CHAPTER 19

We knew from the day that we entered Kingsbridge that our bridges to the country club existence had been burned behind us, and though we sometimes gave an inch toward the doctor’s efforts to make us rehabilitate old ghosts were constantly popping up to serve as a reminder about the good old days. It didn’t help the doctor’s cause any when visitors from Staten Island such as Red Cross Gray Ladies and former Halloran personnel came to visit with us. It was hard to tell at first about these visitors, for they started to come and see us with the same interest as they had at Halloran, but then suddenly without any apparent cause or reason dropped completely out of sight. It was for the “Gold Star Father” who had been so instrumental in making our monthly parties at Halloran a success by supplying dates for stags to come up with this simple explanation, “This place depresses me; it is too much like a real hospital. I can’t breathe freely here.” He then went on to add that the only time he would see us from then on was when he threw parties for us at the Elks Club in his hometown of Ridgefield Park, New Jersey.
Euthenics is a science that teaches that environment determines a person’s characteristics, but in our case it was quickly depleting our store of old friends at a time when they were sorely needed. The doctors must have sensed our loss of outside contacts, for they soon began to press those of us who were in a little better shape than the rest to accept maximum hospital benefits discharges. They made some inroads, and managed to convince a few that they should accede to their wishes when it was decided to turn their efforts on our first wheelchair scout who had brought the unfavorable report back to us at Halloran.
He was in what might be called good condition, for he could walk with the aid of both crutches and braces. He didn’t make too photogenic a picture hunched over his crutches, dragging his dead legs behind him, but the doctors were certain that he was ready to make the transition to civilian life. He naturally was of a different opinion, and set about to express himself in no uncertain terms. Seeing that they had come up against another disbeliever the doctors set about to add emphasis to their arguments. Every day after he would leave the ward to go to the mess hall or elsewhere they would tear up his bedding, leaving only the bared bed and mattress for him to find upon his return that evening. He was more than stubborn about it all, and wheelchair or no wheelchair each evening he rolled into the linen closet, took out the necessary linen, and returned to his room to remake the bed.
This went on for several weeks when the doctors decided to attempt to break the stalemate by taking everything away including his mattress. This might have worked the trick for the doctors save for the fact that many of us sympathized with our hero, and decided to pitch in at bedtime to help him with his bed-making chore. We found that lugging a mattress down the length of a corridor was too much of an effort for even a half dozen wheelchairs, so we struck upon a simpler plan. We realized that a united effort could only succeed in toting a mattress a short distance, but the nearest mattress to his bed was naturally on the one next to his. It was a cruel imposition on the patient who used the other bed, but a case of military necessity: you know what necessity is to invention. Timing our move to catch our hero’s neighbor out of the room we made the switch, and then sat back to watch the repercussions set in.
We of course had our fighter jump into bed and undress, so that all efforts to remove him from his ill-gotten gains would be thwarted. When the nurse was informed of what had occurred she called the officer of the day who was covering our service, and who incidentally was also a psychiatrist. The two of them raised holy hell, but our hero persisted. He finally won out by playing against time, for as Officer of the Day the doctor was very busy and could not afford to stay to argue with a bunch of belligerent patients when he had sick people to administer to. Since there was no sense in punishing our hero’s neighbor for what we had done, the nurse ordered the aides to bring him another mattress from the linen room. Once he was safely tucked into his newly made-up bed, we decided to call an end to the festivities for the night.
Another dawn, another day and we were well rested in preparation for still another round of vituperatives with our medical adversaries. In this case the battle never became joined. Our court physicians soon realized that what they had believed to be a Grade A piece of strategy had in reality become a drain on the undermanned evening and night crews. To add to it all, the boys in the “Halloran Room (a nickname given to that room by the nurses when they realized that its occupants had by hook, crook, or promise managed to e1iminate any Kingsbridge old-timers as roommates) had suddenly decided that they wanted a sleeping pill at night. This unorthodox request hit the medics right in the middle of their campaign to wean everyone from the little bastards.
It was a doubly perplexing problem as the boys had based their pleas on a very sound reason for ”Anwar” the fat colored boy from New Jersey who slept in their room was a classical snorer. Those of us who were familiar with the roar of the German “Tiger Tank” and Arthur’s snoring were positive that he had the Tank easily beaten. One of the boys who slept in that room made a not too appreciated attempt at humor by placing signs on each of the room’s beds that gave the generic name and history of various species of wild African game. It was a simple matter to obtain these signs, as his uncle was a guard at the monkey house in the Bronx Zoological Gardens. The doctors were none too delighted by those green and black, half Latin, half English displays, but they had to admit that Anwar’s moonlight howling and his roommate’s daily shenanigans gave that room every right to call itself a jungle.
