Ben Stein's Diary: My Hero
Stein, Benjamin J.
BEN STEI DIARY by Benjamin J. Stein My Hero Sunday U h-oh. I do not like the sound of this at all. I am out here in Malibu with Alex and the dogs. It's morning. Last night, we had a lovely...
...Naturally, it was a spectacularly beautiful Los Angeles day...
...Thank you, God...
...Oh, I hope this works...
...Pfister, a very serious and clever looking surgeon, was shaking my arm and telling me that the surgery had gone great...
...As I sat in the darkness, I thought about my father, just as you might expect...
...To hear that my father is much better, although still very critical...
...He has been so brave, suffering pain and discomfort, fear, sleeplessness, terror, shortness of breath, embarrassment, every kind of piercing and tearing and intrusion and he has never complained once...
...I guess plenty of hard-working men and women...
...I realize more and more that there is a lot of world out there that takes its responsibilities seriously...
...This is really scary because I can hardly trust my own judgment about many of these things...
...I called her...
...Yeah, right...
...I sat with one other paying passenger and the usual mob of flight attendants gossiping in the galley about their love lives...
...Sunday I came to the hospital with my suitcase today, planning to fly up to New York to my niece's wedding...
...I thanked Debbie and Dr...
...He looked at me dubiously...
...I am here at the hospital...
...He's stabilized...
...Who will be around to offer his judgment that maybe spending a million dollars on a house in Oxford, Maryland, that I'll only live in one night a year might not be a great idea...
...Monday T o my total amazement, at 6:3o a.m., as I was racing into Washington, there was a ton of traffic...
...My mother was different, and so am I.) Who's going to be there waiting for me in the East where the sun rises...
...Tommy's at Nerd Camp as I call it, or Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Camp as he calls it...
...He would be there sitting on his leather swivel chair under his lamp, thinner every time, with all of his news and views 50 October 1999 • The American Spectator and beaucoups, eager for company and just as ready to hear my news...
...But I did find him in a bay with about twenty other patients who were about to have angiograms...
...But what a madhouse of traffic...
...He had some bad chest pains, so he went in and he's at GW Hospital...
...A few minutes later, I dragged myself to the answering machine...
...I do not like this at all.Wednesday I t is very, very early in the morning...
...In fact, taken all in all, if you could take your most optimistic dream of how a ward should be run, it would have to be something a lot like the surgical ICU of the Washington Hospital Center...
...When I awakened Dr...
...I especially do not like this because I am here all by my little self...
...He looked shy, and Mommy said, "He told me to tell you he just wants you to be here for it and not have to go back to Washington right away...
...Then, down to baggage claim, and there's Tommy frantically looking for me with tears in his eyes...
...That could be a good sign or a bad sign...
...Kent did call me in for a talk...
...on the cursed redeye...
...My sister and I can look on, but he's doing the suffering and hurting and bearing it...
...I chatted and gossiped with the nurses for a while—hospitals are perfect for me in that way because I have a captive audience to show off for...
...They moved my father into the Surgical Intensive Care Unit last night...
...Then they took him through some double doors into surgery, and I went into a waiting room, as tired as a man can be, or at least as I have ever been, to wait...
...I'm in the pink...
...In his dream he heard himself saying "free at last, free at last...
...His heartbeat went haywire, and they started an I.V...
...I had better get there pronto and wield my scalpel...
...What if some horrible turn of events happens and a big decision is required of me...
...She told me horror stories about various people's lives to make me feel better about my father...
...I guess plenty of hard-working men and women...
...Kent...
...Then they attached a new catheter to his heart and on its other end it was attached to a bedside pacemaker...
...My father sitting out on the deck of our next house, on Harvey Road, overlooking Sligo Creek Park in Silver Spring with another radio, this time atube-type portable with batteries, also listening to the Senators while a wall of cricket noise rose like a tornado from the creek banks and the maples in the park, circled around like a banshee, and slammed against the house...
...He looked grim, and with damned good reason...
