by Alan Alda
The man on the table next to me had gunshot wounds. A guy across the room had knife wounds. We later learned that the knife wounds were self-inflicted while he was in the custody of the police, forcing the police to bring him to the hospital. He’d arranged with his girlfriend to wait outside the hospital, and at one point in the evening when no one was looking, maybe when everyone’s attention was turned to the actor from North America, he slipped out of the hospital, met his girlfriend . . . and escaped. There are eight million stories in La Serena.
Graham, who has seen countless surgeries in thirty years of producing science documentaries, asked to take a look at the operating room. Dr. Zepeda, in his modest way, invited him in, and Graham could tell immediately that it was, in fact, very well equipped.
Graham got Arlene on the phone and gently, but not wasting time, told her I needed an emergency operation. She agreed and, surprisingly free of panic, she called the airlines and started arranging a flight down to Chile. Then she put in a call to Sally and Steve Cohen, close friends and both doctors, to see what they could tell her about what little she knew of my condition. She realized she didn’t even know the name of the hospital or the surgeon. She was wondering: Into whose hands are they putting my husband’s life? Steve got on the Internet and then on the telephone, and within fifteen minutes he’d managed to track down the surgeon in La Serena.
In a hurried call, Steve asked Dr. Zepeda a few pointed questions. They both knew there wasn’t a lot of time. Every few minutes, more and more of my bowel was getting sucked through the loop on my omentum, where, given enough time, it would burst.
Steve: “Does he have peritonitis?”
Zepeda: “Not yet.”
After a few more exchanges, Steve called Arlene and told her the guy knew what he was doing.
Steve and Sally both wanted to fly down to La Serena with Arlene. But Steve had to appear as an expert witness in court, so Sally and Arlene got ready to fly down together.
3:45 a.m. sunday
They tugged at me and drew me out of my morphine stupor. “Alan? . . . Here’s what’s happening to you. You have a blockage in your intestine and you need surgery as soon as possible. We have to make a decision. This is Dr. Zepeda.”
For the first time, I held the gaze of the man who would soon hold my life and several feet of my intestines in his hands. He was young, but he had the gentleness and presence of an older man. He smiled with mature warmth, and behind his rimless spectacles were intelligent and completely confident eyes.
“Here are your options,” he said in halting English. “You could be operated on here in La Serena. . . . This is a well-equipped hospital. Or, you could fly to Santiago, where the hospitals are bigger.”
Graham leaned in and said, “It’s a two-hour flight, though, to Santiago. And we’d have to charter a plane, which would take some time. We could try it, but there’s a problem with that. The airport here in La Serena is totally fogged in.”
In a matter-of-fact way, just laying out my options for me, Dr. Zepeda said, “You could try to fly to Santiago. But if you wait for the fog to lift, you may not make it.”
Well, that was pretty straightforward. You may not make it. In my own morphine-induced fog, those words became instantly engraved on my brain. No one had ever said to me before, “In a few hours you may be dead.” It’s true—it does concentrate the mind.
“Let’s do it here,” I said. And I could see on their faces that giving me the final decision was really just a courteous formality.
Interestingly, I wasn’t afraid. It must have been Zepeda’s quiet confidence and Graham’s gentle, rational manner that let me simply accept as the next logical step that this man whom I’d never seen before would now take a sharp knife, cut open my belly, and permanently rearrange my insides. And I was never the kind of person who would kiss on a first date.
“The blood supply to some of your small intestine has been choked off and it’s dying,” he said. “I have to go in and resect the bad part and then sew the good parts back together.”
“Oh,” I said, “you’re going to do an end-to-end anastomosis.”
He was stunned. “Yes,” he said. “How do you know that?”
“I did many of them on M*A*S*H.”
It’s true. I did them on extras and day players alike. And although all I operated on was a piece of foam rubber, I could picture exactly what I was supposed to be doing.
There was a short pause, and then he laughed. Through my haze, I smiled. My real illness, it seems, is my compulsion to amuse. Apparently, you can offer to disembowel me, but I’ll still see if I can make you laugh.
