In chapter 1, Wes recounts the death of his father. It started when his father couldn't sleep one night, because of "a severe sore throat and fever." He took a pill which became lodged in his throat. In the morning he drove himself to the hospital, and later, when his wife visited him there, she found him "disoriented" and unable to keep his eyes open. The doctors were unable to diagnose what was wrong with him, and so released him from hospital, prescribing nothing more than rest.
Later that evening, Wes, then only four years old, remembers his father's slow footsteps on the stairs, and then a crashing sound as his father collapsed. Wes remembers his father "grasping for air (and) holding his throat." An ambulance came and took Wes's father, but he died before reaching the hospital. When the autopsy was carried out, it transpired that Wes' father died from "acute epiglottitis, a rare but treatable virus that causes the epiglottitis (the flap at the base of the tongue) to swell and cover the air passages to the lungs." In other words, Wes says, his "father's body suffocated itself."
Wes blames the hospital. He thinks that the doctors didn't take his father's initial complaints seriously enough, because "his face was unshaven, his clothes disheveled, his name unfamiliar, his address not in an affluent area."
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