Part 6

“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.

THE ATMOSPHERE OF DISSIMULATION

I sometimes wondered what there is about the atmosphere of a hospital that makes everybody prevaricate. If you ask what your temperature is you get an evasive or dishonest answer; if you ask a civil question about yourself, or anybody, or anything whatsoever, they all--including your own people--seem leagued together in a solemn compact to deceive you. And they justify their deceit on the ground that truthful answers are “bad for the morale of the patient,” who is supposed to submit to everything without question, obey all orders without objection, and interfere with no local procedure. You hire the doctor, suffer all the torments, and pay all the bills; yet you are given but little occasion to feel that you are in any other respect regarded as a human entity. You are merely a patient--known in hospital parlance by the number on the door of your room. If you ask an intelligent question about your own condition, the answer makes you feel as if you were prying into their affairs. If you are feverish and irritable, and feel anxiety and suspicion because you are being obviously deceived, you must content yourself with believing that your attendants think they know better than you about your condition and what is good for you.

The first night at the Kahler hospital, my nurse on retiring said she was a light sleeper, and to call her when I wanted anything in the night. She would get up at seven and go to breakfast. Under a strong opiate I slept fairly well through the latter part of the night, and waking a little before seven, with a throbbing hip, and parched mouth and throat, I attempted to wake her for a glass of water (her bed was behind a screen across the room).

“Miss Page!” I called in a loud whisper. No answer. Then louder--“Miss Page!” Still no answer.... “Miss Page, did you say you were a light sleeper?” About that time I felt like sneezing; and, I thought, “if I can put this over strong it will surely bring her to.” So I drew in a tremendous inhalation and let out a blast that seemed to shake the room. When the reverberations had died away I listened, and the death-like silence gave me a quaky feeling.

Becoming alarmed, I reached for the telephone on the stand beside my bed and asked the operator to ring my bell vigorously, as I couldn’t wake my nurse. The ensuing clatter sounded like a fire alarm.

“My God, the woman’s dead!” I thought. When I could stand the noise and suspense no longer I cut in and called to the operator--“Send someone up quick; there’s a dead nurse in my room!”

In a short time there was a rush of feet coming along the corridor, then the door was opened, the lights flashed on and several excited people ran in.

“Behind the screen!” I said. They all scurried across to the scene of the supposed fatality. But the bed was empty! Half an hour later the nurse came in smiling. “I got up early,” she said, “and slipped out while you were asleep. Did you miss me?”

We now approach the scenes that bordered narrowly on tragedy. Strangely enough I had had much to do with tragedies the past year. I read twenty-one of them by Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, but little did I dream how near I was to becoming the central figure in a tragic drama with a modern hospital setting.

A couple of days or so after the nurse episode Dr. Braasch came to see me. He said he was making a special study of my case, and for some time he listened attentively while I endeavored to explain how I felt. For the first time I was encouraged to find that I had finally impressed someone with the idea that all was not going well. With the parting remark that he would call again in a few hours, he went out, leaving me in a state of wonderment as to what the next move would be. A little later, when Doctor Will made his customary morning call, he talked at unusual length about the operation. He said his first impression on seeing the infected kidney was to remove it; but on second thought, and acting on the advice of his assistants, he decided to try to save it. Therefore after spending nearly two hours cleaning out and repairing it he stitched it up, put it back and sewed up the incision. He still felt that his second judgment was correct. I disagreed with him, for I continued to grow steadily worse.

“Doctor, that kidney must have died of the operation. I wish to God you had taken it out and thrown it into the sewer; then I should have been well rid of it,” I said in despair. “I’m poisoned, I tell you, I’m poisoned!”

But in his calm dialectical way he went on to explain several reasons justifying his action, and others accounting for my condition. Finally he convinced me that he was right; that my condition was only a natural outcome of such an operation, and all I had to do was set my mind on getting well. After he left I called in the family and said we’d play auction bridge; that what I needed was action and diversion. They were thunderstruck at seeing me climb out of bed and call for my dressing gown and slippers. Though my head was in a constant whirl we played for an hour, when Doctor Braasch came in and dropped into a chair, looking rather troubled.

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!

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!