He went away again to get ready for the operation, and after about thirty seconds his phrase came back to me.
You may not make it.
I called over to Graham. “Graham, I need to tell you some stuff.” I noticed that I said this with no emotion. I was just taking care of business. “If I don’t wake up, I want you to tell this to Arlene and my daughters and my grandchildren—”
“Wait a minute,” he said, “I’d better get a piece of paper.”
I came up with a couple of sentences, and he wrote them down. I tried to say the unsayable in fifty words or less. A minute later, unsure that I had said enough to Arlene, I called him back and said a little more. I wanted to say more to my daughters and my grandchildren, too, but time was up.
4:00 a.m. sunday
They started the anesthesia, and I went gladly into the good night.
Graham and Nick sat and waited on wooden chairs in a hallway lit by one dim bulb. The hospital was silent, empty.
5:10 a.m. sunday
After an hour and ten minutes, Dr. Zepeda came out of the operating room. Graham got up and asked how it was going. “It’s all done,” Zepeda said. “He’s all sewn up.”
A while later they were wheeling me, semiconscious, out of the recovery room. Graham dialed Arlene and held his cell phone to my ear. Neither of us can remember what we said to each other. But I can remember the sound of her voice and the peace I felt hearing it. It was the first sound I heard as my life began again. We were back in Eden, starting over.
night and day—sunday
I woke up in my hospital room. Nurses were changing IV bags over my head. Every few minutes, it seemed, they were waking me up to take my blood pressure and stick a thermometer in my armpit, when all I wanted was to sleep.
But my dreams were worse. I was making a movie with a famous actor. In each dream, it was a different actor and a different movie. But each time I had to stop shooting to go do something on the other side of town. I never made it back to the set, where I knew I was needed. I was frustrated. I kept getting drawn farther and farther away from my obligations.
I woke up to see the night nurse hovering over me. Sometimes she was replacing my IV bottle. Sometimes she was taking my blood pressure. This time she was just looking at me enigmatically: a silent, beautiful Indian face, staring down at me, like a serene angel of death. When she left I reached back into the dream, looking for another few minutes of sleep. But then, it wasn’t the famous movie star I saw. This time Rush Limbaugh was sitting across from me, glaring at me. Somehow I had disappointed him. He was angry with me. He called me hurtful names. He seemed to think I was weak, useless. Why was he mad at me? Rush, don’t be angry with me. I’m an entertainer like you. I think you’re funny. He glared at me, hate in his eyes. He wanted to kill me with his glare.
I woke up to daylight, and Nick and his wife, Jerushka, were there.
Nick had brought me a plaque signed by all the astronomers at the observatory, making me a member of the Brotherhood of Observational Cosmologists. I asked them to prop it up on a shelf where I could see it.
Jerushka, Nick’s striking, ebullient Croatian wife, had brought me flowers and a large plastic bag from a store. She held up the bag triumphantly. It was full of toilet paper. I wondered why a bag of toilet paper was a triumph. Then Graham came over to the bed and proudly showed me
a stack of towels he’d stolen from the hotel. Why was Graham stealing towels? The hospital towels would be fine. Then someone explained it to me: There are no towels in the hospital. You have to bring your own. You have to bring your own toilet paper, too. Not only that: Graham had been sent out to buy antibiotics for me at a pharmacy. Dr. Zepeda had told him he’d get a better grade of medicine if he bought it himself. I was beginning to get a feel for the little realities that marked the difference between have and have-not.
After a long night of sweaty sleep, my pajamas were wet rags. Jerushka took them home to have them laundered for me. Meanwhile, the day nurse tried to help me into a pair of hospital pajamas, but none of them fit. Chilenos are all much smaller than me. I squeezed into a top, but the only bottoms I could fit into were skimpy shorts. I was cold in them, and I felt ridiculous. As I crossed the room in my Chilean gatkes, I remembered a radio joke from my childhood in the forties. My father and Jack Carson were at the microphone in a live broadcast, doing lines by Jack Douglas, who was legendary for writing weird jokes.
