It's Not Easy Bein' Me: A Lifetime of No Respect but Plenty of Sex and Drugs (21 page)

A short time later, my heart started doing somersaults in my chest, and I had to spend a night in St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica until they got it under control. My cardiologist told us that I would only live three months if I didn’t get my valve replaced.

My doctor is strange. No matter where it hurts you, he wants to kiss it and make it better. After he checked me for a hernia, I had to change my phone number
.

J
oan and I quickly started interviewing heart surgeons and decided to go with Dr. Hillel Laks at UCLA Medical Center. When I went to him, he ordered a bunch of tests on me, including angiograms to my brain, which revealed a whole boatload of problems. Not only was my right carotid 100 percent blocked, but so was my right vertebral artery. Once those suckers close off, you can’t do much about it. The aortic blockage was moderate to severe and one of the bypass grafts from the previous heart surgery had closed down. The doctors said that either the aortic valve or the blocked neck arteries or a
combination of both could be causing my symptoms, and they needed a little time to evaluate the situation.

Here’s a free anatomy lesson, and not the kind I had to pay for in those Times Square strip clubs: four arteries supply blood to the brain. I was down to two and they were both on the left side of my neck. That meant the right hemisphere of my brain must have been very bloodthirsty! The two arteries on the left were no day at the beach either—they had partial blockages in six places. The doctors said they couldn’t stent them, so heart surgery would be very risky because there was a good chance I’d have a stroke in the middle of it.

Joan and I met with Dr. Laks a couple of times. He suggested that I get examined by Dr. Neil Martin, chief neurosurgeon at UCLA, before going ahead with the heart surgery.

Dr. Martin ran me through another marathon of tests and, after looking at the results, said the words “brain surgery” to us for the first time. He said the good news was that he happened to be a specialist in the very procedure that could protect me from having a stroke during heart surgery. He called it an extracranial, intracranial bypass. I only know this because Joan had him write it down. When we got home, she immediately got on the Internet to study up on it.

Meanwhile, Dr. Martin told us that he wasn’t sure he would recommend the surgery because he wasn’t certain my heart was strong enough to endure it. He wanted to talk some more with Dr. Laks, and said he would give us
a call in a day or two. So Joan and I went home not knowing if I was going to have brain surgery or heart surgery, or both. Some choices, right?

My doctor told me he had good news and bad news. I said, “Doc, only tell me the good news, all right?” He said, “All right. They’re going to name a disease after you.”

T
he following day, which was a Saturday, our building concierge took a message from the brain surgeon that read:
Spoke to Dr. Laks. Decided against heart surgery. Go ahead with brain surgery
.

This really surprised us, so we quizzed the guy who took the message to be sure he got it right. He was sure, though, so we prepared ourselves for that.

We weren’t able to reach the doctors until Monday, when they told us that the concierge had taken the message down backward. I would be having
only
the heart surgery, which would be scheduled as soon as possible.

By this time, I was not able to stand for more than about ten seconds without experiencing symptoms. I could barely get from one room to another, so Joan rented me one of those three-wheel scooters so I could get around in our apartment.

Here’s a message I hope you never get.

Courtesy of the collection of Rodney Dangerfield.

To show you how serious all this was, I even stopped smoking pot to clear my lungs. Joan had me eating healthy foods and getting lots of rest. It was much worse than when I checked into the Pritikin Center. No sneaking off for Chinese food with Roseanne.

A few days later, the date for my heart surgery was set. I had to be admitted the following afternoon, so my son and daughter flew in from the East Coast. I was scheduled for another angiogram to my heart to make sure there were no surprises before surgery the following morning.

That day, a lot of my friends called to wish me luck. I
can’t remember much of that time, but Joan says Jay Leno, Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, Louie Anderson, Dom Irerra, Brad Garrett, Lenny Clark, Michael Bolton, Robert Davi, and Bob Saget were some of the more famous ones.

That night a big group of us were having dinner in my hospital room, when Dr. Laks walked in with a few other doctors and asked to speak to Joan and me alone. When everybody had cleared out, Dr. Laks looked me in the eye, man-to-man like, and said, “Rodney, you like to be creative, don’t you? Your work requires a lot of thinking, so we want to do everything we can to preserve your brain.”

Uh-oh. I started hearing that damn
Twilight Zone
music in my head.
Do-dododo, Do-dododo, Do-dodo
…

Dr. Laks continued, “Our team has reevaluated your case. Your angiogram this morning gave us some new information. We feel your heart is stronger than the initial tests revealed.”

Then I realized what he was saying: they wanted to do the brain surgery
first
, then do the heart surgery. They had concluded that my heart would be strong enough to endure the brain surgery after all, and that would optimize my chances with the heart surgery.

We figured the brain surgery would take place the following day, but Dr. Martin was on vacation and wasn’t reachable by phone. (I think he went mountain climbing or something.) I didn’t want to spend Dr. Martin’s vacation in
the hospital, so Joan took me home and I continued to practice parallel parking the scooter in our dining room. I was still writing jokes and working on this book.