...But this keyhole surgery is supposed to be far better, far less taxing...
...We went down in the elevator...
...I told a few stewardesses what was happening...
...Who's going to be the Daddy...
...of heart-regularization medicine...
...I have to remember everything he's saying," I thought to myself, "so I can tell Mom and she'll be able to be informed...
...She's a lovely young woman and my sister, a well-organized and tasteful woman, has arranged a lavish fete...
...No, I had better just be there...
...But this is not supposed to be happening...
...Kent offered to show me moving X-rays of the results of the cardiac cath...
...True, the walls are a depressingly dingy color, and true, there are no decent waiting areas...
...Then we're going to do a 'keyhole bypass' surgery and take his mammary artery, which is useless in an 82-year-old man, and transplant it to his heart...
...That's a gift...
...God bless him, and He obviously has, and me and my boy...
...My father was back in his room...
...My father was sedated so he didn't know what had hit him...
...The nurses...well, remember I said that the surgical ICU is like paradise in a way...
...Daddy remembers...
...There is some blockage, but they'll fix it...
...I only mention Del Taco and the chicken soft taco because it was about fifty cents and tasted amazingly good...
...He lies there in the ICU and cannot talk because of his tracheal tube...
...But she had gone back to New York the day before...
...He should be up and about in a few days...
...They could not do the angiogram yesterday because they "forgot" my father was on blood thinner, which he's been on for about twenty years...
...Let's just have all of the Steins die right now...
...About his tests...
...My father in an earlier day coming up to meet me in New Haven when I took a leave of absence because I had such crazed nerves about being in law school with such mean and sadistic people as I had teaching me—and because I was treated for studying anxiety with drugs they use to treat psychotic serial murderers...
...Miracle...
...More and more breathing problems...
...But he looks as if to say, "Well, what can you do...
...He was in a ward with a kind of scary tough Korean nurse who kept calling him "sweetie" as if he were brain damaged...
...When I returned, my father was in the CardioVascular Recovery Room attended by abeautiful nurse named Mary Beth, with blond hair and alert blue eyes...
...But, I thought to myself, I'll have to ask my father about this...
...He's taking less oxygen...
...The head nurse of cardiac cath, Debbie, got me a gurney and had me lie down and breathe while they put pillows under my head and knees...
...We talked endlessly about Nixon and how could he ever get out of the mess he was in, and then we realized he couldn't...
...He had not slept at all...
...It looks very bad," she says...
...Stuck in traffic...
...Friday I am up at 3:30 a.m...
...I sat near a family with a lavish Tidewater accent waiting for their Mom to have brain surgery...
...Tuesday T his is getting worse and worse...
...I have44 The nurses are attentive, intelligent, good natured, eager to help, knowledgeable, and very good-looking...
...He's starting to get more atrial fibrillations...
...I am so incredibly tired, too...
...I argued with them but to no avail.44 A doctor came in and said there would have to be an angiogram the next day...
...Very surreptitiously, I asked two of his doctors if I should stay or go...
...Pneumonia is setting in...
...Of course he was unconscious already...
...In fact, while all of them are fairly good-looking, there are a few young women here who are heart-stoppingly beautiful...
...I told my sister and my niece I was not coming...
...It took a few minutes to track down my father, but there he was, in another tiny room, talking to my sister, who had bravely come over with him in the ambulance...
...It's a monster oak with immense branches covering an entire lawn of decent size...
...Then he calmed down and looked better...
...Welcome to Washington, D.C., most unbearable spot on earth in the summer...
...What would you like...
...So here I am in mid-air once again hearing that my parent is gravely ill...
...That meant he couldn't talk at all...
...In fact, very weak and pale and laboring desperately trying to breathe...
...Thursday B etter and better indeed...
...I fell asleep in that tiny rigid chair for about two hours...
...No, I do not like the sound of this one bit...
...17 said it before and I'll say it again...
...His blood pressure came up, and all was better...
...Then he had dozed off and dreamed he was at home and my mother was standing over him...