- Once, my plane crashed in the jungle and I walked half-naked across South America. I wrote a book about it.
- Really? What’s it called?
- From the Indies to the Andes in My Undies.
All my life I’d remembered this stupid joke. Now I was living it.
I moved slowly across the room and sat on the bed. I lifted my legs as a counterbalance and lowered myself sideways onto the lumpy mattress. I crawled back into sleep, and there was Rush Limbaugh again, glaring at me. What does he want from me?
I had trouble staying asleep. First of all, they’d put me in the maternity ward, and all night long I heard newborn babies crying. That wasn’t so terrible. I like the sound of babies. But they’d also provided me with a night nurse who, when she wasn’t hovering over me, staring down like the angel of death, was sitting in her chair right next to my bed, snoring. She didn’t snore like an angel, either; she snored like a fully grown moose.
10:00 a.m. monday
I woke up surprisingly refreshed. Dr. Zepeda had told the nurses to let me rest, not to wake me even to take my vital signs. For the first time I was given a little food. Crackers, a fresh cheese called quesella, some generic red Jell-O, and a glass of fat-free milk. It all tasted fantastic.
I drifted off to sleep and then opened my eyes when I heard a noise at the door. Arlene was coming into the room. I could feel a grin spread across my face. She knelt beside the bed, took my hand, and cried quietly.
10:00 a.m. tuesday
Sally and Arlene were worried about the countless people coming in to see me, all of them either shaking my hand or kissing me. When you say hello to a woman in Chile, you kiss her on the cheek whether you know her or not. If you don’t kiss, you risk offending her. And then there were the dingy surroundings. Nick hinted that the private clinic where they first brought me might be more comfortable, and within a couple of hours I was on my way there.
3:00 p.m. tuesday
On a gurney again, moving down the halls, through the doors of the old hospital and out onto the pockmarked sidewalk, kidda-clunk, kidda-clunk. While they worked on prying open the doors of the ambulance, I looked up at the eaves of the building. Directly above my head, three pigeons were sitting on the drainpipe, facing the other way, their fat bottoms poised for a direct hit.
Ah, gravity.
Get the ambulance open, guys. Do not fiddle with it. Open the door.
3:30 p.m. tuesday
The new room was gorgeous. Clean. I met my nurses. The night nurse, Jocelyn, I was certain, would not snore. And the day nurse, Tatiana, was full of life and eager to teach me Spanish. It was essential that I learn a little because no one, at least no one who hung around here very long, spoke English.
Nick arranged for people from the observatory to come over and translate for us. Elaine, a Scottish-Chilean woman who worked at the observatory and spoke perfect English, took Arlene shopping. They bought me a down pillow to replace the hospital pillow, and I instantly understood why people long ago chose to sleep on feathers instead of potatoes.
Tatiana helped me translate articles in the Chilean press about my illness. It seemed to be big news down there. Spanish-speaking journalists were calling the hospital room from Bolivia and Miami. I had apparently reached the point in my life where I was getting more attention by getting sick than by acting.
8:00 p.m. tuesday
Exhausted, Arlene went to sleep on the bed next to mine, but I stayed awake. For the first time, I had enough energy to watch television. And to my surprise, I found myself passionately involved in the World Series. I was surprised because during my childhood, my father’s ear was perpetually filled with the music of Mel Allen’s exuberant vocal cords, and my rebellion was pointedly to ignore baseball entirely. The game I watched that night in the hospital was perhaps the fifth or sixth I’d seen in my entire life. And I loved it. I had apparently come back to life as a completely different person.
Not knowing whom I was supposed to root for, I found myself intimately caught up in the fortunes of Hideki Matsui. Every time he came to bat, he fascinated me. Even when the pitcher nearly killed him with a fastball close to the head, his expression never changed. He became my hero because his concentration was inspiring. Also, he didn’t spit. What is it with the spitting? And why does the video director constantly cut to a tight close-up just as a wet one slurps out? Or do they all spit so copiously that you can’t cut to anyone without capturing a Niagara of jaw juice?
