THE CALAMITOUS VERDICT
“What worries you, Doctor?” I asked. For a moment he looked at me, perhaps wondering if it were best to make a clean breast of matters; then without any mollifying preliminaries he said: “That kidney will have to come out; it’s your only chance. Septicemia and uremic poisoning have set in, and with the utmost haste we shall be none too soon.” (Any physician will understand what a meager chance a patient has under these conditions.)
No judge in pronouncing the death sentence on a criminal ever dealt a more staggering blow. It fell upon me like an earthquake upon a tottering structure, and my emaciated physique proved unequal to the shock. The whirling in my head suddenly increased and in my weakened highly nervous condition when I thought of cutting in through the newly healed wound, an oppressive darkness settled over everything and for a brief space I passed out of the interview. When I came to, the first thing I noticed was that the air seemed fresh, and the ceiling had gone back to its normal height. Doctor Braasch regarded me with an anxious inquiring look.
“Make it as quick as possible,” I said. “Lucky you discovered it.”
“It was you who made the discovery,” he frankly admitted. He then gave his orders to the nurse. Twenty minutes later I was on the operating table; Doctor Will and his staff, with a considerable audience of physicians, all in white masks and gowns, were standing in readiness, and a nurse was saying, “Now relax and take deep breaths.” The urgency was such that they broke all precedents of the institution, since kidney operations were never done there, and Doctor Will never operates in the afternoon, after operating in the morning. A dozen or so doctors from the clinic having heard of the affaire extraordinaire came in to view the proceedings.
Were it possible to relate in detail what followed the next few days it would only prolong agonizing scenes which would be more depressing than diverting to both the reader and the writer. If it be difficult for one with sympathetic tendencies to read of such harrowing experiences, it is doubly hard to write about them.
They changed my nurse for two others more skilled in surgical cases. For the first time Doctor Will refrained from his customary jokes, and whenever he called his face wore a look of seriousness. He was plainly disturbed; he was also unusually tender and solicitous.
From two or three sources my wife heard that kidney operations do queer things to people, and some Gloomy Gus assured her that even if I got well I’d be so peevish that no one could ever live with me. And on the fourth day after the second operation she chanced to hear one nurse remark to another in the corridor outside my door—“Isn’t it too bad that Doctor Will’s patient in Number 88 is going out!”
Nowadays, hospital patients don’t die; they merely “go out.”
At night my sleep was broken and constantly haunted by all sorts of weird dreams and illusions. If there is anything more boresome than the act of listening to a detailed account of somebody else’s operation, it is to lend an ear to some fantastic dream; but seeing that the ancient writers used to lay great stress on these somnific aberrations I will risk telling of a curious one that still haunts my memory. I dreamed that someone had brought me a number of small sleep storage tanks, resembling oxygen tanks, and told me that while I was getting my best sleep in the early part of the night I should sleep them all full, then later when the opiate wore off I would have a reserve supply to draw upon. I took the tanks one by one, slept them full and after capping them securely I laid them down carefully in a row. Later when I became semi-wakeful and restless I took up one of the tanks to extract some sleep from it; but to my amazement the cap had been removed and it was empty. I examined the others and found the sleep had all been drawn off. For a moment I wondered who had tampered with my tanks; but the villain was not far to seek, for lying serenely there beside the last tank was a husky looking kidney, sound asleep!