Red Sox Rule (17 page)

“I had a heart attack on the seventh hole,” Tito told his son. “And I had a horrible back nine.”

A joke? Francona knew his father was tough enough and strong enough to play through any mild heart attack and then do something about it later. What wasn’t a joke was the night, shortly after the golf story, when Tito became one of those Francona men who didn’t make it. And then he made it again. It was a night of dancing and celebration in memory of Birdie, and Tito was thanking all of the doctors and nurses who had helped his wife. All he remembers was dancing and then blacking out. His eyes rolled back into his head and he collapsed. He was dead. He doesn’t remember anything about a commotion, a crowd gathering around him, and someone rushing a doctor to a car to get a defibrillator. He doesn’t remember being shocked once, and then twice, before coming to and taken to the hospital.

Someone had called his son, who was living in Philadelphia at the time. It was 11:00 in the evening when Francona got the call about his father. He didn’t have time to wait for a flight, because the first one from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh wasn’t going to leave until early the next morning. He needed to get there as quickly as he could. He put some things in a bag, got in his car, and drove the
5
¹
/
₂
hours from eastern Pennsylvania to the western part of the state.

He arrived at the break of dawn, early enough to see his father awake and then not awake; it was happening again. Now, a doctor had just told him that surgery would be out of the question for Tito. They didn’t think that he would make it through, so they would have to wait a day for the doctor to figure out the best way to go. And on the next day, the doctor suggested surgery. Never mind what he had said the previous day. Either Tito was going to die without any surgery or he was going to die on that operating table.

He knew as soon as they put him to sleep for surgery that he could be going to sleep forever. After hours of surgery, it wasn’t John Patsy “Tito” Francona’s time; he came out of the surgery and was soon golfing again, as strong as ever.

If he had wanted to check on his son, he knew the time to do it was during the 2001 season, when Francona was working as a special adviser with his and Dad’s old Indians. His responsibilities were different than being on the bench, and he was accountable to fewer people. The closer Terry Francona got to a dugout, the less he worried about himself. Each day was spent pouring all that he had—his energy, his knowledge, and his time—into the betterment of a baseball team. He worked himself to exhaustion wherever he was, whether he had a long history with the players or not. It could also be said, then, that the closer Terry Francona got to a dugout, the closer he was to being at risk. All managers can benefit from a bench coach; it’s also safe for Francona to have a personal bench doctor, just to be sure that he is taking care of himself.

After his year working for the Indians, Francona felt that he needed to be on the field again. He liked the scouting and evaluation end of the business, but he was made for the pace of the dugout. He was a subjective man with the ability, certainly, to be objective;
scouting seemed to be the other way around—you had to prove your objectivity first and then talk about the subjective elements. Francona was at his best looking a player in the eyes and finding out his particular story. He was best when he could be there on the field and in the dugout, places where he grew up, making his observations about the game.

He left Cleveland in 2001 and landed in Texas as Jerry Narron’s bench coach. He worked with players such as Alex Rodriguez, a young Hank Blalock, and a banished-from-Boston Carl Everett. The Rangers weren’t very good, and Narron was fired at the end of the 2002 season. Francona was interested in the job, but general manager John Hart decided to go with Buck Showalter. He had no desire to stay on staff there, so he went searching for other jobs. Since it was after the season, he also decided to have minor knee surgery.

There were several reasons Francona had fallen in love with Jacque Lang 24 years earlier, and none of them had to do with the fact that she knew something about medicine. He liked her smarts, and insisted that any wife of his had to be the brains of the marriage, but he never imagined that his wife, the nurse, would spend a lot of time attending to him. But before she attended to him in the fall of 2002, she begged him: sweetheart, please, do not get on an airplane.

He was in Seattle, interviewing to be the manager of the Mariners. He was sweating during the interview, shifting uncomfortably in his seat and trying to stay away from thinking about his chest, which felt as if a knife was lodged in it. He had pulmonary embolism, blood clots in his lungs, and he didn’t know it. He didn’t know it as he sat with his friend Chuck Cottier that night during dinner and, abruptly, got up from the table.