...I wish I had known to sue them at the time...
...Then, back to sleep at the hotel, feeling groovy...
...Imagine, those of you who know medicine, treating someone who was anxious about his paper in civil procedure with massive doses of horrific Trilafon...
...They took it well but I felt nauseous and distraught missing the wedding of that sweet girl...
...The brain is amazing...
...But he never talks about how much money anyone has made...
...Sounds like a scam...
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...When he saw me, he greeted me cheerfully and resumed his talk about the estate tax...
...A doctor came in and said there would have to be an angiogram the next day...
...Just as when my mother was terminally ill, they totally or almost totally ignored me except for one who showed some sympathy...
...The bad news about a heart attack seemed to settle in the dingy room like an unclean fog, an ancient dust from thousands of other patients who had been in the room and gotten bad news about their tickers and let the news slide to the floor and attach itself to the wall and the ancient curtains until the room was grimy with bad news...
...Advertiser Index By patronizing the companies and products posted in this issue, your positive response rewards them for advertising in one of the gems of American publishing, The American Spectator...
...I sat with my father 52 October 1999 • The American Spectator and he did not look good at all...
...It's just not in these cardiac guys to give up...
...As my sister says, it seems to be in a no-man's land...
...Pfister said I would not be able to see my father for a few hours, so I went back to the hotel to sleep...
...Both of them said they would stay...
...They are attentive, intelligent, good natured, eager to help, startlingly knowledgeable, always ready to explain, and some of them are amazingly good-looking...
...His blood pressure is regular...
...Or maybe that should be on shore...
...When he saw me, he even let me hug him...
...Not a great way to feel...
...They would not give me the car I wanted for anything and acted as if they had never seen me before at a station I rent from about fifteen times a year...
...Nurses came in to take blood and read his cardiac rhythms, and another nurse came in with an aspirin...
...The American Spectator • October 1999 55...
...We all commiserated and tried to be cheerful...
...He did have a plan...
...So now they're doing it this morning...
...Soon, in fact, Dr...
...She had to make preparations...
...I called every few minutes and the reports were steadily worse...
...This is really getting scary...
...The only reason for the move—they said—was that to save on staff they were closing down the CVRR for the weekend...
...Real care is given to how the families of the patients are getting along...
...My father is still on the ventilator, but the doctors are all saying that he's stable and trending up...
...When he had that episode, I clutched my cell phone and thought, "Holy smoke...
...from now on...
...couple of hours and then drove my smelly car over to the Washington Hospital Center off North Capital Street in view of the Capitol...
...What maniac would be calling at this hour...
...The nurses all fuss over me like mad insanity because I am a TV star...
...I like that because in this case, they let me spend a little longer with my father than they normally would a patient and his son...
...But also true, this hospital surgical ICU really wants to save lives and save spirits as well...
...Who'll tell me I should not feel bad about not knowing in what month the U.S...
...Saturday T ommy actually agreed to come out to the beach with me, which is rare...
...Politically, we're at different poles, but she does not have a mean bone in her body and she has the discipline of a Trojan...
...This is going to be a protracted struggle, as De Gaulle said after the Germans overran France in 1940...
...We stopped at Del Taco and I had a chicken soft taco, and then I was at the airport...
...The doctors are thoughtful and always in attendance...
...He thought Ed Dennison was an unsung genius of economics...
...I have never known anyone as indifferent to money as my father, the economist...
...To be in the sun and know your father is on the mend....What can I say...
...Bravo...
...I looked next to me for my sister, who tends to be very level headed...
...That means you'll soon be free of this surgery stuff," I said hopefully...
...My father is doing better...
...My father and I eating lunch at the White House Mess while names that are now in history floated around us: Elvis Presley, Bob Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Maurice Stans, John Dean, Chuck Colson...
...He must feel so alone...
...I was all alone hearing—as well as I could make out—that my father was about to die...
...I went back to my room and slept for a•4 Who gets to work at 7 a.m...
...I do not, not, repeat not like blood at all...
...To think that life is about to end...
