The Name I Crossed Off My Emergency Card

The Waiting Room

They took me back at 7:30 that Thursday morning. I remember counting backward from ten. I think I got to seven.

A knee replacement usually takes about two hours. Mine took almost four. Partway through, my blood pressure dropped down low and stayed there longer than they liked. They slowed down and took their time and got it right.

I didn’t know any of that, of course. I was asleep.

Everything I’m going to tell you about the waiting room, I heard later from Tim and from Dottie, and a little of it from Vicki, a long time afterward.

Tim had gone out to his truck for a nap after they took me back.

He came back in around nine with two coffees from the gas station across the street, because he said the waiting-room coffee could strip paint. He handed one to Dottie and sat down.

Dottie was knitting. She was making a baby blanket for a girl at church, pale yellow, and her needles went click, click, click the whole time.

Tim said it was the only thing that kept him from pacing a hole in the carpet.

Around 9:40 the doors slid open and Vicki came in, out of breath, with her car keys still in her hand.

My sister’s girl, Jenny, had seen something on Facebook from Tim’s wife asking for prayers for Mom’s knee this morning. Jenny texted Vicki.

And that’s how my own daughter found out that her mother was already in surgery, and that somebody else had driven her there.

Vicki looked around the waiting room, saw Tim, and came over fast. She didn’t look at Dottie at all. Tim said she didn’t even seem to see her.

“Why didn’t anybody tell me it was today?” she said. “I thought it was next week. I thought Mom said next Thursday.”

It wasn’t next Thursday, and she knew it. We’d talked about it a dozen times. But I think Vicki had been telling herself a lot of things that week, and that was just one more.

“She’s been back since 7:30,” Tim said. “They said about two hours.”

Vicki sat down next to her brother. She pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them, the way she used to sit on the couch when she was little and something on television scared her.

Ten o’clock came. Then ten-thirty. The board on the wall that shows the patients by number said my number was still in the operating room.

Tim said that was when he started to worry, and he got up and went to the window and stood there looking at the parking lot.

Vicki kept asking if anybody had heard anything. She went up to the volunteer desk twice.

The volunteer, an older man with a cardigan and a name tag, told her as nicely as he could that the surgical team would call the family contact when there was an update.

“I’m the family,” Vicki said. “I’m her daughter.”

The volunteer said the surgery team would call when they had news, and he was sure it would be soon.

The Phone Call

At 11:15, Dottie’s cell phone rang.

It was in the front pocket of her tote, down under the yarn, and it played the ringtone her grandson set up for her, which is a rooster crowing. Tim said every head in that waiting room turned.

Dottie dug it out and looked at the screen. It said the name of the hospital. She set her knitting in her lap and answered.

“Yes,” she said. “This is Dottie Hess. Yes, I’m her contact.”

Vicki stood straight up out of her chair.

“Why are they calling you?” she said. Her voice was too loud for that room. “I’m her daughter. Why are they calling you?”

Dottie held up one finger, the way she used to hold it up in the school office when the phone rang during an argument. She kept listening. She said “yes” and “all right” and “oh, thank the Lord” and “we’ll be right here.”

Vicki turned and looked at her brother. Tim said he has never, in his whole life, wanted to be anywhere less. He said he’d rather have been forty feet up a pole in an ice storm.

But Tim is a good man. He didn’t look away. He put his coffee on the floor and looked his sister in the eye.