Helga Schubert

The bee is my totem.

Introduction


I am three or four and sitting in the dirt playing on a little strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street on 7th St N.E. right outside of our apartment. I feel an excruciating, sharp and burning pain at the base of my right thumb. The tears come so quickly that I am partially blinded and unable to see my hand.


I'm up in a flash and running toward the apartment. Through the outer door and taking the stairs as fast as I can, I am screaming in pain. My mother opens the door of the apartment and grabs my wrist  and hugs me at the same time. She looks carefully at my hand. 


"You were stung by a bee. It will be better in a little while. We'll  put some baking soda on it." She gradually calms me down and I'm finally able to look at the painful wheal with the central red dot marking the point of the sting.

Throughout childhood I was generally aware of what the bees were up to. I gave them healthy respect and a wide birth. I attended them when they were wounded often as a result of mowing clover in the lawn. I would often kill them quickly to end any suffering but at other times I allowed them to die in my hand, occasionally receiving a final, last-gasp sting for my troubles. The stinger had no trouble piercing the extra layer of callous on my hands.

I felt no need to explain my attraction to bees.

Helga

She was woman in full glory with a timeless physical radiance and charm. She was about the same age as my mother, but a very worldly 57.  She possessed the same sense of an enveloping inner peace that surrounds my wife, Jasmine. It must be piped down from another plane of existence during sleep.

As I was making rounds at St Vincent Hospital early in 1980, one of the nurses told me that Helga Schubert, one of the administrators, had been admitted the previous night from the emergency room and that a surgery had occurred earlier in the day. The nurse related that it was not good news.

I finished my patient care work and located Helga's room. The surgeon, Dr. Meyers, was there when I arrived at the room and he stopped talking as soon as I stepped through the door. Helga said, "It's okay, Dr. Meyers, no secrets from Dr. Sohr. "

Dr. Meyers explained that the bowel had been blocked by a cancer which had also established itself in the liver. The emergency surgery had removed the obstruction but that there was quite a bit of cancer that had been left behind. "It's spread beyond the reach of any surgery at this time."

He held out the hope that the tumor might respond to chemotherapy.  He was  gracious enough to write the progress note while still sitting in Helga's hospital room. This gave her the opportunity to ask more questions. It allowed him to demonstrate his expertise and compassion...as if to say, "Together we will face this in the best way that we can."

She wanted to know how much time she had left but Dr. Meyers said that it was too soon to have those kinds of answers. As Dr. Meyers left, I sat down on the bed and she reached out to hug me--a huge hug that bewitched me and drew me to her particular needs. Within that hug was an unwritten contract. We would be there for each other. I would stand in for the husbands who had left her and I would be her mock lover during the next few months. She would permit me to observe her in this unfolding act of dying.

She was born in Prague in 1923. Her father was an attorney who taught at the University. When the Germans occupied the city, her father was arrested. Two weeks later the family was told that he had died unexpectedly and the body was returned with clear evidence of ongoing torture.

Helga told me that she was raped twice during the war, both times by Czechs and not by Germans. With liberation of the country, she returned to the University to resume her education. However, the communists were firmly in control by 1948 and free elections could not survive the communist ascent to total power.

It was then that she decided to leave the country. She went for a holiday to a ski resort, where she received crash course lessons in cross-country skiing. She immediately put these lessons to good use and she escaped on skis over the Czech border to Austria. Making her way Paris, she made a life for herself for many years working for Voice of America and for various theater companies throughout Europe. She did a number of jobs to keep herself afloat, even spending some time as an actress.

She often smiled as she discussed the stimulation and excitement surrounding her life in Paris in the 1950s.

Her mother remarried and immigrated to the U.S., settling in Santa Rosa, California. In 1961 Helga  followed and began working for a department store as a buyer. At some time in her late 40's she decided that she wanted to do hospital work. She completed a bachelors and then a master's degree in hospital administration at George Washington University in D.C. She did her internship at the Rosebud Indian Reservation and came to St. Vincent's Hospital in Billings in 1980.

