Resignedly I took my night blanket and pillow, climbed into the wheelchair, signaled that I was ready and away we went, silently and swiftly like a cold draught, in and out of elevators, through long dark tunnels, up and down ramps, in and out of buildings and there wasn’t a word between us. The Charge Nurse would have been so proud of me. When we reached the auditorium my escort kicked open the swinging doors, tipped me out like a sack of coal and melted back into the dark tunnel before I could turn and give him one of my inspirational smiles.
Feeling like a package that has been left on the wrong porch, I clutched my night blanket and pillow and looked around. The auditorium was brightly lighted, rather small and rapidly filling to capacity. There were beds with the backs propped up along both sides and in the back of the hall, ordinary seats in the middle. I was wondering where I was to sit when an unsmiling strange nurse gripped my arm, steered me along the wall on the left side, helped me up onto a front bed beside Eleanor, stuffed my pillow behind my head, covered me with my blanket and told me not to talk.
All around me were robust, healthy looking people, finding chairs or climbing up onto the beds, but there was no noise. Not a sound. These were young Americans gathered together for an evening’s entertainment but there was no laughing or talking or calling. Not even one excited little squeal. The room was perfectly quiet except for the occasional scrape of a chair on the cement floor, the soft pad of bedroom-slippered feet, an infrequent self-conscious click of high heels. It was like a movie without a sound track.
As always at The Pines, the sexes were carefully sorted. The men all on one side, the women all on the other, the space between carefully patrolled by gimlet-eyed nurses with powerful flashlights to make sure that the sexes didn’t mingle in the dark.
I found that sitting on a bed with a pillow behind my head was the most comfortable way ever devised for seeing a motion picture but I thought the picture itself rather a tactless choice for the joyous entertainment of patients in a tuberculosis sanatorium. It was Greta Garbo in Camille.
Just to show me that in tuberculosis there is no sure thing, that all the paths of the tuberculous lead over quicksand, Monday morning, three days after I had gone to the movie and taken that first firm step toward normal living, I was informed that I was to go to surgery the following Thursday. My pneumothorax doctor, no longer the Medical Director but one of the regular staff, told me very casually after my pneumothorax that I was to “have some bands cut,” an intrapleural pneumolysis, to be exact. He explained that small adhesions between the lung and the pleura, caused by fluid or an infection at some earlier time, often tore loose as mine had at first, but big strong adhesions required surgery. He said that I had one or two large adhesions and until they were cut I could not have a proper collapse of the lung.
I spent the morning of January tenth in x-ray, posing with one arm above my head, one hand on my hip, both hands on hips, both arms above my head, and the evening listening to Eleanor tell of recent deaths at The Pines. As she had never before talked to me in the evening, I knew that she was only talking about death because I was going to have surgery, but I listened anyway in fascinated horror.
She said that when patients, usually unsuccessful surgery cases, were going to die they got violent diarrhea and nausea, grew thinner and thinner, weaker and weaker, and were finally visited by the Medical Director and told to put their affairs in order because they were going to die. She said that when death was pretty certain the patients were moved to the emergency ward. When absolutely certain and not far off, they were put in the light room.
She said that Beryl Hanford, the chocolate dipper, would die; both the girls in my old single cubicle would die; Margaretta, the beautiful Negro girl wouldn’t last two more weeks; the little thirteen year old would die; the girl in emergency who had hot packs on her stomach after every meal would die; the Barking Dog, Eileen Kelly, several of the ambulant patients and more than half of the Men’s Bedrest Hospital would die. I asked her how she knew and she said mysteriously that she could tell. She knew the signs. She said that in the sanatorium magazine there were lists of incoming and outgoing patients and deaths were merely listed as outgoing.
She said that more men than women died at The Pines because of a distressing tendency on the part of wives to divorce their poor sick husbands and thus remove their incentive for getting well. I asked her if men didn’t also divorce their sick wives but she said no, that men never divorced their wives, no matter how long the wives were at The Pines. I was amazed at this demonstration of “the faithful old male,” especially as my experience with men in the business world had led me to believe that many men forgot all about their wives when away from them for very short periods, like all day at the office. Eleanor concluded that all some women seemed to want out of life was to paint their faces and go to nightclubs. It was with difficulty that I refrained from saying, “I’ll say, kid!”
At eight o’clock, an evening nurse delivered a note from Eileen Kelly. Ordinarily I would have grabbed it and ripped it open for Eileen’s letters, no matter what her condition, were always amusing, always made me laugh. But this evening Eleanor and her morbid predictions had me stuffed so far down in my crypt that I could not summon the courage to open and read what I was sure was Eileen’s farewell letter. I put it on my stand unopened and continued to look out into the dusky hallway and think about my operation.
Just before lights out Katy stopped at our door and said, “Isn’t it fine about Eileen?” I said, “What about her?” She said, “Didn’t you get her letter?” I said, “Yes, but I didn’t read it.” She waited while I opened the letter and read that Eileen was much better, that she had been given half an hour of occupational therapy time and expected time up very soon. Katy said, “You see what being a good girl does for you?” and left. I said to Eleanor, “Well, there’s one that won’t die.” She said, without looking up from her knitting, “I wouldn’t bank on it if I were you.”