Anyway, I was fascinated with Hideki. I wanted him to get on base. But he kept hitting these quasi home runs, ideal trajectories that were perfect right up to the moment a guy on the other team, almost always the same guy, stepped in casually and caught the ball. Beautiful parabolas ending in the glove of death. Gravity, Hideki, gravity. You can’t forget that you’re hitting into curved space.
Hideki walked away hitless, heroically not changing his expression, and not spitting. I fell asleep. Two hours later, I woke up to the sound of the vital signs alarm going off. I’d rolled over on my side and pulled the needle out of my arm. They stuck it back in, and I began training myself to sleep without turning. I called on the concentration of my new spiritual guide, Hideki Matsui.
7:00 a.m. wednesday
I woke up refreshed. Tatiana helped me out of bed and walked me to el baño, where she helped me take a shower. I was grateful for her tact as I undressed, revealing as little of myself as possible. Actors are shy exhibitionists. I once bolted across a Paris hotel room because the maid delivering breakfast was coming through the door without knocking and was liable to see me in my pajamas.
I stood with my back to Tatiana while she held the shower head, and we chatted in broken English and tattered Spanish. I was beginning to believe that I would actually learn to speak some Spanish before I left. I’ve always thought you could learn to get around in any language if you concentrated on about thirty well-chosen verbs, a couple of dozen nouns, a few pleasantries, and some basic sense of word order.
So a few minutes later, I was sitting up in bed, drawing diagrams for a revolutionary new language system that would enable anyone to learn any language in a week. My old pattern was intact. I don’t just get flooded with ideas, I get flooded with systems. Mike Nichols diagnosed this for me one day when we were in rehearsal for The Apple Tree. There was a moment in the play where my character was supposed to recall something from the past, and Mike didn’t think I was convincing.
“Recall something right now,” he said. “Actually remember something. What were you thinking when you got out of your car this morning in the parking lot?”
“That’s easy. I was thinking, Should I take my jacket with me or leave it in the car? It’s warm. I probably won’t wear my jacket today. But should I bring my jacket all the way into New York from New Jersey if I don’t wear it? That seems pointless. What should I do in the future? Is there a good jacket policy I can derive from this?”
&nb
sp; There was silence in the dark auditorium. Then Mike said, “You’re insane.”
Yes, but look at how much I get done. It was only ten-thirty in the morning, and already I had a basic language system laid out. It used a version of a memory aid that was popular in the Renaissance: an imaginary mansion where memories can be stored and enable you to remember a string of hundreds of words. Then I incorporated an element from my friend Harry Lorayne’s Memory Power System. So of course, if he liked this idea, Harry and I could go into business together. In fact, he and I could make an infomercial together. And then—wait—our friend Mel Brooks could join us on the infomercial. To Mel’s amazement, we’d have him speaking Hungarian, a language he’d never heard before, in seven days. Was I manic? That description didn’t come close. Galaxies were exploding in my neural networks. I was alive, and like a newborn star, I was cooking with gas.
Alan Dressler came down from Las Campanas after a night of observing. He sat on a bed across from me and genially launched into what he knew would cheer me up. “I’ve been thinking about your question,” he said, “about curved space.”
I’d been bothering all the astronomers I’d met on this show with the same question. What does Einstein mean when he says gravity is curved space? How can you picture such a thing? And not only that—gravity is supposed to be curved space-time. Even if you could picture how space might be curved, how do you curve time? I’ve decided that before I leave Chile, I’ll get the answer. This is impossible, of course. Even Einstein couldn’t picture it, except in two dimensions. He suggested we imagine a mattress or a rubber sheet that’s been stretched on a frame, with a bowling ball on it. The bowling ball makes a depression. If you roll a baseball across the sheet, it will curve in toward the heavier ball. Curved space.