Part 4

“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!

FLIRTING WITH THE SHADOWS

Reluctant as I am to dwell upon the sad farewells incidental to the departure of souls from this sphere, I feel that the history of this episode would be incomplete without some account of the circumstances and personal sensations attending the crisis. My strength having been seriously impaired by the first operation and the resultant attack of poisoning, after the second operation I sank lower and lower, until the physicians practically abandoned all hope. And though I was kept in ignorance of their diagnostic conclusions I sensed the gravity of the situation both from my own feelings and from the mysterious actions of those about me; and every time I closed my eyes it was with a feeling of final submission to what seemed the inevitable. Death, which in the distance I had always pictured with unmitigated horror, seemed now to have lost much of its terror; and though its proximity gave me a ghastly feeling, in a way it appeared more like a messenger of relief than a harbinger of ill. Sometimes in my desultory sleep its phantom-like skeleton form seemed to move stealthily about the room, its sunken eyes steadily fixed upon me; and once I imagined it reposing beside me in the bed. The sensation was so shockingly uncanny that I involuntarily put out my hand; and fancy my astonishment when I awoke to find myself clutching the arm of the night nurse, whom I had startled out of a comfortable doze at my bedside!

On the fifth day it was decided that I had but a few hours left, and that a transfusion of mercurochrome was the last forlorn hope. It was a hazardous alternative and would either kill or cure in about forty minutes; but if it killed there was nothing to lose, for I was lost anyway; if it cured there was everything to gain. A well known physician, afflicted with septicemia in a neighboring hospital, had taken it the day before, and died in thirty minutes. My wife asked one of Doctor Will’s assistants for his honest opinion on the probable outcome in my case; to which he answered, “He still has a fighting chance. If he doesn’t die of uremic convulsions inside of forty minutes, he may recover.”

My family were brought together at the bedside.... Lying in a state of semi-consciousness, I remember seeing one of the doctors approach the bed with a huge bottle of reddish fluid (mercurochrome) to which a long rubber tube was attached. Having no idea of what they were going to do, and mistaking this for the usual pink mixture of loganberry juice and castor oil, which I supposed they wanted me to drink through the tube, I closed my eyes and set my teeth. Presently someone raised my arm, then I felt the needle inserted, and when the fluid began to circulate through the veins, my limbs became numb; and as the paralytic feeling crept over my body it seemed as if the bed were slowly moving from under me. Then I imagined my head was in the hub of a great horizontal wheel which spun around with terrific speed for a while, and gradually slowed down till it barely moved. Like the propeller of an aeroplane, its momentum held me aloft over a deep chasm, and when the speed slackened I could feel myself descending, feet first, into the depths. I reached frantically about endeavoring to find something to cling to, but there were no supports, and startled at the increasing rapidity of my descent I opened my eyes--as one will awake from a terrifying dream--and stared about, wondering why so many people had gathered in my room. One physician clung to my pulse, while the other attendants stood about with bowed heads. Suddenly I caught the meaning of it all, and as I closed my eyes resignedly I felt my loved one’s tears on my face. With a final conclusion that all was over, I remember whispering, “Good-by; no flowers, please.” I knew nothing more for two days.

I have heard that persons approaching the gates of Paradise have been known to hear music and angel voices beckoning from within; and although fully conscious of the fact that I was close upon the portals of eternity I could catch not the slightest glimpse or sound of anything beyond; which convinces me that there is at such times no physical communication whatever between this world and Elysium, unless perchance it happened that I was nearing the wrong gate.

During the critical forty-minute interval, while five physicians stood waiting the outcome, one of them quietly recommended that any absent relatives be promptly notified. It was a toss-up with the Grim Reaper--and I won; though the victory was not assured for several days.

Later when I inquired after a missing member of our party I was told that about the time of the crisis he had been dispatched posthaste for home to shovel the snow off the family lot.

THE ROAD TO RECOVERY

The rest of the story is in a somewhat lighter vein. When they first lifted me from the bed and sat me in an easy chair for a few minutes, I felt as I imagine a jelly-fish might feel after being stepped on. My head wobbled about from one shoulder to the other like that of a newly hatched bird, and altogether I felt as if I had scarcely enough stamina to begin life over again. I well remember the comment of my nurse, who was so delighted with having “pulled me through” and at seeing me up in a chair that for a moment her Irish humor overcame the art of simulation. After viewing me for some seconds with an estimating eye she honestly confessed that I looked like the last piece at a remnant sale.

As I looked out of the window and saw figures moving about on the streets it seemed as if I had migrated to some alien world, where everything was topsy-turvy, and I asked the nurse why everybody was walking backward.

She smiled and shook her head.--“You’ve been very ill.”

My head went round and round, as if it were on a swivel. A blustering snowstorm was in progress and as the figures scurried about on the street I was puzzled to know why they all faced the wrong way--how they could tell where they were going, or when they arrived at their destination. I was barely conscious of having once lived somewhere, on some sphere, and I vaguely wondered if I should now have to begin life anew and learn everything all over again, or if I could pick up the broken threads and start where I had left off.

