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Chapter Three is the story of a tragedy we became involved in when we were assigned to fly a couple who had visited the hospital back to their farm. Their situation was one of those we pray will never happen to us.
CHAPTER THREE – CAN YOU FLY WITH TEARS IN YOUR EYES?
There are moments in this job when we’re overwhelmed by the suffering of the patient and feelings break through the toughness we count on to do our jobs. This one started with an unusual call. Instead of flying out to meet a rescue vehicle at an accident scene the call came from our own oncology floor. Theirs was not an emergency kind of business, so, they had little requirement for fast patient transport. But for this mission we were to meet up with a doctor whose patient needed to be flown home. Only one flight nurse would be needed.
Mary Anne and I found the doctor sitting in a room with a man and a woman, he wearing slacks and a long-sleeve shirt and she a dress as if she were going shopping. But the lady was sobbing in slow, deep surges of anguish. The man sat close, his arm around her, comforting her as he himself wept. The doctor faced the lady, gently clasping her hands. Even though this happened years ago, the vision of this poor woman haunts me as if it were yesterday.
He introduced the couple to us and, with chart in hand, asked Mary Anne to step out for a moment. I stood nearby and chatted with the couple, intent on keeping it casual. Medevac pilots at times find themselves in that role, making polite conversation while the med crew is busy planning their care, our only purpose to keep things calm in the face of tragedy.
Minutes later, Mary Anne and the doctor returned. It was time to go. The doctor hugged the lady as she stood up. Her husband helped her into a wheel chair, then pushed it alongside Mary Anne and me as we walked to the elevator.
We arrived at the heliport. Through their lingering tears, our passengers smiled when they first saw the beautiful blue and gold 222 and its roomy interior. Once she settled the lady and her husband into the cabin, Mary Anne joined me as I did the pretakeoff walkaround, filling me in on the situation.
The lady had just learned that the breast cancer she’d been fighting for months was now terminal, and she had only weeks to live. We were going to fly them home to their farm about seventy miles away. They’d taken a bus to the hospital, knowing they were likely facing grave news, and didn’t want to drive home afterward. They’d planned to take the bus, but the doctor intervened and volunteered us to fly them home.
It was a beautiful afternoon, so we flew a scenic route, swooping gently over grass-strewn hills and sloping mountain meadows. Mary Anne chatted with her passengers over the intercom, pointing out the scenery along the way.
The husband had given me landmarks to locate their farm. We circled over the area as he guided me to the pasture where we could land. I set the 222 on the grass and shut it down. When the rotor stopped turning, Mary Anne opened the door and helped the woman out of the cabin. Three young children came running up and threw their arms around their mom, crying and hugging her. Standing close to the helicopter, they were all entwined. They moved slowly toward the house. I stood with Mary Anne, watching the family cover their mom and wife in tearful love.
Turning to us, the husband motioned for us to join them. I hesitated. That was not our place. But Mary Anne, who by now was crying herself, took my arm, and we walked slowly along with the family. As we neared the house, Mary Anne took the lady’s hand and told her we had to leave. She nodded, smiled through her tears, and thanked us.
By now my eyes were damp, and her brave smile was all it took. I couldn’t hold back any longer. Tears streamed down my face. The husband offered his hand. I shook it with both of mine. He nodded his thanks through his own tears, then Mary Anne and I turned and walked away.
By the time we arrived at the helicopter, we were both crying. I climbed in, Mary Anne into the seat beside me. She said, “Woody, can you fly with tears in your eyes?”
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
Running through the start checks and getting the engines online helped clear the fog of sadness but, as I caressed the helicopter into the air, my eyes were still wet.
We stopped for fuel we didn’t need so we could compose ourselves before returning to the hospital. As we walked into the lobby at the fuel facility to pay the bill, we were both wearing sunglasses. Always conscious of our public persona, we were careful our uniforms were clean and pressed and we were smiling. Walking into a public lobby with sunglasses on was counter to that image, but we wanted to avoid creating a stir with our tear-streaked faces.
Mary Anne headed straight for the bathroom while I slid the credit card across the desk. By the time the counter attendant handed me the receipt, the tears were just a trace of dampness and I’d taken off my sunglasses. As I signed for the fuel and pushed the clipboard back to her with as much of a smile as I could muster, she looked at me for a long moment, my red eyes evidence that we’d just lived through something very sad. She offered a hand, and I shook it. That was a class act.
Carrying cups of coffee, we walked back to the helicopter and took off for home. Landing at the heliport, I locked down the controls, throttled the engines to idle and began the shutdown procedures. Our mechanic came over and opened my door, smiling. Though he often greeted us that way, this time, with my emotions still raw, it felt like an intrusion. He yelled over the engine noise that he needed to do a couple of routine checks. I nodded and forced myself to smile.
In the elevator on the way down to our offices in the ER, we met a couple of nurses, one of them a friend of Mary Anne’s. They hugged briefly and chatted, though I could tell that Mary Anne was forcing a show of interest.
It was hard to put away the tragedy we’d just experienced and just pick up where we left off. But our mechanic and the people around us were getting on with their day. The world rolled on, stopping for no one.
Thinking back to my days in police work, we dealt with tragedy from a different perspective. A crime scene or an accident was a sudden, violent instant when people died. But here, this lady, this mother and her family had been handed a death sentence not at the hand of another, but through a terrible biological accident in her body. And, instead of a sudden, merciful death, hers would be slow and painful.
From time to time, I wondered how the kids managed through it all, how the husband put his life back together with her passing. I felt a great sense of closeness to them, all of us sharing those precious few moments together. There’s a great power in sharing another person’s suffering. The pain brings out an inner sense I suspect we all have for what life really is in the final analysis, along with the profound insight that comes with facing mortality.
Being as close as we were to patients who, in many instances were facing an uncertain future often put us in this place. Most of the time the experience was fleeting enough it was only a glimpse. But we had stood with this family and shared tears with them. Our instincts after we flew away told us we weren’t ready to return to our usual fast-moving world, and we went with it.
Death is a part of living that, on the one hand, torments us in the misery of the moment, then hones our souls to a cosmic sheen as we go on with life without those we’ve loved and had to leave behind.
Copyright © 2021 Woody McClendon. All rights reserved.
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