"The Quarterback Speaks to His God"
by
Herbert Wilner
Bobby Kraft, the heroic old pro, lies in his bed in the grip of medicines relieving his ailing heart. Sometimes he tells his doctor your pills beat my ass, and the doctor says it's still Kraft's choice; medicine or open heart surgery. Kraft shuts up.
He wasn't five years out of pro football, retired at thirty-six after fourteen years, when he got the rare viral blood infection. Whatever they were, the damn things ate through his heart like termites, leaving him with pericarditis, valve dysfunction, murmurs, arrhythmia, and finally, congestive failure. The physiology has been explained to him, but he prefers not to understand it. Fascinated in the past by his strained ligaments, sprained ankles, torn cartilage, tendinitis, he now feels betrayed by his heart's disease.
"You want to hear it?" Dr. Felton once asked, offering the earpieces of the stethoscope.
Kraft recoiled.
"You don't want to hear the sound of your own heart?"
Sitting on the examining table, Kraft was as tall as the short doctor, whose mustache hid a crooked mouth.
"Why should I?" Kraft said. "Would you smile in the mirror after your teeth got knocked out?"
This morning in bed, as with almost every third morning of the past two years, Kraft begins to endure the therapeutic power of his drugs. He takes diuretics: Edecrin, or Lasix, or Dyazide, or combinations. They make him piss and piss, relieving for a day or two the worst effects of the congesting fluids that swamp his lungs and gut. He's been told the washout dumps potassium, an unfortunate consequence. The depletions cramp his muscles, give him headaches, sometimes trigger arrhythmias. They always drive him into depressions as deep as comas. He blames himself.
"It has nothing to do with will power," Dr. Felton explained. "If you ran five miles in Death Valley in August, you'd get about the same results as you do from a very successful diuresis."
To replenish some of his losses, Kraft stuffs himself with bananas, drinks orange juice by the pint, and takes two tablespoons a day of potassium chloride solution. To prevent and arrest the arrhythmia, he takes quinidine, eight pills a day, 200 mg per pill. To strengthen the enlarged and weakened muscle of his heart wall, he takes digoxin. Together they make him nauseous, gassy, and distressed. He takes anti-nausea pills and chews antacids as though they were Life Savers. Some nights he takes Valium to fall asleep. If one doesn't work, he takes two.
"I can't believe it's me," he protests to his wife, Elfi. "I never took pills, I wouldn't even touch aspirins. There were guys on coke, amphetamines, Novocaine. I wouldn't touch anything. Now look at me. I'm living in a drugstore."
His blurred eyes sweep the squads of large and small dark labeled bottles massed on his chest of drawers. His wife offers little sympathy.
"Again and again the same thing with you," she'll answer in her German accent. "So go have the surgery already, you coward ox."
Coward? Him? Bobby Kraft?
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