To add a poetic ending to this tale, the boys in that room did receive their sleeping pills, but not for too long as the doctors soon realized it was cheaper to force “Anwar” into taking a discharge. I don’t think that their display of authority was really necessary to solve their medication dilemma, for spring and summer were soon upon us. The change in season was never news to anyone, even doctors, but with the coming of fair weather came a resurgence in wheelchair activity, and the boys were soon taking advantage of the maximum time that their passes allotted to them.
The drive-in movie at the Bronx White Stone Bridge sometimes referred to as the “Passion Pit” began to do a lucrative paraplegic trade. I don’t know who invented the drive-in motion picture theater, but he too must have been one of those with enough foresight to foresee the coming of paraplegia and hand-controlled vehicles. Medical science was making strides to keep us alive and half-healthy while industry was keeping pace by trying to keep us happily occupied. That was where the doctors erred, for could they have realized how tired and worn out those nightly jaunts were making everyone they wouldn’t have worried about Anwar’s roommates falling asleep or discharging that blood-curdling snorer.
No one of us ever thought of telling them of how our night life was affecting our sleeping abilities, for we sincerely believed that our private life was none of their damned business; besides what patient in his right mind ever gave a doctor a weapon to use against him. To top it off there were a few things wrong with the hospital procedure that we wanted to bitch about, and naturally we didn’t want our tormentors to have any strong arguments to throw back at us.
Our gripe for that week had to do with blood tests, and what we sincerely believed was the terrib1y inefficient way that they were being conducted. Whenever a patient was sent as the blood laboratory for a test that required two specimens; one in a test tube, and the other on a microscope slide he was for some stupid and unknown reason required to endure two painful skin punctures. What always perplexed me is, “why it is necessary to puncture a vein to draw a syringe full of blood to supply the specimen that is needed to fill a test tube for one examination is it also necessary to puncture a finger tip to supply the drop of blood that is used to make the smear for a slide examination? Why in heaven’s name can’t a drop of blood for the slide be ejected from the syringe that has the venal specimen before it is inserted into the test tube?”
These medical brains are supposed to he trying to make us healthy, and yet they persist in messing up our hands, which we need so badly to push our chairs, and carry on our activities of daily living. For a while it was a toss-up whether to bitch about that second puncture, or to concentrate on the fact that we were being given intravenous polygrams without first receiving the eye drop allergy test. Fortunately for all concerned the drug companies soon resolved this problem when through experimentation they found a way of mixing an antihistamine with the drug in their laboratories before it was ever used on the patient. With the chemical borakin as the additive too allergic reactions were prevented.
One thing about the men of medicine at Kingsbridge; they thought that they had come up with the perfect answer to our complaints, namely silence. They for some reason that at best can only be classified as poor bedside manners always found it expedient even if they were being asked an intelligent question by a patient who was far from dumb to ignore him, and leave him sitting there alone talking to himself. It was ironic, but even table waiters in the mess hall had more courtesy than those so-called professional men.
One table waiter by the name of Sweeney was such an expert at dressing up the meals with gay talk and idle chatter that the boys ate well at every meal time no matter how badly the food may have been prepared. The story came back from the mess hall one day of how when he was having hard time getting too boys to eat the cheesecake that he was putting before them he said, “what’s the matter with you guys? Don’t you know good garbage when you taste it? I’ll have you bums know that you’re insulting our baker, and he used to be a janitor at Ruben’s, one of the finest restaurants in town.” Between the belly laughs that ensued the boys managed to consume their ration of that cake with everyone none the worse for it.
The kind of good service and entertainment that Sweeney provided didn’t hold true for many of the other ward personnel, and it wasn’t unusual to find one of our number, or even an ambulatory patient in a heated discussion with some member of the staff, especially one of the clothing room storekeepers by the name of Davidson. The noises and sounds that echoed from the clothing room as a by-product of some of the arguments in there were very common. It was quite an everyday occurrence to hear a patient mutter to himself as he meandered through my ward heading toward his, “I’ll get that lazy son of a bitch; I’ll write to my congressman.” One shameful part of it all was that this disgruntled veteran never carried out his threat, for that clothing room is still employing the same people, and their characteristics are yet to change. Running a close second in the race to antagonize patients was Gus, the head of the Orthopedic and Prosthetic Appliance Repair Shop.
It was fun so watch the fights, listen to them, and perhaps even join in, but it was still greater fun to jump into my merry Oldsmobile, and take off to enjoy the New York sights. There were of course always the hidden penalties for my little pleasures. Hidden, that is, for the simple reason that I couldn’t see my backside or its condition except with a mirror, and then not very well. The doctors to my good fortune or misfortune I know not which could do a better job of examining the subject, and that was that. I was immediately and without recourse grounded. My big show for that summer was over, and the doctors during their next sessions of grand rounds advised me that I was to be transferred upstairs to Ward 3DP where the bedsore care was supposed to be superior to that given on my ward. That was their theory, and I went along with it. Not too many days were to pass before I was to let them know how vehemently I disagreed with them.
