I never drink a glass of iced tea that I don’t think of my brother, Russell Stimer. He passed away over twenty years ago. Gone, but not forgotten. Russ died of throat cancer. A doctor had told him not to smoke cigarettes, but that small cigars were ok. Not true.
Russ developed a small hard lump at the side of his throat. Since it was Hillsdale Fair time in Michigan and he had the Stockyard Restaurant to manage, he put off seeing a doctor until after the fair closed. The doctor took one look at the hump and without a word picked up the phone to make an appointment for surgery at the University Hospital in Ann Arbor. He knew it was cancer. It was a form of throat cancer that often-affected middle-aged men who were heavy smokers. It turned out that it didn’t make a difference what they smoked. The nicotine did the trick.
I remember visiting him in the hospital after his surgery. He was in a special wing devoted to throat cancer. All 24 of them were middle aged men. Many did not survive very long. While we were there, two were wheeled out, dead. However, Russ was a fighter. He would live several years, but not pain free. Russ brought a fellow patient home with him who had no place to go. He was dead within a few months.
Everyone in that wing of the hospital left with something in common, a throat opening to breathe through, a stoma. Russ learned how to speak with a device held at his stoma. It sounded tinny and unnatural, but you could understand every word.
That is the background for this story. Fast forward a few years. Russ had moved to a different place, still in North Adams, Michigan. My son Rickey’s wife, Dana, tidied up his house every week or so. They were not friends. He was hard to get along with, but so was she. It was argument time every time they crossed paths. The day in question was no different.
It was a hot, muggy day in late summer. With no air conditioning, the house was stifling. Russ made a request of Dana. In his tinny accent, Russ asked her for a glass of iced tea.
Dana, supposedly innocently, asked a simple question. “Do you want ice in it?” Russ roared into his device, “Why do you think they call it iced tea?” He was furious. I will say one thing for Dana. She knew how to get his goat. No one else would clean for him, so he was stuck with Dana. They tolerated each other most of the time. This was the excepton.
Dana also knew how to clean his stoma. It was something that had to be done often, several times a day. She once saved his life by removing the accumulated mucus, allowing him to breathe.
The moral of this story is to be nice to everyone you meet. You never know when the one taking care of you might be someone you offended in the past. That was a lesson my brother never learned.