finding lots of blood clots in my father, so they kept him in the hospital several days, trying to determine what to do next.

And now, for something fun:

I do not remember seeing cooler art in a hospital before.

Maggie and Hawkeye were out of sorts being left alone so much of the time.

After three days in the hospital in Santa Fe, they decided that my father had to start taking a high-risk blood thinner to (hopefully) remove the clots, so they sent him to a hospital in Albuquerque for four days so that they could monitor him while he first started taking it.

My mom stayed with him the whole time. I did not ask details but assume I know why: The last time my brother went into the hospital, his fiance stayed with him the first few nights but eventually my brother convinced him to go home and get a good night's sleep. That was the night my brother's brain began swelling down into his spinal column, and he never woke up again. My brother's fiance, and I assume my parents, will always wonder what might have happened if my brother had not been left alone that night. (My brother's leukemia was so rare - his oncologist said it was only the second or third time he had experienced a patient with such symptoms in more than 30 years - that his death was inevitable, but I imagine my brother's experience is why my dad did not want to be left alone in the hospital.)

The food at the Santa Fe hospital may have sucked, but apparently it was gourmet compared to the food at the hospital in Albuquerque.

"If you don't like this, you can always eat at our restaurant," the doctors told my parents.