Fifty Year Friends

Credit: Rick Stinehart

The first inkling of trouble was a voice mail I picked up as I stepped out of the shower, dripping wet, wrapped in a towel.

Elizabeth Sloan? This is Kristin, the urgent care nurse at Palo Alto Medical Center.  We have your husband Calvin here. We’ll be transporting him via ambulance to the nearest trauma center.  Please call me back on this number.

I call back, still wet, still wrapped in the towel.  Nobody at the call back number knows anything about a Calvin Sloan or a patient being transported from PAMF to the nearest trauma center.  What follows is an immensely confusing couple of hours trying to find Cal --- where he is, what happened, what condition he is in.  I am 400 miles away, in Orange County, attending one of the regular reunions I have with my college volleyball teammates. It’s a terrible feeling, knowing so little and being so far away.

I use a back channel to check Stanford’s Emergency Department.  That’s the nearest trauma center to PAMF.  I guessed right, and after some confusion, I am on the line with somebody—a doc? A nurse? A tech? -- who is treating Cal in the emergency department. 

What happened? I ask. What are his injuries?

I can let him tell you, responds the ED staffer.  He’s right here.  She hands the phone over.

Honey, says a slurry voice.  I screwed up.  It seems some pain meds might already on board, although Cal later denies this. My anxiety eases.  He is conscious.  He is communicating.

Here’s the story, according to my husband. Working with his table saw, he slipped.  Like most of these accidents, it was so fast he doesn’t really know what happened.  But the outcome was a severed index finger and badly damaged other fingers, on his left hand.  His dominant hand.  The one he uses for everything.  Once it happened, he moved fast, wrapping his hand in a towel, running out to the car (without his phone) and driving himself to PAMF Urgent Care, about two miles north of us.  Why didn’t he drive to the Sequoia ED, one minute away?  That’s a question a lot of people have asked,

starting with me.  Shock? Probably. If I severed a finger

I’m not sure how clearly I would be thinking.   

Stanford’s care was fast, professional, advanced.  A trauma surgeon was called, the consultation completed.  The attending physician orders x-rays, consults with the hand surgery team, determines there was nothing to be done about the amputated finger.  He’s a little more concerned about the ring finger, which took a lot of damage from the blade.  “Not sure we can save your wedding ring,” he says.  But they end up being able to extract the ring from the mess, stick it in his shoe, and put that in the plastic bag of patient personal belongings. Cal is infused with antibiotics and injected with regional pain killers.  They perform surgery on his hand right there in the ED bay, a resident doing the honors. Cal thinks the resident's name was Danny.  Danny didn’t look old enough to shave. Danny’s stitches are tiny, meticulous, perfect.  Cal finds it all fascinating, watching the proceedings and asking a million questions. 

Meanwhile, I am trying frantically to fly home.  My posse rides to my rescue—arranging flights, getting me packed, getting me to the John Wayne Airport.  Jill arranges for her daughter Annie to pick me up at SFO and get me down to Stanford.  When Annie pulls up at the arrivals curb, she has a burrito, a bottle of water, and snacks in a bag.  I figure you haven’t eaten and it may be a long night, she says.  I am not sure, but I don't think I have ever met Annie. Yet here she is, on a Saturday night, at the SFO arrivals curb. With a burrito.

I don’t have juice anywhere in this world except for one place: medicine.  During these interminable hours when I was trying to get home, the only reason I know anything is because of my knowledge of Stanford.  A lovely patient navigator named Fatana becomes my lifeline.  She keeps me apprised of Cal’s condition, his location, what was happening with his care.  Text me when you land, she says.  I’ll tell you where to come.  I do all that, touching down around 8:15. I’ll be there in an hour, I text Fatana. Before I could get there, Cal is released—sent home in a courtesy car. 

This was a surreal experience in so many ways.  While I was body surfing at Big Corona Beach, Cal was cutting off his finger 400 miles away.  Through an amazing alchemy of advanced medicine, modern air travel, and longtime friends, the two of us made it home that night at about the same time.

He is healing. Our days are filled with doctor appointments, pain management and infection control.  He’s on oxycontin briefly, then over-the-counter meds, then nothing.  I change his dressings every day, meticulously keeping things sterile, as the risk of infection is high with these injuries.  We see hand surgeons, wound care specialists, and other doctors pretty much daily. If all goes well, the stitches come out tomorrow. He starts hand therapy next week.  We are hopeful he will recover pretty good function in that hand.

I say I don’t have juice anywhere except medicine, but that’s not quite true.  I have something better: I have friends.  Really good friends.  Friends from every stage of my life.  Friends who will drop everything and help me when I need it. Over the past two weeks, we’ve been showered with food, flowers, groceries, drives, books, jokes, get-well messages. 

And those women who helped me that traumatic afternoon—my posse?  We played volleyball together 50 years ago. Fifty years!  At an impressionable time of our lives, we lived together, traveled together, competed together, won and lost together.  We worked hard at something that mattered to us, pouring our last ounce of effort into it when we didn’t think there was anything left in the tank. We achieved incredible highs and stinging, soul-sucking lows.  Turns out, Stanford is going to honor us as founders of the program at a half-time ceremony next month.  If all goes well, I won’t be there. I will be in Spain.  And I'll be sorry to miss it, but mostly because my friends will be there.

It’s not the first time these women have shown up for me.  The day of Carson’s memorial—about which I remember not much—I do remember looking up and seeing all of them sitting alongside my pool, sticking their feet in the water on that very hot day.  They had traveled from all over, every one of them, to be with me. I don’t remember a single conversation with any of them.  But on a day when not much broke through the fog, this thought did:

Wow.  Look at your friends. They all showed up for you.  

The trauma of this accident with the table saw will fade.  Function will return fully to Cal’s fingers—or not.  We’ll do the best we can with what we have.   But I know what I will remember most about it: the incredible gift of friends who show up, over and over again, when you need them. Maybe they don’t even do a whole lot.  They are just there. Offering their presence, offering their love.  Which in the end, is everything.  

Credit: Cindy Tokar