My wife having heard that I was sitting up, came in. We talked for a while, and somehow she appeared relieved to find how little I remembered of what had happened the past few weeks. She seemed glad that I was going to get well, perhaps because--among other considerations--it lessened the burden on her conscience for having pushed me into the first operation; and by way of making amends for this, and also for scolding me about my stubborn refusal to get well before the second operation, she said I had been a very good patient; that I had been right all the while, and I knew more than all the doctors, nurses and everyone else--even including herself--about what ailed me. After this tremendous concession--which made me a little suspicious that something had gone awry and some bad news must be impending--she asked if there was anything I wanted. This seemed odd, after getting used to being _told_ what I wanted.

“Yes,” I said, “I want a new room.”

“But you have a nice room, with plenty of air, light, private bath and everything.”

“I don’t like it,” I said.

“What is there you don’t like about it?”

By this time I was becoming tired from overexertion. She afterwards told me that I looked wearily about, then resting my eyes on the paneled oak door I said,--

“The door is upside down--I want another room.”

In the weeks that followed I had the usual run of bad days and nights, when things looked gloomy and hope sank low, but all things considered, my recovery was satisfactory to the physicians, though it seemed slow, and at times uncertain, to me.

A few days after my first experience of sitting up, Doctor Will came in and found me nibbling on a piece of toast--the first solid food I had taken in many weeks--which prompted him jokingly to remark that since I was beginning to eat, the price of my board ought to be raised.

“Doctor,” I said, “that reminds me of something that’s been worrying me of late. You being one of America’s greatest surgeons, naturally I have a patriotic pride in being operated on by you; but when I came here I had no intention of giving you a steady job cutting me open and sewing me up. One operation at a time by a great surgeon is usually as much as any ordinary person can stand, either physically or financially, and my Scotch instinct warns me that you are running me into ruinous extravagance.”

“Never mind, my good fellow,” he said; “don’t let that bother you. We are here to cure you, not to get your money; and when you get your bill if it isn’t satisfactory all you need do is scratch out the amount and fill in your own figures--whatever sum is agreeable to you, and that will be our price.” But I was so elated over my recovery that it didn’t occur to me to acquaint the office with this generous proposal.

SUBCONSCIOUS HALLUCINATIONS

It is remarkable what latent powers of reminiscence and narration are awakened by certain species of illness. In my case these ran chiefly along the lines of ancient history; and during the weeks of lucid or semi-lucid intervals I nearly wore out both my night and day nurses with Greek tragedies and Greek and Roman history and mythology. I recited the action and described the mythical gods and heroes in no less than a dozen Greek dramas, and at various times I discoursed at length upon the satiric comedies of Aristophanes, the tragedies of Euripides, the naval exploits of the great Themistocles, the eloquence of Demosthenes, the philosophy of Socrates, and the superb sculpture of Praxiteles. Then coming down five hundred years later to the days of Roman grandeur, I quoted many long since forgotten passages from Horace, Vergil and other poets and orators of the Golden Age. I declaimed, almost word for word, a famous oration by Cicero (which I had not read or heard since my school days, and of which I can now recall scarcely a single line), and likewise while raving over the epistolary attainments of Pliny the Younger I repeated the celebrated letter he wrote to his friend Maximus on the subject of downfallen Greece.

Although the nurses and others who listened were dumfounded at such harangues coming from an invalid, lying at times almost at the point of death, they were not more astonished than I was, and still am, at such abnormal volubility. The night nurse--a patient soul, who bore the brunt of my hallucinations--afterwards told me she had been much alarmed, because she had somewhere read that the lamp of genius often flickers and throws out rays of unusual brilliance just before it expires.

One morning, when I was well on the way to recovery, the head nurse looked in at the door and asked me how the “baby philosopher” was getting along.--“When you get well you must write a book.”

I said that was exactly what I intended doing the moment I got strong enough to wield a pencil. By way of encouragement my day nurse--a humorous, high-spirited Colleen--said it reminded her of an obscure author she once had as a patient. During his illness he ranted constantly about a wonderful story he had just conceived--one that would make him both rich and famous; but a few days later he died without revealing the plot to anyone but herself.

“Bring me a pad and pencil immediately,” I ordered. She did so, and most of this narrative was written in bed during the following weeks of convalescence.

CONCLUSION

It is well known that the medical profession is constantly on the alert for any new discoveries that will benefit suffering humanity; and I am told that they welcome suggestions, even from laymen, that may be helpful in achieving this end. One of the habitual aversions that people have to clinics and hospitals is their arbitrary rules and regulations, in complying with which patients feel that they are obliged practically to relinquish all control over both body and mind. Indeed I once heard a woman remark that she looked on these places as she did on a jail. Doubtless this is an altogether wrong impression; but nevertheless it prevails. We must assume that the first concern of every physician is that his patients have not only the best care but a complacent mind; and one way of helping to accomplish this desire is for surgeons to invent some substitute for adhesive tape. And I wonder if clinics and hospitals intend always to keep castor oil at the head of their diet list.

Furthermore if physicians were to establish a more mutual and candid relationship with their patients, and authorize nurses and other hospital attachés to treat them as rational human beings, possessed of some knowledge of their own feelings--at least to the extent of knowing whether they are getting better or worse--it might help to remedy a condition which I once heard an eminent physician term “an emergent deficiency.”

=TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES=

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.

A Table of Contents has been added for convenience.