My first time in a hospital that I can recall is when I was 6 years old. We were visiting my grandmother on the North side of the city when my father began to complain of abdominal pain. It worsened over the next few hours and my mother and I took him to the Emergency Room. He was diagnosed with a strangulated hernia and surgery was recommended.
When a young nurse approached my father with a clipboard to sign a consent form (I don’t recall the doctor doing this as is usually the case where I went to medical school or in the movies but perhaps one did), my father pushed the clipboard away and asked the nurse to leave. He was going to refuse surgery and check himself out of the hospital against medical advice. My mother of course cautioned him not to do so but anyone who my father did not agree with, particularly anyone carrying a clipboard requiring a signature was not going to tell my father what to do.
A few minutes later and after my father was unable to dress himself to walk out, the chief of surgery (as I would later learn) walked into the bay pulling the curtain back, briefly introducing himself and telling my father he would do the surgery and what the recovery would look like. My father used a few choice words with him as he did with the nurse and said he was leaving.
At this point the surgeon looked at his watch and told my father that it had been about an hour since the hospital called him and based on his symptoms, my father had a few more hours to live before this would kill him.
Upon hearing this, my father asked for the nurse with her clipboard.
Many years later, I did a forensic pathology rotation at the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office on the West side of the city. Prior to the Heat Wave of 1995 I have written about, I accompanied Dr. Edmond Donoghue, the Cook County Medical Examiner to lunch and then to the massive criminal court complex at 26th and California to watch him testify in a murder trial.
Over a bowl of chili a few blocks from the Cook County Jail I mentioned this story about my father and a surgeon when he told me his father was a surgeon.
I recounted the surgeon telling my father he had a few hours to live before saving his life.
Dr. Donoghue shared with me that his father told him a similar story when he was in high school or medical school. A story about a man with a strangulated hernia that was going to kill him and how his father saved this man’s life.
After court where Dr. Donoghue testified as to the manner and cause of death in a “deal gone bad over drugs” case, I called my father and asked him a question I hoped he could recall the answer to.
“Dad, do you remember the name of the surgeon who did your hernia operation by Grandma’s when I was little?”
“Of course,” my father responded. “An Irishman by the name of Donoghue.”
The next morning before we rounded on the cases of the day, I mentioned to Dr. Donaghue that his father saved my father’s life.
According to his obituary, “After an internship at the former Augustana Hospital in Chicago, Dr. Donoghue took specialty training in surgery in several locations nationally, including Cook County Hospital. He was a captain in the Army Medical Corps during World War II and saw service in Europe.
He and wife Mary Helen were married on the Monday after Easter in 1944 and honeymooned at Ft. Dix, N.J., during a military leave, according to son Edmund, who added that he was more than a year old before his father saw him.
After four years in the Army, Dr. Donoghue left the military in 1946. He served on the medical staffs of Augustana Hospital from 1946 to 1979, and St. Joseph Health Centers and Hospital from 1955 to 1979. At St. Joseph, he was a chief of surgery and a president of the hospital’s medical staff.”
My father had his surgery at St. Joseph in 1976. The other Dr. Donoghue that I knew currently practices in Georgia.
