Lessons From Living, Dying and Living Again

Chapter 5 (preceding chapters are posted below)

A Suite for One, Please

         As the 19th century rolled into the 20th, Waterbury, with its belching factories, especially those devoted to brass, was growing at a frenetic pace. As it grew, it added new schools, churches, retailers, banks and housing to its list of local assets. It built roads, parks and a visionary water-supply system. Eighty-six passenger and freight trains moved in and out of the city each day, so a suitably grand railroad station (modeled after a tower in Siena, Italy) was provided by the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. Theaters? Check. Hotels? Check. Museum/historical society? Check. Fraternal organizations? Too many to name.

         Among all these moving parts, one essential institution in particular seemed to need a lift. What was to become Waterbury Hospital had begun service informally in the years following the Civil War, situated in a series of wooden structures, more like houses, actually, on the west side of the Naugatuck River. In 1890, the organization was formalized in a proper hospital building further up what is known today as West Side Hill. It was a modern facility in every sense, but after only a few years it was clearly not fulfilling all the needs of the burgeoning community, especially those of the waves of immigrants moving in from Ireland, Italy, Germany, Poland, Lithuania and the Southern states of the U.S. More hospital beds were needed, and the Catholic Church, then very much in the ascendency, rose to the task. St. Mary’s Hospital, founded by the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Chambery, opened its doors in 1907.

         Doctors who happened to be Catholic and of other non-Protestant faiths, were excited about the new facility. At Waterbury Hospital, they’d had a tough time  consulting with, advancing among or even socializing with, the WASPy medical establishment there. They wanted and needed a place of their own. That’s why you see my grandfather’s name, Charles A. Monagan, Obstetrician, on the plaque listing St. Mary’s founding doctors by the hospital’s main entrance. As the century progressed, Charles’ son and my uncle and godfather Thomas M. Monagan, a much-loved pediatrician, began his decades-long affiliation with St. Mary’s. In 1950, I was born there, followed in due course by my four siblings, not to mention 17 Monagan and Murphy cousins. So that’s why on the morning of March 22, 2023, when I woke up at home with a fever and a general feeling of malaise, Marcia quickly gathered me up and we headed straight for the St. Mary’s emergency room. It was hard not to believe that my neutropenic state was about to be tested, and we knew that time would be of the essence.

         What happened during my week-long hospital stay was more or less a flirtation with death, or at least a rehearsal of what was to come a few months later. As we made our way to the ER, Marcia phoned our friend Dr. Paul Kelly, soon to become my cardiologist, to advise him of our situation. Doctor Kelly immediately contacted the hospital and told them a neutropenic basket case was headed in their direction and to please allow him to pass through the coughing, sneezing, wheezing, contagious, feverish waiting room as quickly as possible. This they did, but of course my infection was already well established. The hospital’s job – the doctors’ and nurses’ job – would be to contain what I had and keep the grim reaper from rolling out the black carpet.

         I was put into an ER bed, isolated from other patients. My temperature upon arrival was 102.4 degrees, already up from what it had been at home. A doctor sized me up and asked a lot of questions. He learned of my two cancers, my bout with chemo and my planned stem-cell procedure, now a mere three months away. Blood was drawn. Tests were taken. The verdict, delivered that afternoon, was neutropenic fever and a presumptive diagnosis of sepsis. Sepsis. I’d heard only terrible things about sepsis, of how quickly and permanently it could turn a body into a junkyard. They said they needed to admit me and get me into a bed upstairs.

