Open Heart Read Free Page A

region now part of Ukraine—and that they had been in the butter-and-egg business there, as they were after they came to the United States. When, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, civil servants assigned family names to Jews, probably at the end of the eighteenth century (so that we would no longer be Jacob-son-of-David, or Jacob-Mordecai-of-Ryminov), a state official, seeing thousands of baby chicks running around the family property, according to family lore, gave us the name Neugeboren , meaning, in German, “newly born.”
    Dr. Hashim says something about the appropriateness of my name, and then, to my surprise, reaches down, lifts the bedsheet, and takes my hand in his.
    â€œTwenty or so years ago,” he says, “I could not have done anything for you.”
    Phil Yarnell, with whom I’ve been talking regularly, and who has been offering me diagnoses by phone and conferring with Rich and Jerry about me, telephones from Denver. Phil started out as a neurosurgeon but switched to neurology early in his career. Before moving to Denver and becoming chief of neurology at Denver General Hospital and of the Neuroscience Division at St. Anthony’s Hospital there, he taught at the University of California at Davis; since 1993, in addition to being in private practice, he has been clinical professor of neurology and neurosurgery at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
    Phil grew up on the same block in Brooklyn where I lived until I was two years old—across from Prospect Park—and though neither Phil nor I have clear memories of having done so, we like to imagine we played together back then: in front of our apartment houses, in the park, and in the sandbox and on the monkey bars in the playground that was directly across from my parents’ building.
    Phil moved to Denver in 1971, the same year I moved to Northampton, and has lived there ever since. He and his wife Barbara also own a 160-acre ranch in Kiowa (“That’s one-quarter the size of Prospect Park,” Phil says), a small town an hour east of Denver, where they keep cows, horses, and llamas. At a lean five-foot-ten-inches tall, with a full head of white hair and a broad white mustache, and wearing a bolo tie at home and at work, Phil could pass for sheriff of a Western frontier town. His accent and blunt, slangy way of talking about things, however, remain pure Brooklyn.
    He tells me he was surprised to hear from Jerry that I have heart disease and that it is so far advanced, but he’s glad I’m in Jerry’s hospital, where Jerry can keep an eye on things. This, he says, is very important, agreeing with why Rich and Jerry have decided upon Yale instead of Massachusetts General, where Rich originally wanted to send me. Given the routine and often lethal miscommunications and other slip-ups that prevail in hospitals, Jerry wanted me at Yale,where he could monitor matters and where doctors and staff involved in my care would be accountable to him.
    My friends had seen a lot of hospitals and doctors, and until you had, they said, you could not believe the difference there was between excellent care and care that was less than excellent. It was, more frequently than anyone dared acknowledge publicly, the difference between life and death. (And this was ten months before revelations appeared in front page articles around the country, based upon a report from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, that as many as ninety-eight thousand Americans die every year in hospitals from preventable medical errors—a figure Rich thought grossly underestimated the reality. * “That figure is just the tippity-tip of the iceberg,” Rich said, “and includes only the most gross and undeniable errors.”)
    Early that evening my son Eli arrives (Aaron arrives an hour or so later), and while he is with me another old friend from Erasmus, Arthur Rudy, calls. I considered Arthur my closest