Two Guys Named Harry
Magic often happens in the busy chemo room. The club adds new members, and we all learn just watching how people interact. The links in the chain of human compassion are strong however slight and fragile they seem. We all learn all over again how important communication is for everyone. Tracy will tell you this story, about two old men and how bridges are built.
It was one of those days that shatters the normal peace and quiet of the therapy room; all day, odd things had been happening. Phones wouldn’t work right, medications got misplaced, charts appeared and disappeared. I looked at Peg and said, “It’s a full moon, that’s what it is.”
Peg snorted. “It is not; I saw it last night, it’s little. Couldn’t be doing what’s happening today. Think of something else.” She motioned to the two women sitting against the wall, and I nodded. Those two would mess up anyone’s day.
It was about the middle of the afternoon and we hadn’t had lunch, every recliner in the room had a patient in it with an IV, several chairs had to be brought in to accommodate others. Mr. Wright was in one recliner, Mary Henderson in another. The waiting room down the hall was full. I looked around and mentally ticked off what we needed to do in the next few minutes; the first thing I needed to do was to take Mr. Aspin’s vital signs. He sat like a small ghost in the recliner, staring into space, not looking at anyone. His wife was across the room, she was one of those. She sat with another lady, who was also one of those. You know what I mean by ‘one of those’, don’t you? Nobody does anything right, people are out to ruin their lives, gossiping and nattering and enjoying every minute of it. They were in their early sixties; they were both heavy set, wearing tight pants. They also wore brightly colored blouses and lots of jewelry. Their hair was some shade of red, no one in the world ever see such a color except from a bottle. Their voices were shrill, and their eyes glittered with competition.
“If you think you’ve had it bad, listen to what happened to me.”
“No one cares, no one listens; it’s enough to make you sick.”
You know. Two of those.
“How are you feeling on the Interferon?” Peg knelt down by the wheelchair and looked at his face, drawn and pale. He tried to smile.
“My wife says I’m like a baby, up all night and asleep all day.” He looked over at her, and there was no expression on his face, past the pain. “I also feel like I’ve got the flu all the time. You warned me about that, and you were right.” He nodded, satisfied that Peg knew how bad he was going to feel. He didn’t seem to resent anything, showed no emotion. He was just patient, waiting for the next thing to happen to him.
I looked at Peg, and she took Mr. Bean’s wheelchair and moved it over by Mr. Aspin. I went to the two wives and in what I hope was a sweet voice, I said they needed a break.
“You’ve been here for over an hour, and it’ll be another hour before they’re done, so why don’t you go to the hospital cafeteria and have some coffee, or a sandwich? You never did eat lunch, did you?” They were too busy complaining to go have lunch but I didn’t say that.
They looked at each other, and turned and left, never saying anything to the two gray men across the room. I stood there for a minute, trying to be understanding. Sometimes it’s harder to be the family member than it is to be the cancer patient; there’s guilt, and relief, and fear of the future all wrapped up in one heavy burden. I took a deep breath and tried to give them the benefit of the doubt, and mostly, I did. We do a lot of that around here.
“Thanks.” Mr. Aspin said in a whisper from his recliner. Mr. Bean nodded. They sat together, in silence. The room began to empty, as we finished our work., but Mary (use another name) smiled at them from her recliner. She had come in from out of town; her treatments for leukemia were once a month, and she was coming to the end of them. The two old men nodded politely to her, and she lay back, watching the fluid run into her veins. I looked at the poem she had written months ago pinned up on the screen, and smiled. Someday I would show those two men what Mary had written. Peg and I caught up on paperwork and I kept one ear on them in case they needed anything.
“What’ve you got?” Mr. Aspin asked slowly, looking at the other old man in the wheelchair..
“Lung. Just got out of surgery,” Mr. Bean had little expression in his voice, just stating a fact. Mr. Aspin nodded.
“I’ve got prostrate cancer.”
We had written ‘prostate’ a thousand times, but Mr. Aspin preferred to be prostrate. He squinted at Mr. Bean. “How old are you?” he asked
“Sixty-five, last month. You?”
“Same. 1930.”
Silence. I listened for a minute and then the phone rang. When I heard them talk again, they were talking about Korea.
“I was wounded at Pusan, too,” Mr. Bean was saying. “Got it in the leg, they sent me to Japan. I was with Walker’s Eighth Army; twenty years old and thought I was immortal.”
“Same here. At the Pusan perimeter.” Harry Bean looked away at the wall, into middle distance. “Never was in one of those M.A.S.H. places right there in Korea. I guess they figured it was too much fun, like the television.” Mr. Aspin looked down at his leg, a little twisted from the wound. Mr. Bean moved his chair a little closer, and the two old men sat there in a silence, sort of smiling at each other. They had only exchanged about twenty words each, but some little communication had happened in this room, like it happens sometimes. Knowing that they shared some of the same experiences made all the difference in the world. I motioned to Peg and she nodded, understanding.