While many of one staff were bitter-tongued and prone to give a newcomer a very poor impression of their ward there were volunteers assigned to the ward whose duties were supposed to be limited to light chores, but who made themselves self-appointed psychiatrists and counselors. As this ward had quadriplegics and serious bedsore cases assigned to it one of the major duties shuttled onto these women was the feeding of patients who were unable to feed themselves. One of the quirks of human nature is that if one person finds another prone and helpless but not in agony then the first person delights herself in practicing as a doctor, lawyer, sage and mother.
It’s no secret that a person lying in bed for a prolonged period of time whether it be during a post-operative period or for any other cause is inclined not to be on the hungry side. When one of those women was assigned to the task feeding any of these patients for the first time and found him hesitant about taking food from her when she offered it she would say, “But you’ve got to eat, it’s good for you.” She perhaps was not covered with nausea as had my volunteer feeder at Mitchell Field, but had so succeeded in aggravating the patient whom she was trying to help that he immediately set about to curse the hell out of her. Quite frequently many of these women were seen weeping as they left the hospital never to return again.
The hell that these volunteers caught was a sidelight compared to the main bout between the personnel and the patients. Doctor Weiss was the name of the joker who was running this ward, and I was yet to have my first collision with him when I learned from the patients why such a conflict was inevitable. He was an old-time Veteran’s Administration doctor who had seen service under the administration of General Hines, and in an attempt to gain some sort of status of respectability did a tour of duty with the army during the Second World War.
He was friendly enough at first and quite loquacious to boot. Whenever I tried to tell him my troubles, in order to keep him from running away, I had to listen to his. I was quite tolerant of his lack of professional ability until the day that I complained to him about being there all those weeks, and not receiving a bed bath. He smiled at me wanely, shrugged his shoulders, and walked away. As he quickened his departure I shouted after him, “Why the hell don’t you shove your caduceus up your arse; you don’t deserve to wear it.” Things just weren’t the same between us after that, but how he ever managed to sneak into the newly organized Department of Surgery and Medicine I’ll never know or understand.
My new quarters consisted of a six-patient room, and though I felt a slight case of claustrophobia when I made the transition from Halloran to the ward on the second floor the rooms on the third floor were even smaller, not to say anything about the dirt. There are all kinds of stories rampant in a hospital, but gossip is the most interesting of them all. Those small rooms made for excellent sources of rumors, but horrible places to try to keep a secret. When a person looked into one of the rooms he might have wondered how a room’s idle chatter could have become ward property, but he had to stay put and watch for a few moments as the traffic of aides, nurses, and other personnel made its tours and passed on those tidbits of information as a bee would pollinate a garden. When it comes to respectability my plaudits go to the bee, for at least he is trying to do some good for mankind; not stir up a mountain of mud, which was the sort of entertainment we were engaging in.
There was one tale that underground telegraph would have liked to carry to the patients’ ears but never did, and that was of the little experience which I had after being on the ward for six months. Despite my hateful introduction to the place I couldn’t maintain a chip on my shoulder for as time passed the ice began to melt, and I found some of the personnel quite human and likeable. One nurse by being extra nice did a boiler room job of defrosting me, and I soon found myself having friendly tete-a-tetes with her in the nurse’s office when she was alone working the evening shift.
I wasn’t the only one who was of the opinion that she was a very attractive girl, for I and many others of the patients had been forced to sit by sadly as some gay wolf dressed in medics’ clothing tried to make headway, and perhaps a little time with her. It was with this thought in mind that I sat there beaming to myself about the fact that she had selected me alone to converse with during those evenings. I was slowly working myself up to a state of ecstasy when suddenly she almost knocked me out of my chair by throwing this question at me. “Joe, do you think I have nice breasts?” It took awhile to recover my senses and stutter out “They’re beautiful,” but then I thought to myself, “Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that after all. I never did really examine these subjects personally.” I then made a second thought and quickly amended the first one. “Anybody who says differently deserves a quick transfer to the nut ward.”
We took a respite from mud slinging and peeking around our neighbor’s bed screens long enough to watch a government attempt to save money. Uncle Sam had decided that a new coat of paint was too expensive for our ward, and so we were treated to seeing our walls being washed. It was what we believed to be entertaining to toss mild abusives at the wall washers as they proceeded with their chore at a pace that would aggravate a snail when eventually we found ourselves on speaking terms with them.