         Even with a dire diagnosis and a raging fever soon to reach 104 degrees, I kind of enjoyed being wheeled through the hospital corridors and up to my room. I’d never been admitted to a hospital before, and I wanted to appreciate all the angles and views. It was like my one ride in an ambulance years earlier (for nothing, as it turned out). I was determined to take it all in and enjoy it. I dared the orderly to go faster. Of course he didn’t, but I think he wanted to. We got to my room, a single, my Neutropenia Suite, and I was heaved from the gurney into the bed. And that’s when I really began to feel sick. I would stay six nights at St. Mary’s. Along the way, I’d be on oxygen a fair amount of the time and diagnosed with parainfluenza pneumonia, febrile neutropenia (sounds more impressive than neutropenic fever?), acute hypoxic respiratory failure and elevated heart rate/atrial flutter. On one of the early nights, I’m not sure which, I tried to rise out of my bed and pulled out some of my IV hook-ups and then fell back across the bed and I think damaged the port that had been installed for my chemo infusions. It was an awkward sequence to say the least. I could only compare it to the poor guy going off the side of the ski jump in the old “Wide World of Sports” intro. I don’t know where I thought I was going, but the nurses were not happy. I stayed put after that.

         Even for someone in my vulnerable condition, the hospital allowed visitors, but only one at a time. Marcia was of course a steady, encouraging presence, my self-appointed advocate, unafraid to question the authorities and push things on my behalf. But here came my children, too! Did they think it was again time, 13 years later, to say goodbye? Possibly, but they were, at least in my presence, nothing other than encouraging and cheerful. They arrived in birth order. First came John, 37, bright and early one morning, responsibly, even eagerly, assuming the mantle of the eldest, both with me and his mother. He’d been a little disappointed not to have been chosen as my donor, I think, but he saw it as his job to help out and keep the home fires tended in my absence. He brought something to eat, probably doughnuts, and we no doubt marveled at the UConn men’s basketball team’s continuing dismantling of the opposition in the ongoing NCAA Tournament. Then Matt, 36, appeared out of nowhere, as he so often does. He wasn’t there and then there he was, standing at the foot of my bed, freshly arrived from Greenpoint. His job as an editor and writer at Major League Baseball was ramping up with the start of the new season only 10 or so days away, but he hung with me even as nurses and doctors came and went. Sadly, he was well versed in hospital procedures and priorities, and he knew well that simply being present counted for a lot. Claire, 33, made the trip from Brooklyn, too, taking the day off from her 7-month-old. Among my visitors at St. Mary’s, and certainly later at Mount Sinai, Claire was the closest to being our own family doctor. When she’d entered college 15 years earlier, she thought she might like to be a doctor and started down the pre-med path, only to be so shaken by an early B in, I think, a Biology course, that she abandoned her plan and took a different route instead. (Successfully, as it turned out; she ended up a Rufus Choate Scholar, meaning she ranked in the top 5% of her Dartmouth class.) But now you could see the would-be medico re-emerging. She was better versed about the material in my patient portal than I was, and she was willing to ask questions of the doctors and nurses until she truly understood whatever it was she needed to know. She knew how to study, always, and as she studied me lying there in my Neutropenia Suite I don’t think she missed much.

         Once they got my fever down, I recovered rather quickly, or at least felt a lot better. Heart issues did not return. After six nights, we broke camp and headed back to our routines. I didn’t suffer any setbacks and continued to improve every day. I don’t remember the food, so it probably wasn’t terrible (or maybe there wasn’t any). I was grateful to St. Mary’s for its quick, serious attention to my condition and for supplying me with all I needed to get home again. I felt I was in good hands throughout. And while I lay in that bed, looking out at the westbound traffic on I-84, I thought often of my own father’s brush with death at St. Mary’s back in the summer of 1941. He was 29 and single, a young lawyer and president of Waterbury’s Board of Aldermen. He’d gone into surgery for what the doctors thought to be appendicitis, but once they were in, they came across a growth on his intestine and, without hesitation or consent, removed that as well. It was a major undertaking and the methods and tools were terribly crude by today’s standards. He labored for days in a delirious state, hallucinating things like his own doctor chasing him around the hospital roof. As he slowly recovered, the United States entered the war against Germany and Japan, but he was not in enlistable or draftable condition, which greatly frustrated him. He ended up settling for being mayor of a major industrial city with a booming wartime economy (1943-48), hosting war bond rallies, seeing troops off at the railroad station, equalizing pay for male and female city teachers, integrating the police department and establishing civil service guidelines for hiring and promotion rather than keeping complete power over both within the mayor’s office. In later years, he spoke fondly of St. Mary’s, its doctors (many of whom had known and worked alongside his father), its no-nonsense nuns and nurses, and its daily room-to-room Holy Communion, including the enforced fasting for recipients of the host, even those quite ill patients who might have benefitted from a bite or drink of water.

