Merely the patient

My first experience in having the wound dressed was one of the high-lights of the whole occasion—one that requires no straining of the memory to recall. It was indeed a masterpiece of brutality that well deserves to be recorded in medical history; and I remember it as the outstanding instance where my rights and feelings as a patient were asserted with loud spontaneity, in language more forceful than polite.

“I have a happy surprise for you,” the nurse greeted me that morning, with a roguish twinkle in her eye; and presently one of the house doctors came in, followed by a nurse pushing a “tea-cart” loaded with bandages, bottles and a wicked looking assortment of probing instruments. He set immediately to work removing my swathings, and when he got down to the criscross network of adhesive tape he carefully peeled up one of the corners, then without the slightest warning he suddenly ripped the whole thing off, carrying with it, as I supposed, all the skin, with the kidney and half of my insides adhering to it.

“You * * * damned brute!” I exploded. I added much more to the same purpose; but that, for the moment, was all the satisfaction I got. His calloused soul had probably been excoriated many times before. He merely smiled and inquired if it hurt! Ever since then the mere thought of adhesive tape makes me shudder.

From five to eight different physicians, including both the Mayo brothers, visited me daily. Though I was not a patient of Doctor Charles Mayo, he called on me regularly, chatted pleasantly for a few moments, and always left with a word of cheer.

While my progress was constantly reported to be normal, on the ninth day I began to realize that some strange thing had “got” me—something was certainly going wrong. The drainage tubes had been removed, my incision was almost healed, both kidneys were said to be functioning regularly, my temperature was reported normal (though I knew it was not), and I was told that all blood tests and examinations indicated that I was on the highway to recovery. Still I protested that something had me in its deadly grip, and I began to be alarmed. I complained to the nurse, who said I was only tired and needed sleep. I complained to every doctor that came in, and each in turn, as if they had all rehearsed together, said it was “only natural”; and every time I expostulated with Doctor Will he good-naturedly turned the matter aside with some joke. Once he said that if the fire alarm were to ring, I’d be the first patient to jump out the window.

While they all seemed disposed to listen to me with that kindly forbearance usually shown to a talkative old lady in a high class private sanitarium for feeble-minded, nobody was seriously impressed. There was no use trying to argue with anyone; they simply listened tolerantly as long as it amused me to talk. Indeed the harassment of my body and mind was such that I sometimes wondered if I had become an inmate instead of a patient.

They said the records showed I was getting well, and that’s all there was to it. Whatever I said or however I felt seemed not to alter the purely scientific fact that my condition was normal.

There are certain reactions that customarily follow certain operations; and in common practice the patient is not supposed to develop any complications not on the regular calendar. The signposts were all set indicating my lines of recovery, and all I had to do was to keep within bounds and follow directions. But some deadly microbe having intervened to upset their calculations, I was unable to eat a mouthful of food, or to adjust my mental and physical reactions to the prescribed order of things. In other words, theoretically I was getting well, but practically I was becoming a physical wreck.

About this time I received a call one afternoon from the pastor of a church in the town, who having read in the local newspaper that I was from Boston probably jumped to the conclusion that I must be in need of spiritual aid. He was a soft-spoken, amiable, benevolent appearing man, and regretted to find me laid so low. Seeing that I was too sick to indulge in much general conversation he very considerately came at once to the point and asked if I were a believer. When I assured him that I was, he inquired if I felt prepared for any eventuality.

“My friend,” said I, “no one has a more profound veneration for your cloth than I have, and you show the true Christian spirit in coming to see me; but I am decidedly dubious about death-bed repentance. Religion, it seems to me, is something that should be acquired and practiced in health, not in sickness. A soldier who has been a worthless slacker in health can be of little service to his general when he lies at the point of death. This last moment contrition makes salvation too easy to be genuine.”

His answer was that those who came late to the vineyard received the same pay as the ones who came earlier; but my mind was too muddled to comprehend how this applied to those who remained away till they were too ill or decrepit to be of any service at all; and having delivered my little sermon I was not disposed to argue the matter any further.

