Scare

He was sitting up in his chair, newspaper before him, watching television. He looked good on the monitor and his last pressure was beaucoup normal. I don't know what he was even doing there. I guess it was just too late in the evening to discharge him.

His was a fairly routine heart attack. Chest pain, a ride to the hospital, labwork and EKG in the emergency department. Toss in an aspirin, nitroglycerin, morphine, and a trip to the cardiac catheterization lab... Next thing you know, it's suppertime.

While I checked him over he seemed rather focused upon the television. It was a documentary.

"I was there," he said. The television program was about the Cuban missle crisis.

"I was on that ship," he said, indicationg one of the boats shown in old black-and-white contemporary news footage. He added that later on, after the whole thing had blown over, JFK had boarded and presented commendations to the crew.



I was amazed and told him so. I also said that I was very proud of him for his service. He said that it was nothing; really nothing, and that he wasn't even frightened by the prospect of nuclear confrontation because he knew that Krushchev wasn't that crazy.

"They didn't have any missles," he said, and he went on to say that he believed that at that time, the U.S.S.R. had a very limited arsenal of nuclear weapons anyways and we'd blow them off the planet if they started anything.

I said he should probably write a book about this, but he said "That's all the world needs is another book about politicians getting into pissing contests with each other." He was very grateful that "nobody got hurt," though, and that was the thing about it that pleased him the most.