Someone must have spoken too soon, for before we knew it we had loaned one of them the sum total of five dollars. We gave the money to him a dollar at a time, for each day that he worked he hit up another one of us for a bill with the excuse that he was short of money, and would have to go without lunch if the loan were not made. He promised that all would be repaid at the next payday. Not one of us had the foresight to check and verify his story, for it turned out that ours was the last room which he was to wash in the hospital. His presence in our building may have been part of an economy drive to save the government some money, but no mention was ever made of what happened to the economy of the patients of that room.
Uncle Sam may have trying his best to be economical with his paint; he may even have been forcing the Veterans’ Hospital System to use surplus equipment left over from the military hospitals, but he could never keep pace with the way his employees were expending his property and wasting his money. It is hard to determine the useful life of a piece of equipment or to prevent a convalescent suit or sheet from tearing, but only a blind man can ignore the obvious waste of working time. No system of management in a free country such as ours can deny the workingman his coffee break, but the problem is to determine the length of such a respite.
I suppose we patients should have minded our own business, but we couldn’t keep our mouths shut when we entered the canteen only to find the spaces reserved for wheelchairs occupied by goldbricks. It was bad enough denying us access to the small source of amusement which the refreshments served in the canteen afforded us, but it was even worse for them to sneak off half an hour or an hour early to leave the bed patients to rot until the next shift arrived. The coffee break may have been a legal point stretched a little bit, but willful neglect of sick people is just another word for murder.
Suddenly and without any apparent reasons we found ourselves witnessing a complete turnabout of their attitudes toward work. To our delight and bewilderment the “joint” began to jump with little beavers dressed in hospital uniforms. It was one thing to see aides and porters pressured to produce more work under the prodding of our charge nurse, but that day the nursing supervisors themselves came up from their offices on the first floor to oversee the labors in person.
Whenever one of the underlings fell behind in his work we received an extra treat for before our eyes we saw the supervisors pitching in and lending a hand at the menial and dirty jobs. That was too much to endure for our curiosity. Our underground telegraph was of no use to us that day, for its message runners were too busy doing what they were supposed to. We had no choice but to resort to eavesdropping. It took awhile, but we finally managed to overhear one of the busy little bees mutter, “Why in hell couldn’t that damn Admiral stay in Washington?” There was only one person who could cause the uproar that we were witnessing, and the utterance of a remark like that. Admiral Boone from Washington had come to our hospital either to visit or inspect as head of the Veteran’s Administration Department of Surgery and Medicine.
There were no complaints about boredom that day, but still another set of curiosities set into our minds. What does he look like, will he visit us, what made him choose this hospital, and is this the only one? While we sat there waiting the cleaning crews worked up a heavy sweat from their toils while we managed to produce a little one from our anxieties, but the rumors flew far and fast with still no Admiral Boone. We were all set to call it a day and give up the cause when in he walked, entourage and all. Many of us had discussed bringing up our complaints directly to him, but when the big opportunity presented itself; silence and contentment reigned. The staff managed to keep him from coming directly into the room, which made me think that if anyone of us had dared to open his mouth, the good Admiral would have been quickly whisked out of the range of our voices.
With the goldenest of all opportunities walking quickly down the corridor there was nothing to do but lie back and wait for the stories and rumors about his visit to reach us. The one that was the easiest to confirm and about which I’m positive the Admiral never heard was the one of the empty whiskey bottles found lying about the grounds by the porters and guards as they went about their frenzied efforts to beautify the place before his arrival. Several hundred empty pints and fifths proved but two things; one, what the majority of the patients were doing for recreation; and two, why there were so many liquor stores across the street from the hospital on Kingsbridge Road.
It was a shame that such a beautiful chance to redress our gripes went astray as we had plenty to bitch about. The presence of the Admiral proved to us once again that brass is a very effective weight to swing around if you want something done, but many of the boys were far from glib with their tongues, and had to find a more practical way to express themselves. It was a shame that Doctor Boone was only there those few hours. One of the boys who was part of that new crop of wheelchair soldiers from the Korean conflict found himself ill and in great discomfort from what he believed to be a kidney flare-up. He conveyed his ideas to the nurse who in turn called the urological Officer of the Day.
Upon his arrival the physician went about questioning the patient for symptoms, and then set about to squeeze the sides of his body to probe and determine in the prescribed fashion if the diagnosis could be confirmed. Confirmation came quickly, for the patient let out a yell and shouted, “Leave that son of a bitch alone, you bum.” A word to the wise wasn’t sufficient, and the doctor being a little too conceited for his calling sneaked in another painful probe while the patients eyes were turned away. This second squeeze brought more than an agonizing groan from the patient; it brought his fist crashing to the young doctor’s jaw, and crash it did, for he was by no means a featherweight. The ward physicians raised all kinds of cain and hell about this, but they could come up with no answer when the patient said, “If that joker wants to learn medicine, let him practice on the monkeys in the zoo.”