I told my doctor, “Every day I wake up, I look in the mirror, I want to throw up. What’s wrong with me?” He said, “I don’t know, but your eyesight is perfect.”

T
he big day finally came. On April 7, 2003, I checked into the hospital, this time for brain surgery. My son and daughter flew in again. That night we had a small party in my room. Bob Saget and Louie Anderson kept us all laughing until we were exhausted.

Joan spent the night with me and went to pre-op with me in the morning. Just before they gave me the injection to knock me out, Joan says I said, “I want to live…”

Those were my last words for about two weeks.

My doctor’s a very strange man. I said to him, “Doc, what’s the difference between an oral thermometer and a rectal thermometer?” He told me, “The taste.”

T
he surgery went well, but there were still some spooky days ahead. For various reasons, they had to place me in a “medically induced coma,” which, they said, gave me a better chance at a full recovery. Since I was in a coma for part of this time, and pretty whacked out for the rest of it, I don’t have many memories of what went on, so I’ll turn things over to Joan for a while:

When Rodney was taken out of his coma, he was still pretty far gone. He couldn’t talk, or hardly move, so I was always looking for clues to figure out if his unusual and newly blood-soaked brain was processing information. Some days he would seem responsive. Others not very. One day his eyes were open and he was able to weakly squeeze my hand, but not really on command.

Dying to know if he could understand what I was saying to him, I finally asked him a question I figured would get a reaction. A while back a fan had e-mailed Rodney an X-rated cartoon that Rodney thought was hilarious. I can’t bring myself to describe the cartoon, but the caption was: Surprise Balloon. So, that day, I asked Rodney if he wanted to see a surprise balloon. What a reaction! He grinned from ear to ear and tried to talk. I’ll never get that picture out of my mind—both sides of his mouth turned up in a smile despite the big ventilator tube stuck down his throat, with another one up his left nostril, and his skull shaved and covered with staples and electrodes. I was thrilled.

A few days later, another thing happened that assured me Rodney was on the road to recovery. Before his surgery we always looked forward to one daily ritual, watching
The Jerry Springer Show.
This went on for years and years. We never missed that show, no matter what was going on
.

The morning they finally took all the tubes out of Rodney, he was sitting up in bed in the intensive care unit, and I noticed that he was staring at the clock and then looking out the window. It took me a minute to realize that it was 10
A.M.
, which meant that
Jerry Springer
was on. I asked him if he’d like to watch, and he said yes in this deep, almost satanic voice, so I turned it on very quietly, because I didn’t want to disturb anybody else in the unit, or let the doctors know what we were doing. When Rodney saw
Jerry Springer,
he lit up. He was so into it—like a kid making his first trip to Disneyland. Pure glee
.

The word quickly spread that not only was Rodney okay, but that the first thing he had wanted to do when he had regained consciousness was watch
Jerry Springer.
Our publicist mentioned that in the press release that day and the story was picked up all over. Jerry Springer even sent us tapes of all the shows Rodney had missed while in his coma
.

Oddly enough, though, once we were home, the fully recovered Rodney no longer had any desire to watch television. But for a while, especially with restricted blood flow to the brain or while coming out of a coma
, Jerry Springer
was a wonder drug, a tonic for Rodney’s tortured soul
.

It turns out the UCLA doctors are geniuses. The brain surgery was the right way to go. My recent echocardiogram shows normal heart function. In other words, I got to skip having heart surgery for a while. I still have aortic valve stenosis, but I don’t have shortness of breath. A full year after the surgery, I’m breathing fine, walking fine, thinking sharp. One of these days I will have to get that aortic valve replaced, but for now, I don’t think about it.

By the way, originally I was going to include the Surprise Balloon cartoon in this book but the publishers felt it was too risqué. If you want to see this X-rated cartoon, come to my website,
www.rodney.com
, or send me an email to
[email protected]
.

I tell ya, I think doctors get too much respect. A hooker should get more respect. She’s more important than a doctor. I guarantee you, at four o’clock in the morning, drunk, I’d never walk up five flights of stairs to see a doctor
.

Chapter Seventeen

End of the Line

With me nothing comes easy. This morning I did my push-ups in the nude…I didn’t see the mousetrap.

P
eople ask me, “How do you write jokes?” There is no set procedure, but writing is basically thinking. Before you write anything, you have to sit there and think about it. Sit down and try to think funny in whatever area you want: wife trouble, car trouble, kid trouble.

With my image,
everything
is trouble.

Many of my jokes are written on the spot when I hear something I can make funny. One day I was sitting in Mulberry Street Pizza in Beverly Hills. It’s a nice place to hang out with the guys—and one of the guys I was hanging out with at the time said that he had a “tale of woe.” So I turned that into: “Every man has his tale of woe. Unfortunately, in life there’s more woe than tail.”

One time I was kidding around with a waitress at
Mulberry Street. I said, “Make it with me, and I’ll give you a thousand dollars for an hour.”