Thomas Wictor

I’ve just discovered that my Extravagumbo Website is worthless, and I can’t get a response from the people who made it. I’ve spent all day trying to figure out how to write a description for my Website that will show up on search engines, but nobody can or will help me. Nobody cares. People to whom I paid vast amounts of money are indifferent. When I use Bing, I get my Website name, and under it is written the following:

A description for this result is not available because of this site’s robots.txt.

WordPress comes with a robots.txt built in. I can’t remove it. Nobody can or will tell me what it does other than prevent descriptions from being published. The WordPress forum was useless.

When I Google Ghosts and Ballyhoo, my own Website doesn’t appear in the results. So all this effort is just another spectacular failure, simply the latest in the endless failures that define me. All that money, wasted. The only thing I’ll do successfully someday is die.

I could easily hate the people who designed my Website. But I don’t.

Yesterday they put Mom under Code Blue, meaning she was at the end. She was unresponsive and they couldn’t find a pulse in her arms. They moved her into a heart-care unit, and a nurse called me to tell me all this.

“What are her chances?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m not allowed to say,” she replied. Then she giggled. It’s a cultural thing. She’s from one of the Asian countries where they laugh when they’re nervous.

So we waited for Mom to die.

An aside.

In the movie Jacob’s Ladder, there’s a scene that always chokes me up. Tim Robbins is in the hospital, being tortured by doctor-demons. His suffering is truly horrifying. He weeps, hopeless and lost. Then his chiropractor Danny Aiello crashes through the doors and thunders down the hall, shouting, “Where is he? What have you done with him?”

Aiello rescues Robbins from the torture. I always wondered what it would be like to have a burly, two-fisted angel save me.

Yesterday, as Mom lay dying, her oncologist Dr. Brian J. Leberthon burst into the room and said that she was being given the wrong treatment. A…discussion between Dr. Leberthon and the hospital staff ensued. It was spirited. Dr. Leberthon showed Tim the X-rays of Mom’s lungs and said they’d been interpreted incorrectly. The pulmonary specialist had told us that there was no hope. He wanted to move Mom into hospice.

Dr. Leberthon was adamantly opposed to putting Mom in hospice.

“I will not let her die!” he yelled. “Your mother is a brilliant woman. I love her, and I love you! I can save her!”

Dr. Leberthon is known as the Patron Saint of Lost Causes. He takes all the cases that other doctors turn down. And he does indeed save many of them. His nurses say he performs miracles.

Tim has medical power of attorney over Mom, so he told the staff to do what Dr. Leberthon asked. Mom was moved into this amazing room that has to be reserved for celebrities, because it has a kind of space-age control center for all the machines that were hooked up to her. She got new medication, and three different treatments were applied. By the end of the day, she was alert and sitting up. Most of her congestion was gone. She was breathing easily and able to give a thumbs up.

Mom told me that I have to work on my career right now. She ordered me to do so, actually. I’ve been home all day, struggling with my failure. It’s not clear how long Mom will live, but if she dies now, it won’t be from pneumonia. Dr. Leberthon did indeed save her. I’ve discovered what it’s like to have a burly, two-fisted angel intervene. It’s pretty great.

But that’s not all.

A couple of days ago I also got a message from a man named Jesus Betancourt, a Venezuelan from my hometown of Caripito. He sent me some photos of his family. Here’s Jesus with his wife Ana and his daughter Jessica.

Jesus told me a little about himself. He and his family are very brave people. Jesus also invited me back to Venezuela.

So, even though my own problems continue, there is always light, and the brightest lights are in the form of people.

I don’t know Jesus, but I love him, as I love Dr. Leberthon. It’s not possible for me to hate in a world of Betancourts and Leberthons.