It may have been cause for wonder to see a patient acting so brutally insubordinate towards his doctor, but it soon became easy to understand when these mighty men of medicine couldn’t command the respect of their underlings on the ward staff. An illustration of this could be seen in the little incident where the assistant charge nurse went up to an attendant whom we called Big Smith and said, “Smitty will you please clean out the linen closet?” Smitty completely ignored her, and walked out of the room. She promptly ran after him and shouted, “Smitty if you’ll do the closet I’ll help you.” Smitty stopped a second, thought it over and finally went to the linen closet. He of course had to have a cigarette before he unlocked its door.
The same sort of passive resistance bounced all the way up the ladder of rank with the nurses in turn slyly disobeying their doctor’s wishes whenever there was a chance to disagree with him. Of course there was no display of open hostility as with the case of the orderly, but the nurses knew that the doctor was supposed to be occupied most of the day, and therefore not in a position to see that his wishes were explicitly carried out. Many a patient has been told something by his doctor only to have the nurse say it wasn’t so. The question then was to determine which of the two was telling the truth. Invariably, it was proven that the doctor had been sincere while the nurse had acted as she did either because she had a personal dislike for the patient, or had taken it upon herself to play medic.
Fortunately there were other members of the ward staff who got along well with everyone, and such was the case with the aides whom we called Preacher. The word Preacher was more than a nickname to them, for on Sundays, which they somehow always managed to have off from their regular work they were preachers in their neighborhood African Baptist churches. We would always tease them about it by saying they were the real reasons that our ward was better than the one on the second floor, for it had two genuine ordained ministers while the other ward only had one.
Having once undertaken to wear the cloth they found themselves leading a life of service to others, but one of them soon found himself in trouble with the hospital authorities by stretching the point too far. Being the softhearted person that he was he gave in to a patient’s request that he help him sneak a fifth of whiskey onto the grounds. As it always is with nice people he was caught. His standing with the church didn’t help his civil service status at all, and his pleas fell on deaf ears making an appeal useless.
Whiskey to paraplegics is not a disease, but a form of entertainment to divert the mind from what the body has been forcing it to accept. With the guards on their toes because of that unhappy incident and with the flow cut to a trickle the serious drinkers had to be satisfied with any form of entertainment, even the legitimate kind. The recreation department must have been clairvoyant, for it was about then that a few acts that were obviously from a night club routine came to perform for us right on the ward. At first we were treated to a songstress, a couple that performed well at ballroom dancing, and finally a magician. There was a lull in the program, and we all set back preparing to disappointedly leave.
To our surprise instead of the show being over the pianist began to beat out belly dance music. Out from behind the crowd, and to the audience’s delight slithered a shapely voluptuous blonde. The boys were enthralled by what they were seeing, and we all started to ease forward in our seats as far as safety and lack of balance would permit. Everyone’s eyes started to pop as she unashamedly shook all eight of her cylinders and her crankcase at us. She then enhanced her act by singing in a low feminine voice a song that was as sexy as hospital protocol would permit. While all the patients were drooling at what they were seeing, the nurses were blushing, and the rest of the entertainers were laughing their fool heads off. As her number came to a very suggestive close she shook her way off of our makeshift stage parting with these words, “Boys, why don’t you come up and see me sometime?” He-she then pulled off its wig, and as it disappeared a wailful moan rose up from the crowd. We had been thoroughly taken, but we also knew why the rest of the cast had been bursting with hilarious laughter.
We should have known better than to expect the hospital to permit a genuine sideshow to be brought onto the ward, but he-she had done such an excellent job that we never took time out to think about it. I soon found other food for thought, for I healed up my bedsore quite well, and was again permitted to sit up in my chair, and to seek my amusement elsewhere. When all else is quiet, and there is nothing to do there are always the triweekly movies in the recreation hall. Taking advantage of the next showing I found my way to the Rec Hall, and parked my chair next to an early arrival. It was no effort to strike up a conversation, so we easily killed the few minutes that were necessary to wait out the start of the next showing.
When the picture finally began I slouched down in my chair as I sometimes do to relax and enjoy such films. I thought I was all set to take in a good performance when my newfound friend said to me, “What is the name of the picture?” Annoyed at what I believed to be a poor humorist, I retorted, “What’s the matter, you blind or something?” He softly answered, “Yes.” Still the skeptic I continued my questioning. “Then what are you doing here?” His reply to that was even simpler than his first one had been. “I like to hear the sounds of the action from the screen; you know my ward is very quiet.” “ The rest of the fellows claimed that it was a very good picture, but somehow or other I just couldn’t get any kick out of it. It was damn hard to laugh with that blind fellow sitting next to me.