The next afternoon Eleanor was moved, thank God, but her discussions of death, like the smell of flowers after a funeral, lingered behind her and when I was visited by the Salvation Army and handed a religious tract by a sad-faced old lady with stiff black hairs on her chin, I trembled with fear, forgot that the Salvation Army often came to The Pines, and thought the hairy old lady had been sent by the office in lieu of the Medical Director, to prepare me for death.
After supper my apprehension was increased by extensive preparations for surgery and a large sleeping potion. If the operation was going to be the simple little thing I had been led to believe, why the enema, why the shaving clear to the waist back and front, why drugs? Did it portend something more serious or was it merely a surgeon’s caprice, like shaving the head and giving an enema before piercing the ears?
The next morning at seven-thirty, like a picador toward a bull, Miss Muelbach came charging at me with a hypodermic needle. “I’m allergic to morphine,” I said mildly but she already had the needle in and was bearing down on the plunger, so I didn’t pursue the matter further. Instead I put on the sterilized white stockings, white cap and white gown she handed me and when she had gone I looked in the mirrors. My reflected all-white image was so much like a young weevil emerging from a sack of flour that I expected to see a flour manufacturer’s label embossed in blue on the bedspread.
I decided to put on some mascara. This was strictly against the rules but I thought the situation warranted it. After all if I died I didn’t want my body sprayed with Black Leaf 40 and dumped on some compost heap. After I had put on plenty of mascara I looked again and found that I now looked like a weevil who hadn’t slept. I was contemplating the removal of the mascara when two strange nurses wheeled in a stretcher, transferred me to it with one jerk of the sheet, and wheeled me rapidly to the surgery on the top floor of the Administration Building.
Because of my allergy the morphine, instead of dulling my senses, had made me very bright, alert and nervous. Very conscious of every sound, every sme
ll, each new face. The surgery was high and very light with shiny white-tiled walls. Waiting for me were two doctors looking like wrinkled Ku Kluxers in their surgical caps and gowns, and three surgical nurses wound and bound in white. One of these identified herself as an operation artist, and a friend of my sister Mary.
I was transferred from the stretcher to the operating table and turned on my right side with both arms over my head. Then after a great deal of scrubbing and painting on my back and chest, novocain was injected in my left side under the arm and in my back in the vicinity of my shoulderblade.
The doctor who usually gave me pneumothorax explained what they had done, were doing or intended to do. “We are now making a hole under your arm. In this incision we will put a little light so that the surgeon can see what he is cutting from the incision he has made in your back.” The operation artist, who was peering in the holes and drawing what she saw, also made comments. “Your lung is the prettiest shade of blue,” or “You should see the neat job the doctor is doing.”
As soon as they were ready to cut, the lights would go off and a blue light would go on. Then the surgeon would say, “Ought two,” and a nurse would repeat, “Ought two” as she handed him the instruments and checked them in after he had used them.
It was very hot in the surgery and I was extremely nervous. Before long little rivulets of perspiration began running off my forehead and down into the mascara on my eyelashes. The mascara ran into my eyes and stung fiercely. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I tried to tell the nurse stationed at my head to wipe my eyes but every time I spoke the doctor told me to shut up as they were cutting my lung and talking apparently moved it.
The nurse finally noticed my tears and thinking that I was crying from pain or fear or both, hurriedly held spirits of ammonia under my nose which made my eyes water more and released more mascara.
After what seemed like years the doctor explained that they had anaesthetized for two adhesions but had found four and were going to have to cut them anyway. I was to be brave, he said, and was not to flinch. I was very brave and didn’t flinch but only because the slight burning from snipping the unanaesthetized adhesions was nothing compared to the torture I had already endured from the mascara.
At eleven-thirty I was wheeled back to the Bedrest Hospital and put, in spite of loud protestations on my part, into the light room, reserved, according to Eleanor for the surediers. At two o’clock Mother and Mary brought me an armload of spring flowers and I blanched when I saw them for I had forgotten that it was a visiting day and thought they had been sent for.
By four-thirty I had been moved back to my own room and only by a slight soreness under my arm and in my back and by my very red-rimmed eyes could I tell that I had spent the morning in surgery. I had been instructed to eat lying down for a few days but Charlie came to see me anyway. He gripped my right hand and said, “When Kimi told me you’d went to surgery I said to myself, ‘Say good-bye to a good kid, Charlie.’” I said, “Why Charlie, there wasn’t anything to it. I feel perfectly wonderful.” He said, “You better wait until the next few days are over. There’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip.”
My first slip came about seven-thirty when I noticed a peculiar scrunchy feeling in my left wrist. When I doubled my fist or flexed my fingers it felt like crumpling tissue paper. I asked the evening nurse about it and she looked frightened and immediately produced the House Doctor who gave me a sedative. In the morning the scrunchy feeling was gone. I asked the Charge Nurse what it was but she only smiled and asked me who had given me my hypodermic the morning before.
