Mad Max, my Hernia, and Me

By Jim Willis

When I was in the 6th grade back in Oklahoma, my teacher, Mr. Blackwell, came to me one day and congratulated me on being named captain of the Kiwanis Junior Police for our school, Westside Elementary. Growing up, few honors meant more to me than that one. Wow! I was now in charge of all the student crossing guards! My captain’s sash was a special gold color, while theirs were blue or white. And my badge was cooler, with CAPTAIN stamped right in the middle of it.

But then the well-meaning Mr. Blackwell darkened the moment by saying, “You know, Jimmy, now that you are in a leadership position at school, you really should consider choosing your friends more wisely! You don’t want to have students think you condone bad behavior by making friends of those who act badly. And I think you know who I am talking about.”

Yes, I did know, and he was talking about my best friend, Max Hogan, a fellow 6^th grader. I never considered Max as “bad” before, although he was one of our class clowns who we jokingly dubbed Mad Max.  He just liked to have fun and stretch the rules a bit. Nothing bad, though, at least not to me. In fact, once I joined him in a prank when I stood guard in the school hallway while Max slipped into the girls’ vacant bathroom, grabbed all the toilet paper from the stalls and stuffed it in the bottom of the trash cans. Then we hung around that end of the hall and waited to hear the reactions from the girls who used the facility. We didn’t have to wait long.

 I had no intention of dumping Max as a friend, as Mr. Blackwell suggested. Of course, I wasn’t going to argue over it with the man who could make my school year difficult. So, I responded dutifully to Mr. Blackwell’s concern:

“Oh sure. No trouble there! I’ll be careful, Sir!”

Alas, the more I came to like being captain of the junior police, the more I feared losing the title. Continuing to hang out with Max could cause that if Mr. Blackwell were right. So, I began hanging out less and less with my friend. He knew it, I knew it, and our closeness suffered. We lost track of each other over time, and it hurt. I was not happy with myself.

What had not hurt before, hurt now.

Oh, and this “troublemaker” that Mr. Blackwell had warned me to stay away from? He progressed well through school, graduated college, served as a Marine in Vietnam, and became a captain of industry in Tulsa. The last pictures he sent me a couple years ago, he was lounging on a Caribbean beach with his pretty wife, enjoying the fruits of a long professional career.

All this came back to me just last week, some 68 years after the 6^th grade. I was lying on my back in a hospital’s post-op room, feeling the kind of pain the Physician’s Desk Reference describes, nonsensically,  as “exquisite.” 

I had just opted for umbilical hernia surgery after my doctor had warned me a few months back that I shouldn’t wait for that troublemaker to break through the stomach wall and produce “ten-out-of-ten-level pain.” 

The surgery had just ended a half-hour ago, I was reentering the world I’m told is real, the general anesthesia was wearing off, and I was feeling every new stitch on my ripped-open gut. Oh, and one other thing: all my verbal filters were still napping.

“CRAP!” was my first post-op uttering, borne out of severe stomach pain. Whereupon I discovered instantly I was not alone in the recovery room.

A nurse’s voice, struggling to remain calm, came slogging through the fog.

 “Please turn to your left,” Mr. Willis, “and look at our pain chart. “Then tell us where your pain level is.”

 Didn’t you just hear? I mused. I thought I just did.

 What I saw on the wall were stick-drawn happy faces, solemn faces, and crying faces with the numbers 1-10 inked below them: the standard universal scale of agony, seemingly dumbed down for kindergarteners.

 “I can’t relate my pain to your chart!” I shouted. “Your scale only goes to 10! Why did you bring me back with this kind of pain, anyway?”

 “We couldn’t keep you under forever,” Sir, came the response from the surgeon.

 “Where are you on our chart, Sir?” the nurse persisted.

Although normally I present myself as civil and unruffled, I quickly realized this was not to be one of those times. I knew I was unfiltered at this moment, and I must have sounded like an ass. But of all the things I cared about on this particular day, remaining civil was at the bottom of the list.

“My pain’s not on your stupid chart!” I reiterated. “It’s off  the blasted  chart!”

Then, for a reason that must have made sense to me, I continued, “I know what pain is. I have a PhD!”

Then it struck me: I had just uttered a classic non sequitur that made me look like a world-class elitist or maybe just a fool.

 I looked around and saw what appeared to be a half-dozen faces all staring straight at me, quizzically. I heard my interior voice go, “Oops!” I never liked being the center of attention. So, I tried to straighten things out.

“Look, I’m sorry! The pain is overriding everything now and doing the talking. I’m sorry but  …”

 “You’re fine, Sir!” came another voice quickly. “It’s all good!” chimed in another cheerily.

  “Just let me apologize, okay?” I shouted. “I’m being a jerk!”

Another voice jumped in. “Should we bump him up another 5mg Hydrocodone?”

“Can’t,” the surgeon said. “We’ve already maxed him out on pain meds.”

Then he tossed it to me: “Sir, do you have a low threshold to pain?”

 I paused. Compared to what? I thought. Being mauled by a grizzly bear? I didn’t want to sound like the hospital wimp but, here again was another low-level concern.

 “I don’t know how to answer that question,” I said. “The pain’s as bad as a jagged  kidney stone, if that helps.”

Then another thought occurred, so I tried to mention it, between stabbing pains. Damn, too late. Another stomach stab hit, so I let fly with another bomb.

“Crap!   That’s why I had this hernia surgery … to avoid this level of pain if my stomach wall blew. The hernia wasn’t bothering me until now! How deep did you have to cut, anyway Doc?”