That brief interlude of healthy skin didn’t last too long, and I soon found myself being put back on my old Stryker frame by the sore which had brought me to the third floor. By this time the reports from the fellows about the plastic surgeon’s work were more than favorable, so I decided that it would be best if I gave in to the diagnosis that surgical removal of the cheek bone in my right buttocks would be the best method for the prevention of future breaks of the skin in that area. I found myself signing a consent slip which had the technical word “ichechtomy” on it, but meant buttocks cheekbone removal.
Any plastic procedure when performed on paralyzed parts of the body requires at least from four to six weeks for convalescence. Nutrition and proper diet are the mainstays of a good recovery, so I was forced to fight gravity as I ate, for I had to remain in the unnatural position of lying on my stomach during all that time. Fortunately we had a wonderful women in our paraplegia kitchen by the name of Martha who was the sweetheart of our
service, and who took time out to grind up soups for me, so that they would be easier to swallow.
My food trays were not the pretty sight that their aroma made them seem like, but every bowl contained the type of food necessary to accelerate the healing of my bedsore operation. The sight of my guzzling these thin mixtures from these soup bowls left me open to snide remarks from the cheering throng. The first of these jokesters said that only babies eat that sort of diet. I extracted an apology from him by washing his face with the contents of one of the bowls. He learned his lesson well, and did not bother me again. Later a redheaded quadriplegic who took his courage from whiskey and slept in the same room decided to make money bets with me about the contents of those bowls. He was drunk when he made his offer to wager, and I did not feel rightly about accepting a drunken man’s money. He continued to taunt me, and so I finally acceded to his goading.
As a precaution against a loss of memory when he sobered up I made a tape recording of everything he had uttered while under the influence of the spirits. He was more than a red-faced redhead when he heard the playback of what he had said while intoxicated, but he immediately set about to phone home to his sister to bring him some money with which to cover his betting losses. I felt a little awkward when I accepted the money from her, but as she
handed me the green paper she said, “Don’t let it bother you, this should be a good lesson to him; it serves him right to lose for drinking and gambling at the same time.”
Anyone who undergoes any type of major surgery is anxious about the outcome regardless of whether he is ambulatory or a paraplegic, so that he may again have his freedom. I was no exception to this hope in addition to which I had become good friends with the new ward resident. As I was pinned down and could not escape I made an excellent listener when he boasted of having the fastest small boat which sailed out of City Island, New York. In an effort to put an end to my being a captive audience of his tirades I promised that as soon as I was physically able I would go with him for a ride in his boat. He was the ward physician on whom we all depended for our well being, but when he spoke of his little seacraft he sounded like a child who had just received a new toy. It was to be many weeks before my convalescence was completed, and I was to take his invitation seriously, but during the interim I was still up against the worst problem of hospital life; namely boredom.
I then fortunately found myself introduced to the members of an organization of which I had heard a great deal, “The Veteran’s Hospital Radio Guild”. Its membership was made up of aspiring young actors and actresses who were trying to cut a name for themselves in the radio and television industry. Being true altruists, they found time to neglect their burning ambitions, and spend a few hours each week with the disabled veterans in the hospitals. Monday night was the one which had been assigned to Kingsbridge.
After my first meeting with them and after learning of what they had to offer a hospitalized veteran I began to look forward to those weekly two hour sessions. It was truly an entirely new form of entertainment, for while we were in a way being amused we also found ourselves being educated to the top secrets of the broadcasting world.
The members of the guild during those meetings not only treated us to an interesting diversion, but also attempted to teach us the art of reading a radio script, so that when it was played back it sounded like the real thing. They went out of their way to cater to our disabilities by bringing tape recorders, microphones, and all the other needed equipment to our bedsides. We made up quite a jolly group when we huddled around the recorder as one of the members of the guild passed the microphone to each actor in the hopes that it would reach him just about as he was about to read his lines. No matter how many times those professionals rehearsed us we were still rank amateurs, but we weren’t in the business too long before some of the boys changed into prime hams.
The guild was trying its best so bring us diversion, and we went along with the gracious effort, but somehow or other it wasn’t the sort of thing that we called sport, or even put us into trouble with the doctors. For that sort of thing we had to rely upon our own ingenuity to devise something short of murder that would also be legal and interesting. There was a buxom nurse on the shift about then who had breastworks that were almost as beautiful as those of the young lady who had asked me my opinion about hers. Her body form was just as shapely, and so we all felt there was no sense to putting the ceiling light out until we had stayed up past midnight in order to have our eyes drink her in, and give us something to dream about. One of the boys who was an expert at the art of practical joking decided one midnight to add a little spice to our dreams by placing a dead mouse just inside the doorway to our room.
Our dream nurse came in as usual, put on the lights, and started to give out the midnight medications. Before she could turn once again into our Cinderella she spotted the mouse, dropped the medication tray to the floor, and let out a horrendous scream. The word scream was another understatement, for her voice re-echoed throughout the entire third floor. Needless to say it awakened everyone, for all who could physically make it came a-running. There was an awful look of disappointment in everyone’s eye, for he had expected to be a late witness to an attempted rape, but found nothing lying on the floor but a dead mouse and medicines. The rape scene was going to have to wait for our dreams, for we could do no more to do her justice than that very dead mouse on that very cold floor.
