"They cut my toe off on Friday," said Mike Krueger as he looked up from his bed at the Veterans Hospital. "Then, had a heart attack, some sort of infarction, I don't know. So the rapid response team comes, my guy Russ comes in to rescue some fat guy laying on a bed, saves my life."
Krueger pointed to the nurse monitoring him from the doorway in the intensive care unit. "Look at this guy. Jorge. He's a freakin' star. They're all stars, these kids. I call them kids. I just really, seriously want to give these kids some recognition. They'll do anything for you, and they get no recognition. They get nothing."
Krueger's medical adventure started back in July, when he went to the hospital with a blister on his little toe. He got pumped full of antibiotics, but he's a diabetic with poor circulation in his feet, and the infection continued to get worse. Doctors had to remove his toe.
"Took the bandage off and it stunk," said Krueger, a 63-year-old truck driver who speaks with poetic bluntness, some of which has to be altered for the newspaper. "Then I started going through the heart stuff. I had no heart problems before, unless you count the times I tried to haul my fat [posterior] up the stairs. It was fate, I guess."
Krueger has been lying in the hospital's ICU, waiting until Tuesday, when he will undergo a quadruple bypass. I asked him if he was nervous.
"I'm flippin' terrified," Krueger said, and then the burly truck driver's voice quavered. He took a sip of water to stop himself from crying.
"I think I'm in manopause," he said.
Lying in bed this week, Krueger called me out of the blue, saying he had a story about the VA. Reporters will tell you they are likely to return those calls because you never know what you'll get. People who are sick or in pain are often cranky and scared and they want to blame someone or report incompetence.
