St Jude

Wherever I go with Luc I am entertained, even if it's in the cardiac unit of St Jude's Medical Center in beautiful downtown Fullerton. She was in for a cardiac abalation of the AV node (aren't you impressed?) by a rather dishy Dr Doshi, which involved having incisions made in her neck and crotch and wires being fed up her arteries and veins to her heart. The usual dose of sedative is 5mg for this operation. Lucy required 300 mg due to her mega-resilient liver. Nurse Michelle ministered to us when we arrived and very quickly assumed we were "life partners." I have never been more happy of my A grade for human biology O Level than yesterday when I managed somehow to understand the complicated description of the surgery that was to come. I'm not entirely sure that L was aware of all the four chambers of her heart, but I'll give her the benefit of the doubt. She was whisked off to the operating room and appeared an hour later looking groggy but happy with great wodges of cotton wool attached to her neck and groin. "Look, look, they had to shave me" she says with glee and whips off her pastel blue gown to reveal a naked thigh covered in what appeared to be orange self-tanning liquid and another wodge of cotton. "I'm starving" she says. "I want rice with butter." They bring rice and bean soup and pork spare ribs and something that isn't butter and I don't have a hard time believing it's not butter either. Minks and I ladel plastic teaspoonfuls of soup and rice into her mouth as she lies on her back (she has to remaint this way for three or four hours so that the blood clots properly) and offer her a bendy drinking straw attached to an apple juice box. She's famished and even tries the pork ribs. The barbecue sauce gets all over her fingers, her face, the tubes. Nurse Michelle visits with more diagrams of the heart. She tries to explain in details the intricacies of the AV node ablation. Lucy nods and smiles but I doubt she'll remember anything. She falls asleep after politely saying "Good night" to us and we sit outside in the corridoor; Minks reads her Harper's Bazaar and I eavesdrop on the OC couple in the next door room. He's had a heart attack and their discussing their diet options. He loves shrimp and she loves fishsticks. They buy them wholesale at Costco. She makes them into fish tacos for the granchildren. He has a lifetime membership to Bally's where they have a great whirpool spa. They have a place in Mazatlan. She tells him there are more calories in shrimp than ribeye steak. He says he's only 270 so he's not worrying.

The ladies in the pink smocks who sit in the Admitting reception area are volunteers. They're all lovely old Catholic ladies with perms and pink lipstick and they love England. Minks asks who St Jude is and they don't know. They're not sure. They think he helps you find things that are lost, but maybe that's St Anthony. I tell Minks that I think he's the Patron Saint of Lost Causes but I could be wrong. I seem to remember lots of weird little ads in the personals section of the Telegraph relating to St Jude but I've no idea what there significance is. I believed then that they were code. That this is how spies or star-crossed lovers communicate with each other. I'd like to know but I don't. And no-one ever told me. I think how fun it will be to google. The most glamorous of the pink ladies asks me where I grew up and tells me that I haven't lost my accent. Minks smiles politely as the ladies debate St Jude. She turns to look at the prominent wood-carved sculpture of him that sits in the reception area. He's handsome, chiselled even, has a mouth like a movie star and the kind of facial hair that's all the rage now. Minks isn't sure about St Jude. I worry that I'm not a better mother. I've never told her bible stories or about the lives of the saints.