November Pompano Beach. I go to the beach, despite wilting heat, a lowering sky, too many people, and paralyzing blue-bladder hydrozoans Portuguese men-of-war which, when punctured by sharp sticks or stones, as small boys delight in doing, explode like party balloons. The people are a breed retired necktie salesmen? Those Route 1A type advertisements pursue the customer even here, however, trailed from small airplanes at strafing height. New York.
Following a consultation with his doctors, we take I. In fact the femoral artery is found to be entirely blocked, and circulation in the by-pass veins so dangerously reduced that surgery is necessary as soon as the patient can be prepared. The preparations, incidentally, require that I. A catheter, inserted into the artery, removes the eleven-inch!
May 3. We learn this morning that another clot was found in the other arterial branch, and that a second embolectomy will have to be performed today, as well as a left lumbar sympathectomy, to open all of the pipe lines as widely as possible; the alternative is amputation, which he cannot survive.
But can a man of eighty-seven, already weakened by long illness, survive major surgery for the second time in twenty-four hours? We wait outside the operating theater all evening.
At about I am taken to an Intensive Care Unit occupied by a patient whose bandages are like the padding of an ice hockey goalie; another patient, muzzled with breathing machinery, whose heartbeats bounce across the screen of a cardiac monitor in the form of green blips; and I.