...Who will be waiting for me anywhere but in L.A...
...Last night, we had a lovely relaxing evening eating and reading and playing with the dogs while the surf crashed off shore...
...My father, who looks so frail, apparently still had his cavalryman father's heart...
...I am not going to say their names because that would not be gentille to the others...
...I am back in D.C...
...I thought as I heard the rings...
...My father sitting out in front of the house in Silver Spring when we lived on Caroline Avenue, smoking cigarettes and listening to the Washington Senators' baseball games while fireflies flew all around him...
...In a very few minutes his "breathing" was better and his heartbeat on the monitor was perfectly regular...
...premium section of the "red eye" that left at 10 p.m...
...Bypass surgery is horrifying stuff...
...They even offered to let me watch, but that's out of the question...
...But, as I say, he's better now—for the moment...
...They had me in the wrong car...
...His heartbeat went up to about 115 beats per minute while his blood pressure dropped to about 40 over 25...
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...The idea is to save money by not having to pay those high coupons...
...I question whether he'll survive this day...
...His heartbeat is irregular...
...He had on an oxygen mask but otherwise looked great...
...Hint: It begins with an M and ends with a u.) The heat is just seething off the brick sidewalks...
...Who will always be around to answer any question about history or economics or literature or opera...
...I called him...
...I went into the "cardiac cath" waiting room and waited along with many other people...
...Good Lord it is HOT...
...We made small talk—and what isn't small talk in that situation...
...And isn't that amount exactly the same as what the Treasury would have to pay the bondholder anyway...
...Words cannot tell how brave my father was...
...I'll ask my father...
...They refused to give me a no-smoking car...
...Remember when we used to watch these every Sunday morning when I was little...
...The American Spectator October 1999 51 He took me into the lab and showed me photos of a heart with blood spurting all over the damned place...
...Tina, our lively assistant, drove me to the airport...
...Kenny Kent, the famous cardiologist who does the cardiac caths, came to talk to me...
...It's always that way when I have to leave town...
...A few months ago my father and I went out to see that tree...
...Guess what the most pleasant place on earth is in summer...
...I do not like this at all...
...They just make a little tiny hole and work through it and next thing you know, he's great...
...That's because the doctors, in a fit of total confusion about how the human body works, have scheduled my father to be brought down for surgery at 4:3o a.m...
...To think that he's about to enter immortality...
...I told him he looked great and was being very brave...
...Won't the holders of the bonds demand exactly the present value of the bond's total of interest payments plus the payoff amount of the bond...
...No," I thought to myself...
...His situation was grim...
...The room is still the same neutral horrible green, and the sun is still beating down outside, but I am about to lose my father and he's been so brave for long it's just a crime and what will I do without him...
...By then it was dawn...
...I tried to read the newspapers...
...I called the hospital...
...However, the hospital itself is jammed, humming, madly filled with purposeful men and women hustling to and fro, mostly with quite serious looks on their faces...
...More and more blood pressure problems...
...There were no little transistor radios so he ran a long extension cord through the window to hear the games...
...And also, am I going to just have to turn right around and go back to D.C...
...He was getting news from the nurses and doctors and it was not good...
...They brought in my father a little earlier than planned, so I was barely able to catch him before he was to begin...
...True, the course of surgery had sounded a bit, well, maybe stretching the envelope for an 82-year-old man, but apparently it had worked out well...
...Raising him to loo percent oxygen on the ventilator and he's still not getting enough oxygen in his bloodstream...
...I felt light-headed, but my father took it bravely and my sister more bravely still...
...Who will be the voice of prudence...
...Sitting up in a day, walking in two days...
...The nurses are beaming...
...My father looks so thin and drawn and scared, and I feel even more scared...
...We ate our steaks and our hot fudge sundaes and knew it would all come to an end some evil day, and sure enough it did...
...I would have been sobbing with terror...
...Back at home I called the hospital again...
...Just like with my mother back in April of 1997...
...Actually, I was sure Dr...
...Big business...