At noon Charlie, who acted very surprised that I had pulled through the night, asked me how I felt. I told him about the tissue paper in my wrist. He said, “Air in your veins. That’s the way they kill rabbits at the laboratory. Shoot air in the veins and stop the heart. That bubble of air you got in your veins might get to your heart anytime now. It’ll stop just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Well, you won’t know what hit you that’s sure,” he concluded comfortingly.
Two days after my operation I was given a new roommate. A girl named Katherine Harte, who had curly black hair, large green eyes, dimples and empyema. Kate was twenty-five years old, had been in The Pines for two years, had eaten almost nothing for two weeks, had to have her bed propped up day and night, and was ready to die. She told me that she felt as if she were floating about six inches above her bed and that she saw everything through a thick gray mist. She said when the nurses talked to her they appeared and disappeared in the mist and if they were scolding her she could close her eyes and float away from them at will.
The next day after Kate moved in was a visiting day. As I put on makeup after dinner, Kate advised me that she had told her family to stay home because she intended to spend the visiting hours with her eyes closed floating in the gray mist. I didn’t say anything. I felt guilty because I was so well and she was so sick and because I knew that Mother, Mary and Madge were coming to see me and my visiting hours were bound to be a delight.
At two o’clock Kate didn’t open her eyes. She lay waxily in her white bed looking as if she had been drawn on the pillowcase, her lashes and brows bold black strokes, her hair a black smudge. Even when Mary, Mother and Madge came in and cheerfully unloaded an armload of forsythia, two books by Humphrey Pakington and a large box of oatmeal cookies on my stomach and while Mother told me about the children, the happenings at home, at school and in the garden, Kate lay as still as death, her eyes closed, apparently floating in her mist.
Then Mary told about entertaining a doctor from Boston who was so reserved, so Eastern and so disapproving of the informal West that after two days of him she had become so self-conscious about being Western that every time she walked she could hear her spurs jangle and when she spoke she had to check herself to keep from whirling her lariat around her head and calling him Pardner. Mary’s stories were always funny but even if they hadn’t been she was so warm and vivid herself that just having her in the cold rainswept little room was as comforting as a bonfire.
Before Mary finished the story the Charge Nurse stopped at the door and warned Kate and me about laughing. Surprised at the inclusion of Kate, I looked over at her. Her green eyes were open and she was wiping away tears of laughter. I introduced her to the family. Madge said, “My God, you’re beautiful! Why do you have to sit up like that?” Kate, carefully watching the door for nurses, explained that she had empyema, an infection of the pleural cavity, and added casually that she was dying. Madge brushed the dying aside as unimportant. What she wanted were the symptoms of this empyema, the details of how Kate had gotten tuberculosis, what her first signs had been.
I explained that if she wanted to talk to Kate she had better move over by her bed and pretend that she was her visitor. Madge moved with alacrity and Kate told her how, when working as a secretary for a large oil company, she had had a cough for over a year, had been very thin, had fainted one day at work and remained unconscious for over an hour, and had been sent by the plant nurse to The Pines Clinic.
The Medical Director had been very depressing and had told her that both her lungs were badly infected and that he had little hope of saving her. Even so neither Kate nor her mother was able to realize the seriousness of her illness and saw no reason why she should go to a sanatorium, why she couldn’t get well at home. The Medical Director told them that it wouldn’t work, but they tried it anyway for three months. At the end of that time, Kate’s mother was worn out from trying to care for her, Kate was worn out from trying to save her mother and from entertaining visitors who came at any hour of the day or night, and her x-rays showed no improvement.
Kate entered The Pines. At first she took pneumothorax and got along very well, even going to the Ambulant Hospital in six months. Then she got empyema, became very ill and was sent back to Bedrest. She had to have her pleural cavity washed out with a chlorine solution every week and she had had a stripping operation. She showed us the scar, which wa
s scimitar-shaped and extended across her thin back from the right shoulder to below the right arm. She said that she guessed she was dying but she didn’t care.
Mary said, “Nonsense, you’re not dying. Millions of people have empyema—common as measles,” which was entirely untrue of course but seemed to cheer Kate, who told Mary about the floating and the gray mist. Mary said, “Malnutrition, very usual symptom. Your stomach has probably shrunk to the size of a crabapple. Here, eat a few of these cookies.”
Being married to a doctor, Mary felt that she knew more about medicine than the American Medical Association but the only people she was allowed to treat were her family, who knew that no matter what their symptoms, she would diagnose them as being indicative of whatever disease she happened to remember from the latest medical journal. When Dede was cutting her wisdom teeth Mary told her she had every symptom of a rare South American virus disease, and when Alison broke her leg skiing, Mary, who had just heard about psychosomatic medicine, told Mother that Alison could wear a cast if she wanted to but the whole thing was purely a manifestation of her psyche.
She had apparently abandoned the psyche for little crabapple stomachs and empyema as common as measles, but it made no difference what it was because it cheered up Kate, influenced her to eat several cookies and all of her supper, and evidently changed her attitude toward dying for she never mentioned it again.
It was probably the natural progression of the disease but it might have been, as Kate insists it was, the effect of my cheering visitors that made her temperature begin to go down the very next day, made her start to get well and was responsible for our both being given three hours’ time up on the twenty-first of February.