The Maverick Tribe

Up here on my current little perch at Alamo Square I've been surveying a landscape fraught with peril lately.  First there was the Kadner family's havoc on the highways (the friend I'm staying with, Debra, and her brother both had serious auto accidents earlier this year), then there was the sudden death of local newsman Pete Wilson on Friday night (not to be confused with former California governor Pete Wilson).  Pete anchored the Channel 7 evening news and hosted an afternoon show on an affiliated talk radio network, KGO.  The man went in for hip replacement surgery and during it had a massive heart attack, which claimed his life.

I am haunted by this whole ordeal not because I'm a huge Pete Wilson fan or because I'm naive about the possibility of catastrophe on the operating table, or because Pete affected my life in any meaningful way.  But I was listening to his radio show just last Wednesday, his last day at work before the surgery.  And the final topic of discussion was his imminent surgery, where he invited listeners to call in and recount their operating room horror stories.  One caller claimed that doctors had inadvertantly left various pieces of hardware inside his cousin's abdominal cavity.  Another caller described having an adverse reaction to morphine wherein he was completely sentient to the pain of the surgery but couldn't move or speak.  Pete's colleague Gene Burns talked about the blood-curdling experience of doctors having to literally break his neck while he was under merely a local anaesthetic.  Listening to all these harrowing tales made Pete feel better for some reason. 

So there I was, at Debra's place, washing the windows, chuckling with Pete about these surgical mishaps.  That Pete would suffer the ultimate mishap was unbeknownst to both of us.