“I’m sorry, Chuck, I can’t do it, man; you’ve got to take me to the airport,” he said.

Once he got there, he talked with Jacque, and that’s when the begging began: Go to the hospital. Do not get on that plane. He got on anyway, flying all night, and when he landed he did go to the hospital. And that was just the beginning of a medical adventure, an adventure that had him on a shuttle between the hospital, his house, and near-death.

It really did seem that someone was toying with him, playing a sick game of medical roulette, with his number coming up again and again. It would have been enough to stop with a 6-night stay in the hospital, the pulmonary embolism, and being placed on Coumadin, a blood thinner, to prevent additional clotting. He thought he was well on his way to recovery, and he was told not to worry because his blood level, or INR, would be checked daily. His daughter Leah had a soccer game, and he was well enough to attend. As he and Jacque watched it, he started talking about the pain in his knees. He thought it had something to do with being inactive, so he tried to grit his way through it. By halftime of the game, the pain had worsened, and when the game ended, he knew it had nothing to do with being inactive. He thought they might be infected. He was a Francona, and for a Francona man to say anything about pain is serious.

They went to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia and found that the patient had accurately self-diagnosed, but it took a while for the doctors to agree with him. He was told that the pain in his knees was most likely stiffness from swelling, and that if he had an infection there would be more swelling and he would be complaining of more pain. So now he was negotiating with the experts: they were telling him that the only way they could know anything for sure was to drain the knees, even though draining them was a waste of time; he was telling them to waste their time.

“Drain them,” he insisted.

He had been right. There was a staph infection in both knees. He thought he would be given antibiotics and the problem would go away. But he was headed for surgery—eventually. His INR level had not been monitored as closely as it should have been, so he found out that his blood wasn’t thick enough for any type of surgery. He waited 18 hours in the hospital until he could have surgery. And when he did have it, he got two helpings of it: his knees were scoped and, 48 hours later, they were scoped again. That led to one more week in the hospital.

What was this? He had six knee surgeries in a 3-week span, and he was supposed to be feeling better. He wasn’t. He felt like someone with no boxing experience who had been thrown into a ring with three or four of Philadelphia’s roughest boxers. He was beaten, mentally and physically. What was happening? It was November, his kids were doing well in school, it was pro football season, and he was supposed to be on vacation. This was a
vacation
?

It was bad and he knew it. It had all begun so simply on October 12 when he entered Jefferson to have the routine scope of his knees. In November, the entire month had been about pain. He had never been through pain like this in his life. It was so bad, after the fifth and sixth knee surgeries, that when the doctor told Francona he could go home, he responded with, “I’m scared.”

He had a right to be. He hadn’t gotten out of bed, and his right leg already had an ache. He had eaten a big breakfast and somehow he had been able to slip into his clothes while not leaving bed. He was wearing blue jeans, his favorite pair, getting ready to be sent home, and his leg kept swelling. It was agonizing, even for a Francona man, so the trip home was delayed. Francona was rushed downstairs, fully clothed, for an examination. It was a scene from animation, or something from his kids’ video games. He thought,
I wish they’d just cut my right leg off
. He was bleeding fast into that
right leg. He didn’t know it at the time, but it was a femoral bleed, and in between his anxiety attacks, he could hear one of the doctors shout: “You had better get this motherfucker into surgery right now!”

There was no pain like this. Not the first time he tore his ACL against the Cardinals. Not the second time he tore his ACL against the Pirates. Not the time in 1991, his last spring training, when he was a young man of 32 whose body felt 60 years older. Then he thought it was something to have a body in need of so much attention that the only thing that made him feel better was being up to his neck in a whirlpool. No, no. This was excruciating. He was going to need emergency surgery, and they tracked down Jacque to tell her about it.

They found Jacque at school, participating in a program for one of the kids. They told her that her husband was in emergency surgery, and that she needed to get there as soon as possible. As a mother and wife, your thoughts clash and tumble out…
Take care of the kids…Get to the hospital…Call Terry’s father and tell him that he needs to come…Oh my God, I can’t believe this is happening.