...dropped the atom bomb on Japan...
...Who will know everything...
...Well," I said, "they're working on a plan for you...
...But imagine how he feels...
...He's supposed to be recovering, not laboring in surgical intensive care...
...This is great," I thought...
...I watched him for a while and felt happy...
...I think it's got minimal risk and it's going to be fine...
...Her daughter, my charming and accomplished niece, Emily, was to be married that Sunday at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens...
...Uh-oh...
...There was a tiny little tree attached to a stake next to his chair...
...So, since the nurses are all telling me that Pop is recovering rapidly, and since the doctors are all saying the same, and since my sister is now here to relieve me, I am going back home on American 75 tomorrow, back to my little Tommy Boy and my big wifie...
...Thursday B ut what a difference a few days make...
...He showed me on a model of a human heart just how blocked my father's coronary arteries were...
...When his heartbeat reached a certain level, he got a shock to make his heart beat...
...Some enzymes in his blood test said he had suffered a heart attack and his coronary functioning was seriously impaired...
...I thought...
...I rested at my hotel, the cheerful, perfect River Inn, and then headed off for the GW Hospital...
...There was a story in the New York Times about how the Treasury is planning to buy back high interest debt with the surplus that's been building up...
...Today, I was in my father's room when all of a sudden his blood pressure monitor, atrial fibrillation monitor, and oxygenation monitor all started buzzing and flashing at once...
...He told me about his episodes, about his nitrostat...
...The plane landed...
...He has a very high opinion of Pete Sampras and the highest opinion of all of Michael Jordan and he never stops praising Simons and Knight and Viner...
...But he says he's doing okay and he doesn't need or want for either of us to come see him...
...I finally got a car and headed into town...
...She also told him he was being moved to Washington Hospital Center, where there were better cardiac facilities...
...I flirted with her for about two hours, and then Dr...
...He recognized me, nodded wearily, and went back to sleep...
...But however it turns out, Pop's my hero...
...asks 11-year-old Tommy...
...But he is now on what anyone would call "life support" and that terrifies me...
...That was fine, and the SICU is paradise in a certain way I am about to describe, and the doorway to paradise for more obvious reasons...
...But soon I was right as rain...
...His breathing is poor even with an oxygen mask...
...This is tearing me to pieces and my sister, too, but this is Pop's finest hour...
...They gave him blood pressure medicine...
...Most of all, my father these last two years waiting for me to come visit him after my mother entered immortality...
...The orderlies genuinely want to please...
...Every child wants to know his Dad is a hero, and this is my Pop's Battle of the Bulge, his Inchon, his rendezvous with pain and fear and coming through...
...Naturally, her stories didn't help a bit...
...I ran for nurses but they were already all over him...
...Don't they know that's when people are weakest and most vulnerable and their bodies and brains most frail...
...I don't like this at all...
...My father has taken a turn for the worse, been extremely critical, and now is better again but still very critical...
...But how good that steak and that fudge tasted, and how sweet it all was...
...It doesn't do any good," one said, "but it's Jewish guilt...
...It's love and duty...
...The cabin was deserted and freezing cold...
...But this afternoon, after a visit from a very special pal of my Dad's, he started to look peaked...
...That's where they run a catheter—a very small catheter—into the coronary arteries to have a look at what's happening in the heart, blood-flow wise...
...Absent a call provision allowing calls, won't the Treasury be in the same position if it buys back the bonds or just pays them off over time...
...It's an immense hospital cornplex near Catholic U., next to a reservoir and a filtration plant, and about a mile from where I had to park my car...
...Here's the way: The nurses here are the most nearly perfect44 I sat near a family with a lavish Tidewater accent that was waiting for their Mom to have brain surgery...
...Irregular heartbeat...
...To make your blood flow smooth and happy," as she said...
...Oh, happy day...
...He actually agreed to take Puppy-Wuppy for a walk with me by the home of the great diver, Greg Louganis...
...My flight was almost empty in premium...
