The Waiting Room

Well, it's been about six months since I last posted to my blog. I'm here posting again with some health issues, though this time about my Dad.

All of his life, my Dad has had a faulty aortic valve. He had surgery when he was a child. At the time, he was told that, at some point, he'd have to have the valve replaced; that time has come.

Right now, I'm sitting in the waiting room at Cooper Hospital in Camden, NJ, having just seen my Dad off to pre-op. The surgery is scheduled to start in just over an hour, at which point my Mom will have to join me, and should last about five hours. Until it's over, we'll play the waiting game.

It's all a bit weird, the whole thing. On the one hand, I feel really confident in the surgery. Statistically, the odds are great that everything turns out well as something like 99% of these surgeries go smoothly; the likelihood of success is even higher when you consider that statistic is skewed by patients who are not in good health (and, as I said, my Dad's having this done before there are signs of heart deterioration). And after meeting him on Tuesday morning, I have a lot of confidence in Dr. Rosenbloom.

But, at the same time, there's always that chance. While in college, I played a lot of poker. If I had a 99% chance of winning a hand, there is no doubt that I'd bet everything I had. But, working at Amazon has caused me to look at failure rates instead of success rates; if we fail to process 1% (or even 0.01%) of all orders, that's a lot of customers who aren't getting their stuff. We strive to build systems that succeed in excess of 99.99% of the time and, even then, build in mechanisms to handle failure gracefully. I can't help but look at a 99% open heart surgery success rate as a 1% failure rate with no real recovery options in the case of failure; that's a lot of people who don't make it. And there's a big difference between my Dad's life and an anonymous customer's order (not that I don't care about every order placed on Amazon ;-).

This whole process has forced me to think about my Dad's mortality in a way that I haven't ever had to before. In the back of my mind, I've always known that someday, my parents won't be around. But, to think that day could be today is a bit surreal.

When I got home on Monday morning, it became very clear to me that my role was to "be there" for my Dad. We ran some errands, played a lot of Scrabble, and talked about a variety of things; mostly, we just tried to keep his mind distracted from the approaching Big Day. I also tried to stay very positive. My Dad tends to be rather obsessive and negative thoughts would just churn in his mind.

I think my approach was helpful for him. However, it left me unable to talk about my own anxieties. My Mom suggested that I say something like, "I know everything will probably be OK, but I wanted to tell you how much you mean to me." But, even that seemed to show doubt, something that would have surely played in my Dad's head. So, I ended up trying to show him what I wanted to say by being supportive during our time together.

Ultimately, I had to say goodbye to him as he left for pre-op in a wheelchair without being able to vocalize everything I felt. I just hope I'll have another chance. For now, I guess I'll just have to wait and see.