The problem was that there was no circulation going into his leg, and the blood from his femoral artery was shooting everywhere, filling that right leg with blood, the blood going nowhere. They sliced into his leg, a foot-long incision, and began to save his life. They began surgery and stopped the bleeding, but the doctors felt that what was happening with Francona was so extensive that they packed his leg and continued surgery the next day. He had a Greenfield filter placed in his vena cava, the main vein for return circulation. The filter’s function is to catch clots before they enter the lungs.

It would only be fair if the nightmare ended there. It would be fair if Francona, eight surgeries into his baseball vacation, could
recuperate nicely, watch his kids grow up, and enjoy the long Thanksgiving weekend. It would be perfect because Thanksgiving had always been his favorite time of year. He remembered all the fun things that happened, like the time he and Jacque invited Frank Coppenbarger and his family over for dinner. The Coppenbargers’ son was 3 years old at the time, and as they all waited and waited for Jacque’s turkey to be done, they finally got a chance to dig in. The turkey wasn’t good, and no one said anything. Except the 3-year-old kid: “This turkey sucks.” Those were the things you’d never forget: telling and retelling stories and remembering the football games.

That’s what Thanksgiving should have been. What it became was the holiday when Francona was sent home after a week in the hospital, only to experience more pain. He was on an IV, he had antibiotics, and he had no strength. He left his room once, maybe, and didn’t have the strength to go to the bathroom. He tried to talk himself into it, it was just a few feet away, but the thought of standing was daunting. He looked at the ceiling in that room, looked up to where he thought God would be, and spoke to the heavens.

“God, please don’t give me anything that I can’t handle.”

But those legs were swelling again. And there was an intense pain in his back. He was told by an orthopedist and spine doctor that the discomfort was due to positioning during surgery. Some positioning: this was brutal. He was suffering so much that he called for Jacque, had her help him get off the toilet—he couldn’t do it himself—and corrected her when she said, “I’ll get the car.”

“Call an ambulance,” he shouted.

He had the will to live, absolutely, but there seemed to be a message here. Just when he thought he had to focus on recovery, another condition would arise. So, essentially, he was recovering from three or four things all at the same time. Which is no kind of recovery at all.

Never mind the baseball vacation and a job in 2003. He wanted to live. And walk again. And enjoy the “mundane” aspects of being a husband and father. But this was roulette, and his patience and mettle were being tested. When would he say when? When would he give in? The new problem was that the Greenfield filter was clotted. But now the device in place to catch the clots was too clotted to further do its job. The hospital in Philadelphia had no beds, so he spent two days in a Bucks County hospital, half-consciously looking at the ceiling and waiting for any pain medication.

He was once again that animated figure, his lower body expanding and disfigured. He had gained 30 pounds. After the 2 days in Bucks County, he was taken to Philadelphia and the intensive care unit. Fade in, fade out, take some meds. That was his life; a few times he forgot to breathe. A ventilator was put in his room because, due to his stupor, he would fade out and forget to take breaths. Any day now, he’d be as familiar with the medical jargon as his wife, the nurse, is. He was learning about anticoagulants to dissolve the clots and diuretics to reduce the swelling.

“God,” he said, looking at another ceiling. “Didn’t I ask you nicely?”

He had, indeed. Even though it didn’t seem that way when doctors couldn’t give him the answers he wanted to hear. He asked what his recovery time would be like now, and they gave him a vague, “It depends.” They talked about developing “collateral circulation.” They didn’t always say what he wanted to hear.

It depends? That wasn’t the answer he wanted. They told him it depended on how strong he was; his recovery was up to him. In the meantime, if he wanted to look at his situation spiritually, he had his answer for the point of this test: his marriage. It was strong before, and it became even stronger. He had been infatuated with Jacque since the day he first spoke with her, but this was beyond
infatuation. This was an unshakable foundation, a pyramid much older and more trustworthy than the one young Jacque Lang fell from as a University of Arizona cheerleader.