“My dear brother,” he said at length, “nothing is more uncertain than life. You are making a brave fight, but if by some hard decree of fate you should be called to your final accounting, do you feel that you are prepared to meet your—”

“Yes, I feel quite prepared,” said I, and without stopping to realize how it might shock his religious sensibilities I added—“But if you saw a man in a pasture running for a fence with a raging bull close at his heels there wouldn’t be much use stopping him to inquire if he were prepared for the consequences in case he stumbled.”

A few days later, though my head still reeled and I felt the slowly increasing ravages of some sort of poisoning, I became restless for a change of environment. The hospital rooms were equipped with an electrical signaling instrument that clicked busily night and day, and nearly drove me mad. Then came Christmas Eve, with a group of noisy merry-makers parading up and down the corridors, singing Christmas carols and hallelujah songs. It was after visitors’ hours, and my night nurse having gone out, perhaps to join in the festivities, I lay there conjuring up melancholy thoughts, and contrasting the wretchedness of that night with the happiness of former times. Whether it was the peculiar nature of my illness or what, I cannot say, but Christmas music seemed utterly out of tune with my situation, and I can recall nothing that ever made me so blue, either before or after.

At length Doctor Will submitted to my entreaties, and so they bundled me up, put me onto a stretcher and took me in an ambulance down to the Kahler hospital, where I was placed on the convalescent floor. This brought me more conveniently near my family, who were living at the Kahler hotel, in the same building with the hospital. For the first two days I was reduced to one nurse, who did twenty-hour duty; that is, she was off from two till six P. M., and during this interval various members of my family took turns at entertaining me by trying to convince me that the doctors, nurses and everybody else knew more than I did. Now that I was listed among the convalescents, they couldn’t understand what made me persist in being so stubborn about getting well. Indeed doctors, nurses, friends and relatives all boosted me along and although I had lost nearly thirty pounds—mostly from my face, it seemed—they all insisted that I was improving rapidly and “looking fine.” Several letters and telegrams came from friends congratulating me on my rapid recovery, and everybody seemed jubilant, except me.

“Where do they all get their glad news?” I asked. “It’s the only information I have of any improvement. Don’t try to fool yourselves or me—I’m sick! Call it stubbornness or whatever you will, but I tell you, something has got me!”

Every blood test and every examination in the regular technical routine showed me to be perfectly normal; and yet, though I strained every nerve and muscle to justify these cheerful views, I was still conscious of the gradually tightening coils of some deadly venom. But the physicians still refused to take my complaints seriously; and for the life of me I couldn’t explain just how I felt. I simply knew that something had gone wrong, and that I was steadily losing ground in an unequal fight. About the only sensation I could describe was that I felt a constant whirling in my head; and the skin on my head and face felt like a tight-fitting leather mask. I ate nothing and slept very little, except under morphine. Whenever anyone spoke to me or looked at me I felt an impulse to burst out crying. I was assured, however, that all this was a perfectly natural result of the operation.

About this time I developed an excruciating pain in my right hip, which admitted of no comfort, day or night; and when the orthopedic specialist had probed deep into the hip joint and drawn off whatever he could find—which wasn’t much—I discovered that this, also, was a natural consequence of the operation. I learned (indirectly) that I might perhaps have a stiff hip joint the remainder of my life, but they advised me it were better not to worry about it, seeing that it was not an uncommon result of a kidney operation. Unable to figure out what communication a lacerated kidney on the left side could have with a stiff hip on the opposite side, I asked the nurse; but for all I learned I might as well have asked the orderly. So I gave it up—as you have to do with all hospital problems that you attempt to solve by questioning those in attendance.

To draw me off the subject my new nurse declared that my worst trouble was a bad case of the “grunts”; and when I reported this to Doctor Will, with the suggestion that he add it to my list of symptoms, he passed it over with the usual remark that it was “only natural.” Whatever I did, or said, or felt, or thought, seemed not to concern anyone, because it was always perfectly natural; indeed it seemed as if I were the most perfectly normal and natural patient in the whole institution.