         As for my family, my stay at St. Mary’s was like spring training for the campaign to come. Asked to respond quickly to an unforeseen crisis, they did so. They rallied, radiating love, concern and the wish to help out. Their commitment to me was heartening. I wondered how many more times I’d have to call upon them. 

         With three months to go before the big day, I began to contemplate my odds, my fate and my mortality. At 73, I’d already lived what many would consider to be a full life (at last look, the average last birthday for American males was No. 77). I was showing unmistakable signs of my “aged” status, too. For instance, as an over-70 male, I still looked up whenever an airplane passed overhead. I could remember my childhood phone number as Plaza 4-0951, as well as air raid sirens being tested on Saturdays, a Conelrad triangle on my radio dial, and life with a black-and-white television that could only get one channel (Channel 8 from New Haven). I could recall hearing and repeating the WWII child’s sidewalk taunt: “Whistle while you work/Hitler is a jerk/Mussolini broke his weenie/Now it doesn’t work.” I’d developed a tremor in my right hand that had made it sometimes difficult to tee up a golf ball. I remained wary of microwave ovens. My grasp of proper nouns was fading: I’d be able to remember that actor’s name if only I could remember the actress he played with and the name of the movie they starred in. My nighttime driving wasn’t as cooly confident as it once was. I didn’t mean to pour orange juice onto my cereal. Sometimes I felt I was only a short step away from getting back to that online Nigerian chap to ask about his enormous bequest to me.

         If I’d been 43 or even 53, I’m sure I would have been bitter and angry and probably depressed about my fate. Instead, as the weeks went by, I became rather businesslike about things. I created a computer folder containing various financial notes, passwords, a copy of my last resume, a few Far Side cartoons and, most notably I guess, my obituary. I considered the obit important because it was a last chance to tell my own story (at least before I got the idea of writing this memoir) and lay out some of the things I thought were important in my life. Many people have the time to do this but never do. My mother kept copious, well ordered notes and records of her time on earth but never went so far as to pen an obit or even an outline for one. My father, on the other hand, started his obituary decades before he died, adding to it, subtracting from it, curating it with an undertaker’s acute attention to detail. As it turned out, it was a good read, and a lasting record of what he thought important about his life, but too long and detailed for publication in the newspaper. Luckily, after he wrote the obit he still had plenty of time to compile the album-length version of things, an absorbing 400-page account called A Pleasant Institution, published in 2002. Not having been a city mayor during World War II or a congressman during the tumultuous 1960s, I didn’t feel my life was worthy of a book treatment (not many lives are) but I managed to attack my obit with gusto:

Charles A. Monagan, 73, a writer and editor with a special love for Waterbury and Connecticut, died in Manhattan Thursday following an unsuccessful stem-cell replacement procedure to treat myelofibrosis and leukemia. He was the husband of Marcia Graham Monagan.

Charles was born in Waterbury in 1950, the son of John S. and Rosemary Brady Monagan. He attended Russell, Blessed Sacrament, Driggs and McTernan schools and then Canterbury School in New Milford, where he won senior prizes for Best Athlete and Creative Writing, a combination that always pleased him. He next graduated from Dartmouth College and then embarked on a long career in publishing.

