The Call I Made to My Brother First

Marty found him sitting up against the post, talking about the weather like nothing had happened. There was blood in his hair and he could not say what day it was.

Dad takes a blood thinner for his heart rhythm. Anybody who has a parent on one knows what that means when they hit their head. Marty knew. He called 911 before he even helped Dad stand.

I got the call at 6:20 in the evening. I was under a grader at the county garage with a work light and a cold sandwich, and I was at the emergency room in Morehead in eighteen minutes.

The scan showed bleeding between his skull and his brain. The emergency doctor, a young woman with tired eyes and a good plain way of talking, sat down in the chair to tell me instead of standing over me.

“We’re giving him medicine to reverse the blood thinner,” she said. “But this needs a neurosurgeon, and we don’t have one here. We’re working on a bed in Lexington.”

I called Bert from the hallway. He picked up on the second ring and I heard his kids in the background and the television going.

“Dad fell,” I said. “It’s his head. He’s on the thinner. They’re sending him to Lexington when they find a bed.”

There was a long breath on the other end. Then he said, “I’m coming,” and he hung up, and I could hear in those two words that he was already walking to his truck.

The emergency doctor came back about ten o’clock and talked to both of us in the little family room with the box of tissues and the picture of a covered bridge on the wall. She said the surgeon in Lexington would choose with us, but there were usually two ways to go.

“One is a bigger operation,” she said. “They open a window in the skull, get all the blood out, and look for anything still bleeding. It’s more complete. It’s also a longer surgery, and harder at his age.”

“The other is smaller. They drill a couple of small holes and drain it. It’s quicker and easier on an older body, but sometimes the blood comes back and they have to go in again.”

I asked my questions the way I ask a parts man questions. How long under for each. What the odds were of going back in. What could go wrong on the table. What happened if they waited.

She answered every one of them. I liked her for that.

Bert did not ask a single question. He sat with his elbows on his knees and his cap in his hands and turned it around and around by the bill.

“Seems to me,” I said when she left, “if you are going to put a man under, you get all of it the first time. You do it right and you do it once.”

Bert looked up at me then. It was the first time he had looked straight at me all night.

“You would say that,” he said. Then he stood up and went back to sit with Dad.

I need to tell you about the paper, because people always ask why I did not just walk in and say my piece.

After our mother died, Dad went to the lawyer in town and signed his papers. Bert is the oldest. Bert got Dad’s health care power of attorney. I was the backup, in case Bert could not be reached.