“They’ll be here at the same time every day for at least another two weeks, right?” I checked the charts. and nodded. Peg smiled.
“Good.” She grinned. “Did you know they’re both named Harry?”
I checked the front of the chart and laughed. Only a coincidence.
We all settled into a habit, every day after that for a couple of weeks. The two women wheeled their husbands in, and set them next to each other, and then went down to the cafeteria to shred us, the hospital, and probably everybody else. That served for their entertainment, while we took care of things. Harry Aspin and Harry Bean would sit quietly for a moment, watching us move around and get the IV’s started. Illness had added many years to them. Their faces were still gray, there was a little stubble on their cheeks where the razor hadn’t quite done its job. Their sparse gray hair was brittle and their thin hands were veined, but there was a little light in their eyes now, talking to each other.
“So how did you like going back to school late?” They had both gone back to school on the G.I. Bill and became civil engineers in the late fifties.
“Felt weird, but we made it.” Harry Aspin looked into middle distance and said softly, “Mabel worked hard, she saved a lot of money to help toward the tuition. We had to delay having children for a few years because of that.”
Peg heard that, and raised an eyebrow to me as she fussed around at the desk. One of those, being self sacrificing? I shrugged, thinking how people change and shrivel sometimes as they get older.
The other Harry nodded, and sighed. “Now she wants to retire to Las Vegas and have some fun, and I come down with this cancer thing. We were all a lot younger then, you know. A lot younger.”
“She was such a pretty thing…..” Harry Aspin sighed.
“Well, how’s the old man’s club?”
Mabel’s voice was shrill, her hands jangled with jewelry at her wrist and fingers. Her eyes were like stones, and the pretty thing was gone. She turned to Mrs. Bean and laughed. “They’ll talk to each other, you know. Only to each other.”
Bingo. So that was one of the problems. The old men hadn’t ever talked much to anyone, including their wives, because they didn’t know how to share things; they were engineers, not talkers. So life made a wide gulf between them and their wives, and now cancer had made it wider. The old men had built too many dams in their lives, not roads and bridges to other people. Peg and I watched and hurt inside for them all, unable to communicate.
Every day around three in the afternoon we watched the two old men, growing more and talkative with each other, sharing more and more. They never talked about their children, just hobbies and work. Harry Aspin liked to garden, Harry Bean liked working in his shop. One day he brought a wooden box to the unit and gave it to Mr. Aspin.
“I made that years ago, when I had more energy; it’s just a box.”
Harry Aspin turned it over and over in his hands and looked at the dovetail joints at the corners, looked at the little leather thong with its wooden lock that kept the top closed. He looked up at Harry Bean and a slow smile came over his face.
“It’s great, Harry. You do good work,” he said.
Harry Bean looked down at his knobby hands and sighed. “Did.” He replied, softly.
Then one rainy fall afternoon only one old man came in. Harry Bean and his wife wheeled slowly into the room, and looked around.
“Where’s Harry?” He asked it softly but I heard the panic in his voice.
“He’s up on the floor,” Peg was waiting for him, and gave him his answer quickly. “He saw the doctor yesterday and they’re needed to give him some blood, and some tests.”
We both hated having to tell him. Mr. Aspin wasn’t doing well, he was getting weaker and grayer by the day.
“I’ll go see him after the treatment.” Mr. Bean’s mouth was set, his forehead furrowed with concern.
“Oh, Harry,” his wife sighed, “you’ll be exhausted, let’s just go home when you’re done.” She didn’t want to make the effort, but the light in Harry’s eyes was bright.
“Helen, we talked some about that last night. About what could happen. Remember? You said you were glad we talked about it. You go downstairs and relax. I’ll wait here for you.”
She hesitated, and looked at me. For a minute, she was the pretty young woman he had know thirty some years before, indecision taking the lines from her face.
“Go ahead, Mrs. Bean. You need a break. We’ll look after him.”
She looked down at her husband, and turned and left. We settled him down in the recliner and started the IV. He sat quietly, looking around curiously, as if the room looked different without his friend. Peg brought some juice and stood by him.
“Do you want us to take you up to the floor to see Mr. Aspin? Maybe Tracy could walk you and Helen over later, when she comes up.”
He looked up and a smile came to his face. “Would you?” he asked me, with a firm voice.
“Of course, we’re nearly done here and Peg has a meeting in a few minutes.”
It was a quiet little procession that left the therapy room and went down the long hallways and up the elevators to Six West. Mrs. Bean walked beside me, in silence, and Mr. Bean sat up straight and held on tight to the arms of the wheelchair. We found Mr. Aspin’s room number on the white board on the wall, and walked slowly to room 602, a private room at the end of the hall.
He lay in the bed, tiny and thin on the white sheets, his wrinkled knobby hands at his sides, eyes closed. His breathing was ragged; his color was pasty. I took a quick look at the wall chart and found that his vital signs were pretty low. A tube ran through his nose, and there were intravenous lines in both arms, one letting a pint of blood flow into his body. I pushed Mr. Bean up close, and the old man took his friend’s hand. Mrs. Bean turned away, and I walked with her to the door. She leaned against the door frame and started to cry.