...With such late notice, using my AAdvantage miles so that I didn't have to pay the "no advance" fare, I could only get on the BENJAMIN J. STEIN is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Hollywood and Malibu...
...My father was lying in bed in a tiny room with several I.V.'s in him, talking animatedly with my sister about the estate tax...
...He's still extremely critical, says his nurse, but he's better...
...and he just endures it...
...I think he had to be outside because my mother did not want him smoking inside—even though she smoked herself in those days, as everyone did...
...In just a moment, they had an endo tube in him, a tube running down his throat, past his larynx, down into his lungs...
...I soon fell asleep and then I was at Dulles, waiting for the Avis bus...
...He thinks Murray Foss and Mary Kosters and some others at AEI are sound and thorough economists...
...Only that time I was flying east and this time I am flying west...
...Then I put on Bob Dylan and "Idiot Wind" over and over again on my Disc-man...
...Then, with a cold shiver, I realized that I might not be asking my father anything any longer...
...Who gets to work at 7 a.m...
...Anyway, my father was lying in bed...
...Anyway, I was sleeping my little head off this morning when the phone rang at about seven my time...
...Back at the River Inn, I lay in bed covered with a thin blanket and a heavy shroud of fear...
...I felt sick...
...Torture...
...We're going to do an angioplasty with a stent on one of the arteries and open that up...
...When you get good fast food it can be really good...
...An ambulance would take him in an hour or so...
...The custodian of the room was a beautiful black woman named Keeyana...
...17 specimens of humanity I have ever met...
...Boiling, seething, unbelievably hot...
...It was a lonely, deeply troubling moment, as if I were looking into a deep pit of sorrow...
...I started to throw up and faint all at once, just as I do when I have a blood test...
...Who'll be there to tell me that getting and spending are not the only ways of measuring one's progress in this world...
...Like an oven, like a blast furnace, unbearably hot at 9 in the morning...
...Pop is in the hospital," she said...
...Kent would come up with a plan...
...Trouble...
...Better and better," the nurse said...
...My father and I walking around the South Lawn of the White House when he was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for Nixon and I was a lowly speechwriter...
...It was my sister calling from Brooklyn...
...My sister is back here to keep me company...
...Not a word of fear, not a word of complaint...
...Sunday T his cannot be happening again...
...Saturday N ow this is not good at all...
...And now he has dug out an ancient tape of "Ren and Stimpy," set up the new VCR, and is watching it next to me...
...Box 549, Arlington, VA 222160549...
...Then I realized I would not be telling Mom for a while...
...I told my father, who pretended to be cheered by the news...
...This would have been about 1951...
...He's in a chair, but looks weak...
...I am going to have to call my sister in a second and have to tell her we no longer have a father on earth...
...It's so interesting to me even in extremis to think (looking at my sugar cookie that the attendant just brought me) that in all the years I have known my father he has never been particularly impressed by whether anyone — me included—made a lot of money...
...That means we can sleep really late...
...Anyway, soon the folks were ready, and my father bravely signed off on my presence...
...Address: The American Spectator, P.O...
...On the way home, I asked him, "It's your birthday on Monday, my boy...
...As fate would have it, my wifie was not there to meet me...
...Phone: 703-243-3733, ext...
...And his pneumonia is worse...
...They're in his room working on him all the time...
...I am on American 75 and I have just called my sister at the hospital from the plane...
...I had a million things to do, but I did the minimum I could, and then I made my airline arrangements, and then I went into town to pack...
...My hands were sweating...
...I was dizzy...
...But suffice it to say, I have never been to an audition or been on a set that has so many great-looking women...
...He's happy that Daddy's around, and I know the feeling...
...To be here in Malibu...
...Yeah...
...Remember when you used to make me French toast...
...Debbie is a black woman with enormously complex corn rows and an immensely capable brain under them and a big heart under that...
...He'll be up and about in a couple of days," he said with a look of total sincerity...
...54 October r 9 9 9 • The American Spectator What a long flight home...
Vol. 32 • October 1999 • No. 10
