An Existential Crisis

A long time ago before I did much of anything as an adult I was a French major at the University of Minnesota so I made these associations.

My brother Jake is about 2 ½ years older than me. My sister Jean is between us so we weren’t all that close in age. I started out to write a humorous post here but in order to put the humor in context, I have to write about Jake and that is a sad story. The summer I turned 18 and was about to head off to the University to major in French, Jake was discharged from the Navy because he was disabled. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia which I knew about at the time because I had just completed a 1 semester high school class in psychology. When I read the letter my mother showed me even I could diagnose him and it was like I lost him then. That was 49 years ago. Fast forward to today. His life took a turn for the worse this year when he was transferred from the VA hospital in St. Cloud, MN where he has spent much of his life, to the Security Hospital in St. Peter, MN. He has not done well there and developed pneumonia and was hospitalized in Mankato, MN about an hour’s drive south of Minneapolis. They managed to save his life and after several days on a respirator in ICU he was transferred to another room where he is being maintained with oxygen, a feeding tube, fluids by IV, a catheter and is completely bedridden. He is conscious and can communicate and knows what’s going on.  

So this is the sad situation that brought my sister Kay and me to go to Mankato to see him and find out what he wants for his life. Not surprisingly, it turns out that he just wants to get out of it, life that is. He has a court appointed guardian and can’t make his own health care decisions so one of our goals was to find out what he wants so we could communicate that to his guardian. We did that and we spent several hours there with him because you see I didn’t lose him 49 years ago and even though many of my experiences growing up with him were pretty negative as is the case with just about all of my 12 brothers and sisters he was one of the first people that I knew in my life. It made me very sad and I wished that I could at least help him be more comfortable.

When Kay and I arrived at his room, we found him as I’ve described above. A young man sitting in the corner of the room is a staff person from St. Peter Security Hospital. He has someone with him 24/7. I guess because they think because of his past behavior that he might pose a threat to hospital personnel. Anyway, both this young man and the one who came to relieve him were both kind and respectful towards Jake and us. It’s probably good for Jake to have someone with him so I won’t complain about them being there. They are also helpful and know what’s going on. When Jake said that he wanted to sit in a chair, the nice young man informed us that physical therapy would be there within the hour and they would get Jake up and sit him in a chair. We tried to make small talk but Jake wasn’t interested in much of anything except sitting up so we just waited for the thinking he might do better once he was sitting up. So we waited. Jake dozed off and Kay went back to the car to get the crossword puzzle we had been working on. When she came back she said that she took the stairs down and that she was worried because there was a sign on door at each landing that said “NO EXIT”. We waited. Jake began asking for Ashley whose name was on the white board as his nurse. We paged her and Heidi (the second name on the board) showed up. She said that Ashley was at lunch and would be back in an hour. Jake told her that he wanted to sit in a chair. She said that PT was going to be there soon to help him sit up. So we waited some more. Jake continued to tell us to get Ashley or Heidi from time to time and we told him that someone would be there soon. Eventually I went to the nurse’s station and asked. They said that they were trying to locate a chair he could sit in so I went back and reported that to Jake. And we waited. These things happened repeatedly over the course of the 3 hours we were there. PT never did show up and we never did get to meet Ashley. The St. Peter’s staff shift changed and eventually we left because it was getting late. As we walked down the stairs and I saw the NO EXIT sign on every door down 4 flights of stairs it appeared there was no way out. I said to Kay, “Oh my God, we’ve been trapped in an existential play!” And I remembered being a French major in college reading existential plays, “No Exit” by Jean Paul Sartre, and “Waiting for Godot” by Albert Camus   Samuel Beckett. Google up the plays and read the Cliff Notes or the whole play to understand what we went through that day.