His stops along the way included reporting for daily newspapers in Meriden, writing extensively for other papers (Boston Globe, Newsday, Washington Post), freelancing for regional and national magazines, serving as the 1986 campaign press secretary and later writing speeches for Gov. William A. O’Neill, and finally settling in for 24 years as the Editor of Connecticut Magazine. He also wrote a musical, Mad Bomber, about Waterbury’s own George Metesky, staged at Seven Angels Theatre in 2011, and published 12 books, including The Neurotic’s Handbook, Connecticut Icons and two Waterbury-based novels, Carrie Welton and The Easter Confession.

His work was often recognized by his peers. He won many writing awards from the Connecticut Society of Professional Journalists and a First Place for Feature Writing from the New England United Press International. He won a Gold Medal for Reporting from the national City and Regional Magazine Association and the Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Journalism from the Connecticut Press Club, a lifetime honor.

Following an example set by his parents, Charles also served on numerous local boards and committees. He was a board member of the Pearl Street Community Club, Connecticut Humanities and Seven Angels Theatre. He was a member of the Board of Agents for the Silas Bronson Library as well as the library’s Waterbury Hall of Fame Committee. He most recently served on the board of the Mattatuck Museum and was its president during its extensive building renovation. He spent many happy leisure hours playing softball on Waterbury’s fields and golfing on area courses, most notably Western Hills. His greatest happiness was spending time with family, especially at home at Thanksgiving and, in summer, at Quonochontaug on the Rhode Island shore, where he enjoyed surveying the blue Atlantic with a rum drink in hand.

Besides Marcia, Charles is survived by three children, John (Liss) of Simsbury, Matt of Brooklyn, N.Y. and Claire (Peter), of Harrison, N.Y.; grandchildren Penner, James, Charlie and Harry; siblings Michael, Parthenia, Laura and Susie; and 12 nieces and nephews.

         There was a lot I hated to leave out (Bermuda, the Red Sox, the Kinks, that eagle on 18), but printed obits are expensive and you can’t just run off at the mouth and strap your survivors with the bill. Besides, people like to bring their own memories into the picture, and you have to let them do that. My point is that, as the hour approached, I was staying busy by wrapping things up and easing my possible transition into the ether. I’d sometimes been tempted to do the same before leaving on trips with Marcia involving air travel, but I never had. I didn’t want it to appear (mostly to myself) that I had any fear of flying. After all, flying was safe, or at least safer than what I was now facing. They didn’t check your heart and teeth and then anesthetize you before you got onto the plane (although maybe they should).

         So I motored on, my stem-cell replacement now filling up the big preview screen ahead of me. I started taking that daily dose of Jakafi to reduce the size of my spleen. No ill effects with that. My cardiologist and dentist both gave me the green light. My blood counts remained pretty terribly abnormal. At Leever, both Dr. Chang and Karen Pollard Murphy told me separately that they were leaving Waterbury and headed for jobs elsewhere. I liked them both and was happy for them, but I, too, was leaving. My cancer care and stem-cell prep had now fallen quietly and completely into the hands of Dr. Keyzner and the staff at Mount Sinai.

         One worry that grew as the day got nearer was where I might  temporarily reside once the procedure was successful and my hospital stay was over. I’d still have to be within easy range of Mount Sinai for doctor visits, blood draws, transfusions, etc., for as long as a month, maybe even longer. Could we rent an apartment somewhere for a short term? Expensive. Did we know of anyone with an empty pied a terre? Not likely, especially not for a month or more. Our answer came during a pre-admission conversation with hospital social worker, Ryan Dritz, who told us of Hope Lodge, a hotel-like home away from home for cancer patients operated by the American Cancer Society, offering rooms at no charge for people in my exact situation. Ryan said he didn’t think it would be a problem getting a room when the time came. He cautioned that I would need a 24/7 companion while there. The Lodge was located on West 32nd Street, a half-block from Penn Station and Madison Square Garden. Mount Sinai was on Madison Avenue at 102nd Street on the East Side, a block from Central Park. That was far from walkable for me, but an easy cab or Uber/Lyft ride. Problem solved.