I'm Not Dead... Yet! (28 page)

I became a drug addict. Slowly, the pain in my chest began to dissipate. Then the aches in my stunt-ravaged body went bye-bye, too.

I began to think ‘bye-bye’ was the funniest word I had ever heard.

Karla was no longer a Goddess.

She was God!

My surgeon walked up to the bed. “How are you doing, Robby?” he asked.

Dr. Laks was not only brilliant, he was so charming, good-looking and carried himself with such genuine magnetism that women would practically swoon as he would glide down the halls of the hospital. I thought if I should die during the operation, I’d want Karla to be with Dr. Hillel Laks. Okay, that’s insane—but it showed my admiration for the only man I would never be jealous of.

“I’m ready to go home,” I told him. “And I love you.”

“Well, I’m glad you are feeling well, Robby, but it’s only been a few hours since you came out of surgery. You still have drainage tubes and pacemaker wires in your chest and you’ll have to do breathing exercises to keep your lungs clear and get up and walk before we can even allow you to go to your own room.”

“I love you,” I repeated. “And if I die, you can marry Karla.”

“Thank you. And no more talk of death,” he whispered back.

My drugged statements made him and the bevy of interns who followed him (like ‘shrum’ followed ‘mush’) smile, but there was darkness to my surgeon’s mood. I couldn’t tell why. He checked my chart and then moved on. I asked the nurse why he was troubled and she told me I was highly perceptive. And stoned. I told her I was an actor and a writer and I am trained to be highly perceptive. And yes, I was so stoned that everything sonically sounded like it was being produced by George Martin.

“Who’s George Martin?” she asked.

“How dare you! How dare your musical ignorance! Have you no shrum?” I echoed and reverbed with a hint of flange and touch of warm analogue tube resonance. I managed to follow the form of my surgeon, an outline of his perfect posture standing in front of something about 15 yards away from me in the ICU.

The nurse leaned into me and said in a hushed voice, “He operated on a very sick baby...”

I had lived 28 years of a privileged life, yet a baby was struggling for life only 15 yards from me. I began to cry. I cried and cried. I understood that the pent-up emotions I had been carrying around for 28 years were being brought to the surface by my vulnerability. The beauty, happiness and silliness I felt only moments before were replaced by the equally powerful sorrow and the bottomless pit of despair where I was now falling… and falling.

“The baby will be fine, Robby,” the nurse said.

“How can you know? How can anyone know?” My face was now entirely wet with a torrent of tears. Crying had become a grief-stricken calisthenics. This baby represented Lyric; Karla as a child; me; my parents fifty years ago; the entire population on Earth.

“Everything possible is being done for her.”

In order to heal properly,
I did exactly what I was supposed to do and more; I inhaled into a little plastic ‘toy’ so a ball could elevate with every inhalation. It clears the lungs, and pneumonia is the last thing a heart patient wants, so I used the little toy, unprompted, over and over again. I sat up. I sucked on ice chips. I progressed by
forcing
myself to roll out of the bed, no matter how painful. Work ethic; discipline. I walked and walked the halls, pushing my I.V. I made trips to the ICU to check on the health of the baby in the small plastic, see-through cubby. Sometimes I’d just stand and stare at her.

Her name was ‘Amy.’

Amy had bandages and tubes coming from everywhere. How on Earth could a surgeon work with such tiny organs, such small veins and arteries? It had to be impossible, yet my surgeon was known as one of the best pediatric surgeons in the world.

I prayed (this was becoming a habit). I prayed, begging God to heal this child. Is there a God? ‘If there is, I beg of you—heal this little baby.’

I made it to my hospital room in record time
because I was the Olympic patient I told myself to be. Joan Rivers was there with her husband Edgar Rosenberg in the room next to mine. He had open-heart surgery days before I did, and languished in bed, in pain.

Every time I walked past her, pushing my I.V., she would look up and say something ‘encouraging’ like “Robby—what took you so long?”

A day later came the moment of truth—the moment I call the ultimate episode
of ‘Robby Benson: come on down!
This Is Going To Hurt
.’

“What’s going to hurt?” I asked naively.

“We’re going to pull your drainage tubes.”

Huh??

The drainage tubes were at the bottom of my vertical incision that began just under my sternum and went down to about 3 inches above my belly button. On either side were two, almost an inch in diameter, clear plastic tubes that drained the fluids from the trauma of the operation and every ‘juice’ that goes with open-heart surgery that includes liquids in places they shouldn’t be.

Thus—
drainage
tubes.

I looked down at myself. I suddenly was very self-conscious of all the wounds, holes and crusty blood. It most certainly was Halloween. I no longer needed a costume. For the rest of my life, I could go as
me
.

I inspected myself: the tubes disappeared into my torso. ‘I wonder how far inside me they actually go?’ I also thought I saw my skin and crusty blood, trying to grow around the tubing.

Two doctors went to either side of the bed. Both took the tubing in their hands and wrapped it around their grips the same way one does when trying to pull the string and start a gasoline lawn mower.

And then, it happened. They placed their feet on the bed for leverage, one doctor nodded to the other, and the doctor on my
right pulled the tube with a violent twist of his hips, as if he were swinging the hammer throw in the Olympics. Out came the tube.

Oh—my—god!

Where is that pain chart? Forget the chart—where is a megaphone? I need to warn every future patient that this was the most excruciating pain I had felt up until that moment in my life.

Then with little warning, and
no pain medication
to leverage the throbbing,
hurt-of-all-time pain, exploding
off the chart at 100+ (forget the 1-10 scale), a sensation so unbearably intense I wouldn’t wish on anyone (not even Mel Gibson), Sadistic Intern #1 nodded to his Evil Twin—and I realized:
it was all about to happen again
.

GODDDDDDD! How can this be? W
ho thought up this horrible torture? Who thinks this way?

These two young interns could’ve at least done me the favor of pulling out my tubes
simultaneously
. And as I agonized, they began to stitch my stomach up with no topical anesthetic. I realized how bad the pain from
‘the pull’
was, because being
stitched
up without anesthetic felt like someone was tickling me; pinching me, at worst. I’m watching the needle and the thread go through my skin thinking, ‘This should hurt more…’ Next, without warning, one of the doctors snipped, then pulled the wires from my pacemaker—wires that were coming from
inside
of my chest.

Wow. Big Pain meet Small Pain.