I guess it might be called very unpatriotic to make a girl scream from fright instead of satisfaction, but there was no congressional committee around to investigate leaving us to make a clean getaway. It wasn’t much later when we did find ourselves being locked up, but for less of a justifiable reason. Another one of those foreign viruses had reached the city, and our physicians were determined not to be outdone by the rest of the government’s hospitals. We suddenly found our den of iniquity being turned into an isolation ward. To make our incarceration even more bitter all passes were cancelled along with all visiting until further notice. We tightened up our belts a notch or two, and determined to make the best of a poor situation by relying on television and on our own devices to keep us amused.
We had just about reconciled ourselves to our new passive form of existence when Red the quadriplegic whom I had beaten in a bet with my tape recorder spoke up and said, “The whole thing is a fake; it’s gotta be.” Everyone’s eyes turned to him while one of the boys retorted, “Contagious diseases are nothing to joke about,” Red continued, “Do you realize what these quacks are doing to us? By cutting off the visiting and passes they’ve succeeded in cutting off the source of our liquid nourishment.” To this all the boys laughed, for they were quick to remember to a man that Red hardly ever uttered a word during the daytime. The cause for this sudden outburst of unhappiness and the clarity in his speech was obvious. Red had finished off his secret cache the night before.
As the Bible says, “This too shall pass”, and it did. The tide of visitors, well wishers, and baby-talking volunteers soon resumed its flow, and we found the place inundated with a mob of faces very few of us cared to see. During this spate a group came in to give a birthday party to one of the colored boys. He spotted them coming down the hall, for he was well aware of their purpose though they didn’t know what he looked like. He was positive that he was trapped, and would not be able to avoid the embarrassing scene that these parties sometimes bring to a modest person when to his amazement and delight one of the volunteers asked if he knew of a person by his own name. With a broad smile on his face and an evil p lot in his brain he led them to our doorway. He pointed to another colored boy who was lying on a Stryker frame, but could not observe his actions. The group promptly went up to the prone figure, singing Happy Birthday To You as it went.
The bedded figure was quite aware of the discomfort these parties brought to a long-time hospitalized veteran, but he went along with the gag when he spotted the true recipient of the party waving to him from the doorway to keep his big fat mouth shut. The volunteers had a jolly time, singing their song, taking his picture with a Polaroid camera, and finally wishing him the best of everything after he blew out the candles on the birthday cake. They didn’t remain too long as they had several other parties to give, but before they left they presented him with two neatly packaged birthday presents. They had no sooner walked from the room when the originator of this little scheme rolled up to his hapless buddy and said, “O.K., the show is over; you can give me the booty now.” His friend craned his neck while looking up at him and shot back, “Man, you didn’t want the party, so you don’t want the presents! Why don’t you take a flying trip to hell for
yourself?” We a most had a continuation of the party with a fight as the feature attraction, but managed to break it up and settled the case out of court with a compromise that gave each of the combatants one of the presents.
Though sometimes unavoidable, fights between the patients are a bad thing, for they give the doctors another excuse to impose still more restrictive measures upon us. These punitive edicts can even be stretched by the nurses who wished to rid themselves of the sight and bother that the little luxury and comforts that we may have accumulated over the years may cause them. Such a device which made his long term in bed bearable but the nurses none too happy because of the odors that it sent flowing through the ward was Stanley Glazewski’s electric broiler with which he was making steaks for his friends and some of the better liked personnel. His little soirees went unnoticed for several weeks when, as with all good things, the news started to spread. His little stream of chowhounds soon turned into a rampaging river.
By then the charge nurse who long ago had heard of the activities in his room could no longer be tolerant of his broiler, for there was the problem of ministering to the needs of the other fifty-three patients. She first set about to discover how a non-service connected veteran who was only receiving a small monthly pension could afford to be so generous with steaks that sold at premium prices. No one dared tell her that one of the fellow’s father was a butcher, and not only was he supplying the steaks at wholesale; he was delivering them in person. Secrets are never well kept in an environment as close as ours was, and Stan to his dismay suddenly found his supply line being cut. It didn’t sound right for an ex-Marine to be defeated by the science of supply, but he was, and another Paris Island Indian hit the dust.
