You Never Know

Many years ago my grandfather-- his real name was Irving but everyone called him Itchy-- developed a nagging backache. It grew in intensity until finally he went to a doctor; the diagnosis was lung cancer. Still an optimist at 78, Itchy wasn’t bitter but he was perplexed; as he put it, “How did I get lung cancer? The only thing I ever smoked was salmon.”

Since his illness was not aggressive, Itchy was able to live life as usual for quite a while, and his only complaint was that my grandmother’s snoring kept him awake. (Of course, to hear her tell it, she hadn’t closed her eyes for a minute the whole night.) When his worsening condition required a short-term hospital stay, Itchy gave it a positive spin, reasoning, “What could be bad? At least I’ll get some sleep.”

Finances dictated a semi-private room. Despite the drawn curtain between the room’s two beds, one fact concerning his roommate quickly became apparent: the guy had the hiccups. In fact, the elderly man had been hospitalized because he had been hiccupping non-stop for several weeks. The annoying sound came at regular and short intervals, and continued round-the-clock.

After his first sleepless night, my grandfather said, “I have cancer, and they put me in with hiccups? What, they don’t have someone with a bad heart, or maybe a brain tumor? Where am I, the comedy ward?”

My grandmother was outraged, and let everyone within earshot know it. She paraded around the hospital corridor grousing, “How can they do this to him? He’s got Cancer! He should be with someone who’s also very sick, not someone with the hiccups!”

Despite vowing years earlier to disagree with my grandmother at all costs, I secretly felt the same way. After all, one time as a teenager I had had the hiccups for five straight hours, and it was no big deal. It seemed unfair that my grandfather, in the hospital for some horrid procedure to drain fluid that had collected in his lungs, was sleep-deprived because of this Hiccup Man!

It was not a good situation, and I begged my parents to fix it. My father said, it’s not possible, he’ll be out in a few days, he’ll get used to it. My mother said, what can we do, they have no place to move him, just leave it alone. But being brash and 21, I went to the nurse’s station and requested a change be made. “I mean, he has cancer! Don’t you have any other cancer patients he could be with? Maybe you could substitute someone with a more serious, quieter disease?”

The next day I arrived during visiting hours to find Itchy eating breakfast, the Hiccup Man absent and the room blessedly silent. Aha, it had worked! I fixed it! Feeling quite proud of myself, I said, “So, I see they moved your annoying neighbor.”

“He died. I’ve got cancer, and I’m sitting here with orange juice and scrambled eggs. He had the hiccups, and he’s gone. Like I always say, you never know.”

Itchy lived another year, plenty of time to tell that story many times.