From previous posts you have some idea of my negative feelings about early childhood religious brainwashing whether in Madrases or other religious schools. I feel much different about Catholic hospitals based upon my sample Universe of three...I've never seen better overall nursing than that provided by nuns. My recollections of St Vincent Hospital in Billings are of an institution with an amazingly solid core of compassion and concern for patients, the first hospital I had ever seen where all rooms were private--what a true gift for family and patient!

I had a contract with St. Vincent's to staff a clinic 20 miles east of Billings. Helga had gone to work for the management team at St. Vincent's and she was assigned to manage the clinics when the previous administrator left suddenly to join a large group in Wisconsin.

I had first met Helga when she came to the clinic in Worden to introduce herself. We went for lunch at the only  restaurant and we returned to the medical office where we discussed some of the ongoing operational and communication issues. As she prepared to leave, I was impressed that she picked up all the outgoing mail and told the office staff  "I'll take care of this."

Sister Michele, St Vincent Hospital Administrator came to Helga the day after her cancer surgery. As a new employee, Helga was still on probation and her health and life insurance policies were not finalized. The insurers were put on notice that Helga's insurance was to be finalized immediately. Sister Michele promised that the paychecks would be forthcoming throughout the length of the illness. Helga was assured that the hospital would provide room, board, and nursing care no matter how long it would take.

Any concerns of Helga about her indebtedness and short-term finances were immediately put to rest.

Helga was able to laugh about the irony of spending years working toward a goal and seeing the prize evaporate. As she healed from her abdominal wound she began to lose weight. She got a kick out of "the new body" and was happy to pose for photos. Her apartment was only a couple of miles from my house and I visited two or three times a week after she left the hospital. We talked about Sartre's plays and existential philosophy. She convinced me that there is such a thing as a European point of view--a tiredness when looking at the world and an expectation of bitter surprises in personal affairs.

She had a need for physical contact but seldom for physical intimacy. She liked hugging and sitting and talking with an arm around me. She was 20 years older and laughed about being attractive enough to snag a young boyfriend. I told her it was all about her money and station.  I was playing the role of boyfriend or husband--I was the observing stand in.

One evening she went to dinner with Molly and me. We had an enjoyable time and I dropped her off at her apartment some time before 11. Shortly thereafter, she began experiencing severe flank pain. The tumor had encroached on the ureter and her kidney had become obstructed. She went to the emergency room and a stent was placed into the ureter so that the kidney could drain and she was admitted to the hospital.

Her urologist happened to have a cocaine problem at the time. I hope that his medical advice was not tainted by the color of money. Nevertheless, he convinced her that a stent wasn't really complete enough treatment. He said that the safest thing was to remove the kidney--which he did. Although she could have walked home the day after the stent was placed, the nephrectomy confined her to the hospital for the last few weeks of her life as her liver slowly failed. She never again left the hospital.

During last ten days, she didn't eat. She enjoyed a few ounces of cold beer through a straw and I took pleasure in smuggling this into the hospital every evening. She was withdrawing from the world. I remember telling her about the eruption of Mt. St. Helen's and not being really sure that she understood.

My favorite memory of Helga is the statement "My second husband said...or was it my third husband?"

One Wednesday afternoon, I arrived at the Worden clinic to find that I had nothing "medical" to do. This was a situation that had never occurred previously in over three years of work in Montana--never an afternoon to go bare of patients.

I decided to drive back into Billings to see how Helga was doing. I started the little red Fiat and looked down at my right knee. There was the most enormous bee I had ever seen, calmly resting on my thigh. A message?  I gently slipped back out of my seat and grabbed my pants knee to free the material from direct contact with my skin. Then I tugged the knee a couple of times until the bee took off.

I drove in to the hospital. When I arrived, Helga was in a final coma and she died about 45 minutes later. Somehow I had managed to be there for the moment.

You can see from my story that magical thinking has appeared and it continued for the next few days where I had a strong sense of her presence at her funeral and at a wake held by her friends.

What a woman, Helga!  I'm in awe of your courage!