Merely the patient

A PAIN DISCOVERS ME

THERE is said to be no subject on earth more entertaining (to the narrator) than a major operation; and two operations, especially if they fall close together, ought to be—for purposes of self-entertainment—twice as good as one. Thus reckoning, it will presently be seen that I have a decided advantage over those who have to content themselves with only one, or none at all.

And it occurs to me that to write a book is the most considerate as well as the most expeditious means of acquainting your friends with the details of an operation or other painful experience; for in this way you can expatiate at large on the most harrowing aspects of the case, and everybody is at liberty to read as much or as little as he can stand, and skip the rest; whereas if you get the listener’s ear he is almost obliged to suffer attentively through to the end of your story. Furthermore, in a book you can advertise your troubles far more widely and effectively, and with less effort. Another advantage in writing a book on some pet theme is that, like a filibusterer in the senate chamber, you have the floor all to yourself: the difference being that while his verbosity is wholly without interest or sense, either to himself or his sleeping audience, your story is at least self-absorbing.

To go back to the origin of this story, it began with a pain—intermittent at first, but soon becoming violent and continuous. When it reached this stage I called in a physician, who pronounced it a bad attack of something with a strange name, which being reduced to simple English meant there was something wrong with my left kidney. He gave me a hypodermic of morphine and two days later I developed a bad case of septic pneumonia which, with resultant complications, laid me low for eight weeks. While convalescing from this I wrote a book on stock market speculation. I don’t know what prompted me to write such a book at such a time, unless it was that something in the nearness of my approach to the realms of the unknown reminded me of how near I came to leaving the world unprotected against the pitfalls of Wall Street.

In due time I recovered from both the pneumonia and the book, but the kidney was still belligerent, and about every six weeks, to quell its savage attacks I had to take morphine and spend a few days in bed with it. In the fall of that year while on a visit to my mother-in-law in Minneapolis I was persuaded to take this refractory organ to the Mayo Clinic at Rochester, Minnesota; and that sequestered little town, which in the domain of operations, sickness and suffering occupies about the same position as New York City does in the world of finance, provided the setting for the semi-tragic episode herein related, in which for many weeks I played the leading rôle before a mixed assemblage of doctors, nurses and anxious relatives.

Fielding tells us that to prolong scenes of distress to an unwonted degree is a task for which the reader feels but little indebted to the author. Therefore since we have here to deal chiefly with grim-faced facts such as are usually productive of more awe than amusement I shall treat the whole catastrophe as lightly as the circumstances will permit. But after all, a serious illness or an operation—like lion hunting, stock market ventures and suchlike hazards—has its varied and interesting phases; and many of its gloomy aspects are susceptible of humorous interpretation when viewed in retrospect by those who survive to tell the story.

In the present undertaking I was encouraged by the statement of both Doctor “Will” Mayo and Doctor W. F. Braasch, that one of the most difficult problems of the physician is to get the accurate viewpoint of the patient. Not that the patient’s viewpoint seems to make any difference, but they like to have it, possibly for the same reason that the little boy liked to hear the stuttering man talk—because it amused him. In order to get the reactions of a patient, Doctor Samuel W. Lambert goes so far as to say: “I have often told my students that every physician should have a severe illness, and every surgeon an abdominal operation.” Possibly those who read this account will feel themselves relieved from the need of trying out Doctor Lambert’s recommendation—which might also have included nurses, though he may have figured that they have other ways of kindling their sympathetic emotions.