I found a hospital bracelet in my father’s wallet with a date four years after he died. It didn’t have his name on it, or anyone’s name I knew. He had carried it long enough to wear the print off, and it was tucked behind his license, where a man keeps something he wants close to him. He passed in 2011, and my mother packed that wallet away, and I only opened it this spring. The hospital was still there, so I called using the number printed on the band.
A woman put me on hold for eleven minutes. When she came back, she asked me to come in person and bring the bracelet with me. I asked why, and she said she couldn’t discuss patient information over the phone. I drove there the next morning and showed the receptionist the bracelet. She looked at it, then looked at me, and immediately called someone from the back office. A few minutes later, a nurse came out and asked me whether my father had ever mentioned a second family.
I told her no, and she seemed relieved. Then she asked me whether he had ever traveled to that city after 2011. I said not that I knew of, because he was dead. She looked at the bracelet again and said the date was correct, but the patient record connected to it had been amended twice. I asked what had been changed, and she said the original record listed a different emergency contact. The contact was my mother’s name, but the phone number belonged to a number we had never had.
I asked to see the record, but the nurse said she couldn’t give it to me. Instead, she brought out a photocopy of an old admission form and placed it on the desk. The signature at the bottom looked like my father’s. The date was four years after his death. I told her that was impossible, and she nodded before telling me there was one more thing. Someone had visited the patient every week during that hospitalization, always asking whether the family had been notified. Then she turned the form over and showed me the visitor log.
The same name appeared beside every visit. It was my mother’s maiden name.:::