  The surgeon replied, “Oh, not too deep, although the hernia was bigger than I expected.”

Then the nurse who had, by this time, given up on me and the pain chart, gave me what was now a command.

 “Mr. Willis, I need you to breathe! You have to breathe!”

 Questions swirled inside me. So now what? Was I not breathing? If not, how was I alive and talking? Had I crossed over? Is this heaven? Is heaven actually a torture chamber?

 All I could think of to say was, “I am breathing.”

 Then a sweet voice next to me said, “No Jim, You’re not breathing deeply enough.”

 It was my wife Anne, and I started calming down for the first time. Still confused, though. I’m not breathing?

 “You have to take very deep breaths, Jim, so your lungs can fill and prevent pneumonia from occurring,” she said. But it sounded like something an engineer might say when giving instructions on how to tighten bolts in a bridge span. I appreciated her advice, but implementing it was a problem. I was not an iron bolt, but a guy who felt deep, stabbing pains every time I inhaled past a whisper.

"Thanks, Sweetie," I said. condescendingly to the only person in the room who knew me enough to care about me. "Now why don't you go sit over there?" I pointed to a chair against the far wall. Then, silently, I chided myself for being such an ungrateful dope.

Anne didn't go anywhere. Instead, she handed me a plastic suction device like a cop’s breathalyzer. But instead of blowing into it, I was supposed to inhale deeply and watch the little colored ball rise to the level marked “deep breathing.” I tried to suck on the tube and met this result:

My sucking sucked.

The ball failed to inch upwards at all. And each time it did move a bit, a knife stabbed my gut. I gave up after a few tries.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her mouth a mime to the nurse: "You can't send him home like this! I don't think I can handle it!"

“Admit him!” the surgeon pronounced. “We can’t send him home like this.”

Was there an echo in here? I wondered.

Then, probably frustrated with me, he exited post-op, and the nursing crew began prepping me for a two-night stay in the hospital. I didn’t mind. After all, they have more pain meds here than anywhere else, no?

 The post-op staff and drop-ins began leaving the room reluctantly, worried they’d miss my next act , and my own thoughts moved elsewhere. I began thinking of my 6^th grade pal, Max Hogan, and wondering what he might pull at a time like this, just for laughs. And then I wondered why I was even thinking about him at all? What connection did Mad Max have to any of this?

Instantly, the answer came.

 Mr. Blackwell had warned me to remove Max from my life, just like this surgeon had warned me to remove my hernia from my stomach! Even though neither was causing me any pain until I bid them goodbye.

Being the overly analytical academic that I am, I knew I was going to be mulling over this -- uselessly as my wife would say --  for some time to come. I thought about the parallels and the ironies of Max and my hernia. And then about how Max and I had somehow managed to rediscover each other just a few years ago and restart our friendship.  I was glad about that. Could my hernia and I ever become close again, sometime down the road, even after I had pushed back on it this time? I remembered another friend, Larry, telling me the other day he had lived with his hernia for many years and never had surgery for it.

 So, was all this pain really needed?

 I mean, all close relationships are subject to risks, aren’t they?

 By now, though, I was headed for the hoped-for solitude of a private room upstairs and the promise of pain-free, opioid-induced sleep. What could go more wrong than this morning had? After all, Mom always told me, “Bad beginnings make for good endings, Son!”

The next morning, I was awakened at 5:30 by a 20-something blonde nurse, who I called Laverne, who could have passed for a college cheerleader and who liked to call me Buddy.

 “Gotta get you to pee,” Laverne said. “Looks like we’re going to have to run an in-and-out catheter through you, Buddy!” she said with an exaggerated frown. But she was overly optimistic.

"Go get Kit Number 2!" she said to her sidekick Shirley. But, ultimately, it would take three different sized catheters and 20 minutes of a distinctly different kind of pain before she finished.

When she did, she smiled and said, “Sorry about the torture, Buddy! But we may have to try a fourth tomorrow morning. I think you have a swollen prostate. It’s hard to get the catheter past that dude!”

I just lay there and looked up at the ceiling. When I looked down at my stomach, I saw I’d lost another friend, too. And this friendship dated back to the morning of my birth.

My belly button was gone.

I was shocked. No one told me that was going to happen. And out of the 25 or so approvals I signed before surgery, essentially saying the hospital could go so far as killing me if they wanted, I don’t remember signing any doc that approved the removal of the last physical symbol of my birth connection to Mom.

Yet there was the suture line that ran just like railroad tracks right through my umbilicus, decimating it. What remained was a puckered incision, and soon that would disappear, too.

I stared at my buttonless belly for a few minutes, wondering if tears would be appropriate. So much had happened in so little time, I thought. All of this because someone else thought I should remove a bad influence on me. This time it was my hernia.

 But I couldn’t get that time in the 6th grade out of my head. So, I just sighed:

“I’m sorry, Max. Mr. Blackwell was a nice guy, but I never should have listened to him about you."

Epilogue

It's now been three weeks since the surgery, and my brain fog has abated. I realize that, like Mr. Blackwell, my surgeon was only trying to protect me from future pain when he recommended the procedure. For that I'm grateful, and I know my hernia is still in there, all tucked away behind a strong mesh wall. It won't be bursting. The doc did his job just fine. 

So, like my friendship with Max, me and my hernia can be -- as nurse Laverne would say -- buddies again. Even more importantly, at least to me and my Mom who has been observing all this from above, my belly button has magically reappeared! Apparently, all the swelling, stitching, and bruising at the work site had just obscured the rascal from view until now.

Don't worry, Ma. Our connection is still there!