“This is going to be about the not happy ending,” Sandra Gilbert says. She has just stepped to the podium at Roosevelt University’s O’Malley Theatre and the audience for her Chicago Humanities Festival lecture is getting its first good look at her: a middle-aged woman with dark, bobbed hair squinting into the spotlight. The seating in this small theater is steeply pitched, and the 50 or so people who’ve come to hear her see her from above–a small figure in a black well. Black floor beneath her, black drapes behind.
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Sandra and Elliot Gilbert were a husband-wife team in the English department at the University of California, Davis: she a critic and poet, he the department chair. His medical problem was the old man’s affliction–prostate cancer–but he was just 60, vigorous, with no symptoms. He expected good years ahead. On the day of his surgery he was rolled off to the operating room at 6 AM; in early afternoon the family was told the operation was successfully completed, though they couldn’t see him yet. The doctor suggested they relax–go out to eat, go home and take a nap, and (later) go out again for dinner. To Sandra Gilbert’s retrospective horror, they dutifully complied. It wasn’t until 9 PM, she recalls, “when they told us, ‘The doctor’s coming down to see you,’ that we knew there was a problem.”
Within a month, with the help of a friend who is a pathologist, the family learned what probably happened. Elliot Gilbert, suffering from postoperative bleeding, had complained of feeling “lousy” in the recovery room. The staff failed to pay attention, failed to check his vital signs often enough, failed to look for the cause of a sudden drop in blood pressure, failed to follow through on a critical lab test. When they finally decided he was in trouble it was too late to resuscitate him. According to the pathologist’s calculations, he had lost half the blood in his body.