“They’re so close, they got to be such good friends. If he dies….what will happen to my Harry? He’ll get depressed and ….” She wiped her eyes and looked at me, the mascara smudged her face and I could see the gray roots in her dyed hair.
“Let’s talk with him later on, we’ll go back to the therapy room and let him talk.”
She laughed, a bitter sort of sound. “Him, talk?”
We turned and saw Harry Bean stroke his friend’s hand, and sit in silence. Then he murmured, “Got to go, Harry. I’ll come tomorrow.”
We wheeled back to the therapy room in silence, and I kept thinking. “Talk! Damnit, talk to her. For your sake and hers, talk.”
Harry Bean sat silently in the chair, huddled over, head down. Mrs. Bean stood by his side, a sneer kept coming and going on her face, in between the tears.
“So now you’re just going to sit and not talk, and keep it all in, as usual, aren’t you?” She snorted with rage and frustration, and clenched her jeweled fist at her side. Harry looked at me.
“You and Peg told me once that talking was good to do sometimes. Is this one of those times?” he asked softly. I nodded, afraid to say much.
He took a deep breath. “Helen, you’ve got to listen, for once.” He didn’t look at her, he sat there in his wheelchair looking at the empty recliners against the wall. She stood behind him, eyes wide. “Harry Aspin and I went through a lot of the same experiences together, and we had a lot to share. He and his wife are like you and me, somehow the years go by and the kids grow up and we just get taken away from each other somehow. I didn’t like it, neither did he, and I expect you and Mabel didn’t either. But it happened, and that’s that. Now what do we do about it?” He still didn’t look at her, but I did. The tears were flowing down her face, and she took his shoulder, gently. I squatted down by the wheelchair and patted his hand.
“That’s the best kind of talking I ever heard, Harry. You got a lot of sense in just a few words.”
He nodded, agreeing with me. He reached up behind his shoulder and took his wife’s hand and squeezed it. “Time to go home, babe,” he said.
They walked out slowly, and Mrs. Bean waved at us at the door. Peg and I stood there, in silence.
“When he says something, he really does a job, doesn’t he?” Peg sighed. We turned to our charts and our full waiting room, and got back to work.
It was only two weeks later that Mr. Aspin died; he was still in the hospital and just never got any better. Mr. Bean went to see him every day, and every day he came back to the unit looking more pale and quieter. Then early one morning we got the news, and waited for Mr. and Mrs. Bean. It was the last week of his treatment, and the day was quiet and still.
Peg ruffled papers and paced around her desk. “I don’t want to tell him, but I have to. I have to.” I got her a cup of coffee and a hug.
“I’ll help, you know.” She sighed, and nodded. We did help each other, all the time.
Mr. Bean knew, I think, when he got to the unit. He saw Peg’s face, and mine, and when we squatted down by the wheelchair he nodded.
“Harry’s gone, isn’t he?” he asked quietly.
Peg nodded. “Yes, he died in the night. He never woke up, really. Just drifted off.”
Harry Bean nodded and looked into middle distance, and squeezed his wife’s hand. She stood behind him, tears running down her face.
“I knew it would be quiet, not noisy like Pusan. Let’s get on with it.”
We started the IV and Mrs. Bean sat beside the recliner and watched. She saw Mr. Wright come in, and a new patient, Honoria , who had breast cancer. We were in the middle of our introduction and tour of the unit for our new patient when Mrs. Bean came up to us.
“Harry wants to let you know that he’ll call Harry Aspin’s wife; we have the phone number, and he wants to let her know we heard.” Mrs. Bean was whispering, as if she would disturb the peace of the therapy room by talking out loud.
“Great, that’s a good idea. I’m sure she’ll really appreciate hearing from you. Say hello for us, too,” I said.
Honoria and Mr. Wright joined in the little farewell party, lifting glasses of juice and enjoying the cookies Helen Bean had brought. There was a feeling of finality, of leaving, of life taking another turn. It’s always that way when a patient leaves; it’s like a member of the family has gone off on a long trip. We’ll get a postcard now and then, and wish them well and safe journey. As it turned out, they all did go on a trip. Mr. and Mrs. Bean took Mrs. Aspin to Laughlin, Nevada, and they sent us a picture postcard of the Colorado Belle Casino, where they stayed. The casino looked just like a Mississippi river boat, complete with a paddlewheel and bright red smokestacks. On the postcard Harry Bean had written: “It’s not Vegas, but it’s better. Having a great time; this steamboat doesn’t move but there’s lots of action out here.”
We put the postcard up on the screen, and Honoria and Mr. Wright asked about them, and we told them the story of the two Harry’s, and they smiled. It got busy again in the unit, as usual. Every now and then I looked at the bright steamboat on the screen, thought of those two old men, and I smiled, too.