Surgeries

My grandfather, Glenn Bowman, along with my cousin Brian Bowman seated to my right. I'm the chunky kid with the bad haircut.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve had two emergency surgeries. This marks the first time I’ve ever been admitted to a hospital, the first time I’ve had surgery, the first time I’ve been under anesthesia – heck, the first time I’ve had an IV. At fifty, you might say my time was past due.

Both my Mother and my Aunt worked for our small town hospital during my youth. During summer breaks from college, I worked there as well. So, I’m no stranger to hospitals. I just managed to avoid going under the knife myself for as long as possible.

I only have one phobia – an irrational fear of hypodermic needles. I’ve had it since I was a child. 

Now, let me just tell you I cannot remember a time when I was actually hurt by a needle – it’s simply the thought of a needle entering my skin that makes me want to run away screaming. In the last two weeks, I hope I’ve become desensitized to this. I lost count of the number of blood draws and IV’s I’ve had inserted.

However, that irrational fear has lingered in the back of my mind during the entire ordeal.

The one thing that kept me going, the one thing that kept me signing those surgery permissions, was my grandfather, Glen Bowman.

I grew up in the Appalachian Mountains in a wide, bowl shaped valley surrounded by steep mountains and rolling hills. Glen Bowman bought a good deal of that valley before I was born and divided it among his children. He was a coal miner, specifically he drove the small train called a “motor” that ferried miners into the depths of the drift mine at Harman. I can remember sitting in a seat on that motor as my grandfather explained how it worked. I remember peering into the windows of equipment sheds, marveling at the machinery inside. I can remember the coal dust that clung to everything.

Around 1973, my grandfather was diagnosed with lung cancer. He had always smoked, and he had spent many years breathing in coal dust. The doctor told him he must give up cigarettes immediately.

My understanding is he dropped his cigarettes in a trashcan and never lit up again, even though he had been smoking since childhood. The doctor was impressed. He could have stopped at any time. He simply never had a reason to quit.

My grandfather confided later he did not believe the cancer had been from cigarettes or coal dust. He told us about an incident in which a steel cable had caught fire in the mine a few years before. He had breathed in the smoke, and, in his words, “I haven’t breathed right since.”

I’ve never doubted he was correct.

We spent that summer in Charlottesville, Virginia at the University of Virginia Medical Center. Surgeons there removed three quarters of one of my grandfather’s lungs in an attempt to save his life. I saw this through a seven year old’s eyes. I can remember the waiting rooms, and the stifling heat of a central Virginia summer. I can remember my Mother putting me in a chair in a medical student’s lounge where live operation video was being fed in through closed circuit television – she still had the dream I might someday become a doctor.

I can remember sitting in a Howard Johnson’s restaurant drinking Pepsi and lime sherbet floats with my Aunt Susie.

I cannot remember being afraid for my grandfather. You see, to me, he was a figure bigger than life. No disease would stop him. This was a man who had once been trapped in a barn stall with an angry bull. It had pressed him against the wall, threatening to crush him. He had wrapped a massive right arm around the bull’s neck and squeezed until the animal had passed out. A man like that doesn’t succumb to a disease.

And, he did not. He survived his surgeries and went on to the Woodrow Wilson Rehabilitation Center where he spent his days walking through the surrounding woods. When I visited him there, he showed me a collection of Prohibition era liquor bottles he had found throughout the forest. “I think they did some serious drinking around here,” he told me.

“Tony, as long as a man can get up and walk, he can keep going through anything,” he confided in me. I’ve never forgotten that.

My grandfather died in 1975. He was only fifty-seven years old. But, in those fifty-seven years he provided a better life for his children, and a lifetime of stories and wisdom for his grandchildren. You see, it turns out such a man cannot be killed by a disease – he lives on through our memories of him that have not faded forty years after his passing.

Two weeks ago, a surgeon here in Raleigh told me I needed to go under the knife. I was terrified. I have not wrestled bulls to the ground. But, I told myself if Glen Bowman could have three quarters of a lung removed, I could manage an incision in my stomach.

And, when the doctor told me a few days later it would be good for me to walk around a little, I did just that.