By Victor Larson
My father was electrocuted in his hospital bed.
I’m not talking about the kind of electrocution that results from touching a downed power line, or even as the result of an electrical appliance falling into a bathtub. Those are outside-of-the-body events. My dad was electrocuted from the inside.
He was not a well man. Lifelong polycystic kidney disease led to high blood pressure. A misdiagnosis of histoplasmosis in his forties landed him in the Hinsdale, Illinois Tuberculosis Sanitarium for three months. Yes, it took three months for them to figure out that he did not have an easily identifiable disease. During that time our entire family was exposed to the disease he didn’t have. I developed a permanent positive TB skin test that got really interesting looks from doctors until I began warning them not to test me.
Dad swore he would never go to a doctor again. Sadly, this left his kidney and blood pressure conditions untreated and culminated in a series of heart attacks during his last year of life. Symptoms of a heart attack that are now considered classic were not as widely understood fifty years ago. Factor in his aversion to seeking professional help and it wasn’t until he was doubled over in pain on the morning of October 7 that he agreed to go to the doctor.
I recall my mother speaking to me in hushed tones, urging me not to be late for the school bus, when I showed concern about Dad. He was sitting on the living room sofa, bent in half, arms folded on knees, head on arms. This was the man who had not missed a day of work in over twelve years. It’s probably something of a miracle that he didn’t die at home that morning.
I will skip over the next two days. There were many anxious hours, from my return home after school and the somber news about my dad’s urgent hospitalization, through a difficult night during which it was decided that he needed a “demand” pacemaker to control his heartbeat. The device would be temporary at first to assess effectiveness, and then permanent if deemed necessary. By his second day in the hospital he appeared to have stabilized.
Visiting hours were somewhat limited in the hospital’s coronary intensive care unit. Two visitors were allowed in at a time. It was decided that my mother and sister would visit during the evening of October 8. They were visibly shaken when they returned home. It was difficult to see our strong, stoic breadwinner reduced to a vomiting, vulnerable mess. Medication was interfering with his cognition; he was repeating himself, falling in and out of sleep, pale and sweaty, looking so frail between the rails of the hospital bed.
Armed with that knowledge, we braced ourselves for a visit the next morning. It was my turn to go in with Mom. My sister graciously, perhaps gratefully, remained in the small waiting area outside of the CCU. She had seen plenty the night before.
We walked into the unit, through a sterile confluence of hushed voices, beeping equipment, white linen and stainless steel poles and guardrails. Dad’s bed was near the eighth-floor window. He looked a mess, unshaven and hair uncombed, barely aware of our presence, slipping into and out of sleep. On a shelf next to his bed was a large box that was plugged into a wall outlet. It had wires coming out of it that ran down and under the sheet that covered him. This was the temporary pacemaker. Facing us at his bedside was an oscilloscope, a heart monitor that traced his pulse on a primitive, circular green screen, perhaps four or five beats from left to right until it started over at the left edge. This was not the glamorous plot device seen in modern medical television shows. I was fascinated with the technology. The beats were regular and identical. Dad had ten minutes to live.
We visited as best we could given his mostly unresponsive state. Several minutes went by before a nurse came over, made adjustments to an IV and commented that Dad hadn’t been cleaned up for visiting hours.
“It’s been really busy,” she apologized.
She hurried toward the other side of the room. Dad had five minutes remaining.
When Dad woke up, however briefly, he seemed irritated by the wires and tubes, the nasal cannula that delivered supplemental oxygen, and he tugged a little at his sheets. Mom tried to calm and assure him, stroked his arm and said that a nurse would be right back.
At the nurse’s station, the unlucky woman who was caring for my father had no idea that she was about to make a mistake that would end the life of her patient. The incident would haunt her for the rest of her career and long be remembered by everyone on duty that morning. She picked up my dad’s personal items, his comb and electric razor, and headed back to his bed. We watched her approach, a sheepish smile on her face that we attributed to having fallen behind schedule so visibly. Dad had two minutes left; about the time most people spend brushing their teeth.
“Oh, honey, the nurse is going to comb your hair,” said Mom. It was something the nurse should have said. Perhaps she was new.
Indeed, the nurse combed Dad’s hair, parting it on the side as he always did. He had a growth of facial hair, gray stubble he always eliminated during his morning routine, even while on vacation. The nurse put down the comb and unwound the razor’s electric cord.
Death approached without a sound, unseen, and hovered over her shoulder. She plugged the razor into the same outlet as the pacemaker.
My fascination with the oscilloscope would factor into the resulting wrongful death investigation. I watched while the razor’s electromagnetic field disrupted the pacemaker’s signal, causing the slow, steady mountain range on the green display to become the wild tracing of a Richter scale during a high magnitude quake. But in this case the quake onscreen reflected the activity of Dad’s heart.
Alarms sounded. Dad lurched up in bed and yelled something unintelligible; arms stretched outward, and then fell back.
“Code Blue, Coronary Care,” was announced over the hospital public address system. Teams of white coats assembled, pushing a “crash cart.” We were quickly ushered out of the unit. It was clear that something was horribly wrong, but it’s so odd how your mind can retreat to a place of safety even in the face of overwhelming certainty. Time slowed. My memories take on a gelatinous quality at this point, like looking through a glass block window. We seemed to float, our progress impeded in an upstream struggle against the white water of talking, joking lab-coated personnel. They came in as we went out. As a teaching hospital it is likely that some of the people were residents or interns on their way to watch a real-life cardiac arrest, the Code Blue. They would also get to see a failed attempt at revival.
Of the three of us, Mom was the most deluded about what was transpiring. My sister was thrown into a state of confusion and shock. She knew only that we had suddenly returned with an incoherent story amidst a sea of sound and activity. I knew what had happened.
What came next is the stuff of television hospital dramas. The breaking of news to a family in generic vocabulary that is beyond comprehension. It remains an ugly, private few minutes that changed everything in our family forevermore. The world went on around us while we were impaled by the moment. Death batted us around like a shuttlecock for a few minutes and then moved on. My mother dissolved in a torrent of screaming hysteria that sounded like animal noises, like nothing I’d ever heard a human make. The shock to her system ignited a long dormant, mysterious illness she had suffered in her twenties. It was called lupus and it came on with a vengeance, killing her within five years.
Charles Kuralt covered our story nationwide on CBS radio. There were no names mentioned. Names didn’t matter. And it felt like my dad didn’t matter either. A wrongful death lawsuit was settled out of court. When lawyers and actuaries got done dismantling my dad’s financial value, given his age, likely medical outcome and earning potential, our attorney recommended we accept $15,000. Years had elapsed and my mother was too ill to be dragged through a deposition and court proceedings. This is the kind of lawsuit that would yield millions today. Mid-case, our attorney’s home burned down, destroying his files and completely changing his previously optimistic demeanor. Even at age sixteen it seemed very odd to me.
Many years later when my grandmother needed a pacemaker I had a chat with her doctor. He allayed my concerns, assuring me that the technology had matured dramatically. As for the nurse who plugged in the razor—it was an accident. There is nothing to forgive. And hopefully there were lessons learned and shared, some sort of positive result from the events of that morning.
Fifty years later, my sister and I exchanged emails on October 9. We’d both been thinking about that day, each without the other’s prompting, but both with a deep, retroactive sigh of relief for all the good things that have happened since. Many people have it so much worse.