Unfortunately for Stanley his timing was poor, for with the rapid turnover of charge nurses on our ward if he had waited one more month he would have had to contend with a more proficient but less antagonistic charge nurse. That was to say nothing about her being much younger and prettier. With her tenure in office came a new height in efficiency in our ward which reminded me of our old sweetheart of a charge nurse back in the army days at Halloran; Captain Jewel. To our amazement and delight the ward took on new life, the dirt began to disappear, the lazy aides easier to find, and the food trays being served warmly and on time with their contents exactly as their recipients had specified. We were becoming quite accustomed to the finer mode of living that she had brought to us, and to the wonderful effect her personality was having on everyone’s morale when we started to comment to each other what a wonderful wife she would make someone.
The poets must have been writing her biography or else an extra tall male was eavesdropping, for but a few weeks later we found ourselves partaking in a collection with which to buy a present for our newly wedded charge nurse. We weren’t as happy about that wedding as we should have been, for we had visions of losing the best damn charge nurse the ward had ever seen. There was a bit of irony to our problem, for when her leave was over and she returned from her honeymoon we found to our relief that financial reasons prohibited her from leaving the job as quickly as she would have liked. She was to stay on with us for many months to come, and was making her keen mind felt by the doctors plus the chief nurse offices downstairs when as happens with all young married people she became pregnant. The little gift from heaven that was doing so much to solidify her happy married life had treated us just the opposite, and started the breakdown of our newly found happy home life. This time when she went on leave she made it permanent and never returned.
As with everything else in the world that thrives on evolution charge nurses come and go, but their hospitals stay on with their paraplegic patients being almost as durable. We again found ourselves up against the problem of breaking in another boss nurse, and were hoping to ourselves that she would be as likeable as had her predecessor. It was what might have been called good therapy to keep your minds occupied wondering about her abilities, but the effort didn’t work too well as back to my old esophageal troubles my thoughts were again carried. The doctors had been attempting to continue the same weekly dilations with the Hurst rubber dilators as I had received at Halloran, but weren’t quite as skilled. I had no choice, but to ask for one of the more rugged Bouge and scope dilations. As these treatments were far more painful than those given with the Hurst dilators the throat surgeons always made certain that I was what they believed thoroughly sedated, and that the esophagus was saturated with cocaine. I found that regardless of these pre-operative medications the procedure would still hurt, but the doctors being the brave bastards that they were would not heed any of my pleas for an extra bit of medicine to help defeat that brutal pain.
If I were to maintain the small inflow of nutrition that I was able to take into my system I had to accept that treatment. I also realized that the only way that I could cut the pain a little so that I could bear the dilator as it passed the stricture was to instruct these former inmates of medical schools as to the proper method. I told the doctor before he started that if he would observe my hand and arm signals while pushing that damn thing in the directions that I pointed out the dilator would be guided straighter, and the treatment would be easier on the both of us. To my relief he did exactly what I asked of him, and though the pain was far from eliminated it was at least a little more bearable. After they put me back on my litter, and started wheeling me back to my ward I could hear one of the residents who had assisted my surgeon ask, “Who the hell is that guy; where does he get the nerve to direct his own treatment?” It was too bad that I had come out of that operating room with my throat so sore, or surely I would have yelled at him, “I learned it out of a Sears Roebuck catalog, the exact same way that you did!”
When I returned to the ward I was very proud of myself for being so brave on that operating table when the anesthetic started to wear off, and my insides started coming up as they had always done after previous treatments. There was no regaining my appetite that day, and I resorted back to my old trick of drinking sugar-sweetened water to push my stomach back down where it belonged. As I was taking that water into my system an extra obese quadriplegic who was so fat that none would believe that the Air Force from which he had been discharged could possibly have had a plane that was powerful enough to take off from the ground with him in it was busy guzzling whiskey. Outside of the fact that we were drinking different beverages he was consuming twice the volume of his as I was of mine. By nightfall my belly was almost half settled, and my intake had eased to a glass every half hour, but his secret store of the spirits was well packed. He was going at it just as strongly as ever when I was first able to realize what was causing him to make those strange noises and loud sounds. As the night drew on his utterances became even louder and more annoying. His voice soon reached such a high pitch that the sounds bounced off the walls into the nurse’s office and she came running. She was the third and last of the big breasted pretty faced girls whom we had on our ward yet we felt a little uncomfortable as she approached Fat Boy to attempt to quiet him down. She looked even more helpless than he did as she stood next to the fat unshaven pig. When she started to ask him where his supply was hidden he turned his efforts from yelling to calling her the names that are not even permitted in the Air Force. That was all that she needed to raise up her Irish temper, for she tore open his bedside locker, and yanked out the last two fifths. He saw what she was doing, but did nothing about it save scream a little louder. That only gave her an extra incentive to hurry and pour the contents of those troublemakers down the sink. His howling by this time had resonated down to the next ward, and brought the neurosurgical Officer of the Day on the double. The doctor wrote a quick prescription for him which consisted of pushing his Stryker frame into the ward doctor’s office where behind closed doors he spent the rest of the night, and slept it off.