Tell My Sons: A Father's Last Letters by Lt Col Mark Weber, Robin Williams Read Free Book Online Page B

white walls. A large monitor is up to my right, and a shiny, metallic-looking material is along the ceiling in front of me. I slowly turn my head to the left and can make out a U.S. flag. The noises in the room are as faint as the light
.
    “Where am I?”
    I doze off
.
    When I open my eyes again, I still don’t know where I am. A rhythmic swooshing sound is followed by a barely audible, repeating beep. The room is otherwise so silent that I can make out the distinct hum of electronic gear all around my head, as if I’m in a cockpit
.
    “Where am I?” The disorientation reminds me of waking up during a sleepover at a friend’s house. But back then, I could figure out where I was. Why can’t I figure it out now?
    I doze off again
.
    When I open my eyes again, I am immediately aware of a tapping and clicking noise, and it’s happening at a furious rate. I turn my head to the right, and a woman is standing at a console. The light from her monitor gives the room a faint glow. She appears glued to the screen and her task. I ask, “Where am I?” She does not reply. Didn’t she hear me? I ask again. No response
.
    I don’t know how much time has passed since I first opened my eyes,but it feels like an hour. Then it hits me. My powers of deductive reasoning have finally kicked in. The monitors, the shimmering Mylar, the American flag, all the electronics and the cockpit feeling
.
    I’m in a spaceship!
    I close my eyes, confident in my conclusion. But after just a few moments, I feel disgusted with such thinking. What in the world would I be doing in a spaceship?
    I feel a hand on my arm. “How are you doing, Mark?” It is the woman I had seen earlier at the monitor. She looks familiar to me, but I don’t know who she is
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    “Where am I?” I ask in exasperation. “Why are we in a spaceship?”
    She’s neither amused nor upset by my question. “You’re in the hospital.”
    My senses are still very dull, but not because it is the middle of the night and I am tired. It’s because I am stoned on pain medication. But I finally understand—the woman is my nurse. My eyes well up with tears as I remember this is a nightmare from which I cannot wake up
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    I have stage IV cancer, and things have gone from bad to worse as the complications mount from my surgery
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    As I lie there, completely inactive and having just awakened, my heart beats one hundred times per minute, which is a jogging pace for me. It’s been banging away nonstop like this since the surgery three weeks ago (and will continue for another four weeks)
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    I’m aware my internal organs no longer resemble the human design. It’s a marvel anything works, but it does. My surgeon explains he’s hit some snags in the “plumbing redesign.” The undamaged part of my pancreas is still healthy, which is unexpected for pancreatic cancer. However, sewing a healthy pancreas back onto the intestine is like sewing a banana to a condom. And sewing the Pixy Stix–size bile duct into place is an equally challenging task. I was warned that approximately 20 percent of Whipples develop a fistula (an intestinal leak) as a result, and I am a lucky winner
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    In the days following my surgery, I could look down at my abdomen and see a neatly sewn pattern traced along the bottom of my entire rib cage
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But not today. The fistula has allowed most of my abdominal cavity, from my ribs to my hip, to fill with bile and pancreatic fluids. Last week, the surgeon had to open all the stitches along the seventeen-inch-wide incision
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    Now I look like a cut-open deer carcass
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    “Are you going to put the stitches back in?” I ask
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    “No,” the surgeon says. “It may be hard to grasp this idea, but your entire wound has to heal from the inside out—no stitches. It’s what we call an open wound.”
    Telling me that this might be hard to grasp is an understatement. One section of the incision is big enough to allow two fists inside my abdomen. The muscle looks like ground hamburger,