January 27, 2006
Marcel, My Brother
By Charles
Krauthammer
Place:
Los Angeles area emergency room.
Time: Various times over the last 18 years.
Scene: White male, around 50, brought in by ambulance, pale, short
of breath, in distress.
Intern:
You're going to be all right, sir. I'm replacing your fluids,
and your blood studies and electrolytes should be back from the
lab in just a few minutes.
Patient:
Son, you wait for my electrolytes to come back and I'll be dead
in 10 minutes. I ran the ICU here for 10 years. I'm pan-hypopit
and in (circulatory) shock. I need 300mg of hydrocortisone right
now. In a bolus. RIGHT NOW. After that, I'll tell you what to
run into my IV, and what lab tests to run. Got it?
Intern: Yes
sir.
This scene played
itself at least half a dozen times. The patient was my brother
Marcel. He'd later call to regale me with the whole play-by-play,
punctuated with innumerable, incredulous can-you-believe-its.
We laughed. I loved hearing that mixture of pride and defiance
in his voice as he told me how he had yet again thought and talked
his way past death.
Amazingly, he always
got it right. True, he was a brilliant doctor, a UCLA professor
of medicine and a pulmunologist of unusual skill. But these diagnostic
feats were performed lying flat on his back, near delirious and
on the edge of circulatory collapse. Marcel instantly knew why.
It was his cancer returning -- the rare tumor he'd been carrying
since 1988 -- suddenly popping up in some new life-threatening
anatomical location. By the time he got to the ER and was looking
up at the raw young intern, he'd figured out where it was and
what to do.
I loved hearing these
tales, in part because it brought out the old bravado in him --
the same courage that, in the 1980s, when AIDS was largely unknown
and invariably fatal, led Marcel to bronchoscope patients with
active disease. At the time, not every doctor was willing to risk
being on the receiving end of the coughing and spitting up. ``Be
careful, Marce,'' I would tell him. He'd laugh.
Friends and colleagues
knew this part of Marcel -- the headstrong cowboy -- far better
than I did. We hadn't lived in the same city since he went off
to medical school when I was 17. What I knew that they didn't,
however, was the Marcel of before, the golden youth of our childhood
together.
He was four years
older and a magnificent athlete: good ballplayer, great sailor
and the most elegant skier I'd ever seen. But he was generous
with his gifts. He taught me most everything I ever learned about
every sport I ever played. He taught me how to throw a football,
hit a backhand, grip a nine-iron, field a grounder, dock a sailboat
in a tailing wind.
He was even more
generous still. Whenever I think back to my childhood friends
-- Morgie, Fiedler, Klipper, the Beller boys -- I realize they
were not my contemporaries but his. And when you're young, four
years is a chasm. But everyone knew Marcel's rule: ``Charlie plays.''
The corollary was understood: If Charlie doesn't play, Marcel
doesn't play. I played. From the youngest age he taught me to
go one-on-one with the big boys, a rare and priceless gift.
And how we played.
Spring came late where we grew up in Canada, but every year our
father would take us out of school early to have a full three
months of summer at our little cottage in the seaside town of
Long Beach, N.Y. For those three months of endless summer, Marcel
and I were inseparable, vagabond brothers shuttling endlessly
on our Schwinns from beach to beach, ballgame to ballgame. Day
and night we played every sport ever invented, and some games
like three-step stoopball and sidewalk Spauldeen, we just made
up ourselves. For a couple of summers we even wangled ourselves
jobs teaching sailing at Treasure Island, the aptly named day
camp nearby. It was paradise.
There is a black-and-white
photograph of us, two boys alone. He's maybe 11, I'm 7. We're
sitting on a jetty, those jutting piles of rock that little beach
towns throw down at half-mile intervals to hold back the sea.
In the photo, nothing but sand, sea and sky, the pure elements
of our summers together. We are both thin as rails, tanned to
blackness and dressed in our summer finest: bathing suits and
buzz cuts. Marcel's left arm is draped around my neck with that
effortless natural easefulness -- and touch of protectiveness
-- that only older brothers know.
Whenever I look at
that picture, I know what we were thinking at the moment it was
taken: It will forever be thus. Ever brothers. Ever young. Ever
summer.
My brother Marcel
died on Tuesday, January 17. It was winter. He was 59.
©
2006, Washington Post Writers Group
