CHAPTER 21

It was too bad that the guard took such an unfriendly attitude toward the boys, for there were many little crime detecting chores though not as significant so the ones that are performed by Dick Tracy which he could have undertaken on our behalf that would have endeared him to us. It’s no fun to lie helplessly in bed, and try to utter complaints, which are known to be falling on deaf ears. It was one thing to gripe about the service, but it was still another when it affected our pocketbooks.
We had a patients’ laundry that specialized in losing our clothing both washed and dirty, but there was very little which we ourselves could do to recover it. We told our troubles to the charge nurse who prided herself upon being a good listener, and most likely kept her promise to phone our inquiry to the laundry, but that is where the chain broke. Our guard who so dearly liked to play Sherlock Holmes would have come in handy in those days, but that was when he was nowhere to be found. The rest of the guards were of no help to us either, for there was no glamor attached to our dirty wash though you can never tell about the type of dirt which can be found in a laundry.
We decided to mark our losses off in the debit column when one of the boys proved that most of the guards were just useless, for some of them who were former mental patients were using their positions as a means of rehabilitating themselves. Whatever the reasons for their being keepers of the hospital peace they soon found themselves the butts of another joke, for it was discovered that the doctor who had chewed me out for leaving Presbyterian Hospital in such a huff was dismissed for un-American activities. Naturally it wasn’t our gendarmes who made the discovery, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
It was too bad that we weren’t able to summon J. Edgar Hoover’s men or even the guards to protect us from the aide who was begged by the nurse to help her clean the linen closet. He was the type of character who slyly crept into the hospital system, and after being with it a few years naturally assumed that he had earned the status of a doctor. He probably never completed more than an elementary school education, so with that background found himself unqualified in our highly technical society to compete for anything better than an orderly’s position. Once accepted by any hospital he was retrained to do all chores no matter how menial they were. Instead it was all he would need to give him the illusion of being a medic philosophy.
The ones who realized the truth of this failing would jokingly refer to each other as doctor, but to the remainder it was a matter not to be taken too lightly. They always took great pride in performing the cursory medical examinations that they were permitted to do such as blood pressure and thermometer readings. All would have gone well excepting for the insubordinate aide who decided that in addition to ignoring the nurses’ authority he also had been given a mandate to manhandle the patients whenever they disagreed with him.
We tried our best to have him brought up on charges before a civil service board, but found ourselves constantly striking into a wall of red tape. It was a hard job to sell the truth to the doctors who felt that they were the only ones who could decide if the personnel were doing right or wrong. The medical snobs could have saved themselves a great deal of work by listening, for soon afterwards the aide in question took a swing at one of the patients, and the doctors no longer had to fear about dirtying their lily white hands. His leaving was swift, and he soon became one of the very few who were ever dismissed from the service of the U. S. government.
It may have taken a long while to accomplish our aim and rid ourselves of that thorn in our sides, but there was no civil service rule to cover another type of dangerous pest with which we frequently were plagued. Life in a wheel chair has many physical drawbacks and stumbling blocks, which cannot be averted because of the mere fact that we must adapt our mode of living to a world that isn’t and never will be constructed to our wheels. That is a basic truth, and to it we all must admit, but there is another facet which is a product of human error or more properly misdeeds and ignorance. The public outside in all probability has never heard of it, for it has very little of an occasion to encounter people who live out their lives in wheelchairs. The hospitals naturally abound with such patients as well as with ambulatory ones, and that is where the two of them clash.
A person on his feet possesses many disgusting habits of which he is not always fully aware. Among these is the indiscriminate spitting downwards whenever he wants to, and the habitual coughing without covering his mouth that he does whenever his throat tickles him. On a public sidewalk such unsanitary acts go hardly noticed though I doubt if too many of the doers would dare to spit on the floors of their homes. Hospital corridors being the long wide pathways that they have to be give these ignorant slobs the same false sense of well-being that an open street does, and so they act accordingly.
If we were the janitorial staff we would have one set of complaints about these stupid bums, but being in wheel chairs we have one of a more serious nature. These spit-happy idiots are out of line or have their eyes closed when they perform their highly unsanitary deeds, for they invariably end up by spitting down on a paraplegic who happens to be rolling by, and is because of his unfortunate injury forced to live a few feet closer to the ground than the ungrateful pigs. Something that has always amazed me about these morons is that when we try to correct their evil ways and prevent their infecting us with their miseries they become highly indignant.
There is no doubt that a great deal of germicides and antiseptic solutions are used daily in an effort to keep our hospital as close to a sanitary status as possible, but as long as there is the human factor which is forever we will always have the danger of contamination and infection. The general public has become lulled into believing that our hospitals are the hygienic places that it wants them to be, and so tends to relax when entering one of these institutions. The public can be excused for committing this error, as it is naturally unschooled to the facts of hospital life. It is very easy to understand why a visitor becomes infuriated when he is not permitted by the hospital guards to bring his undersized youngster past the gate onto the grounds.
These rules are designed to protect unsuspecting children from any dangers already present in the hospital. Many specialists claim that children are immune to most of the diseases under the sun, but I agree with the hospital authorities and this rule, for why chance the experiment to find out and perhaps regret the lesson. There is always a bit of irony to this debate for like the rotten apple in the barrel story there is always a doctor who is willing to defy convention. After a few years doctors become hardened to their profession, and tend to forget how frightened they were of disease when they first entered medical school that as soon as they learned the symptoms of another disease they were positive that they were afflicted with it. The years of training soon calloused them to all that, and after awhile they even forgot to worry about their own families. It is then not an unusual thing to see one of them sneak his own child into the hospital building saying that the age rules didn’t apply to the families of members of the staff or their hapless children.
Even though we had the longevity and experience when it came to hospital living we could never quite develop the lack of concern that those men presented towards disease. Whenever we dared to forget and become complacent about the devastations that disease brought another one of our number would come down with a serious ailment. We started to regard the recurrence of these illnesses as we would a superstition, for no sooner did one of the gang become seriously ill than two more would follow in quick succession.
The superstitious belief about the three illnesses reached its strongest point when, as if controlled by some unholy hand, three in a row would follow each other to his death. It was an eerie experience to see us all sitting in our rooms after we had heard the news of one serious illness, and wondered to each other in our softened conversations as to whom the next one on the death list would be. The trend of the talk would always try to lead toward the best guesses for membership on that roster which naturally took in anyone of the patients who had suffered the slightest setback in the previous months. Once the names of the last two unfortunates were known the tone of the conversations returned to normalcy, and we began to breathe an air of relief again. Death wasn’t as usual, for oddly enough it only chose three of the elder paraplegics for that visit, and treated us to a short holiday.
I caught the doctors in what I believed was a receptive mood, and rolled into their office just long enough to overhear their discussions of a report which they had received from Doctor Freeman’s paraplegic research center at the University of Indiana. It dealt with the ever-present problems that paraplegics faced; the formation of stones in the bladder and kidneys. Doctor Freeman’s studies showed that the most natural position for the human body to be in was standing, for not only did the urological system function better and drain well being perpendicular it also caused the bones to draw stone forming minerals from the blood stream. It was proven that the pressure imposed upon the bone structure by the weight of the body was the cause of this. We found ourselves presented with this problem of how to do something which would aid our paralyzed bodies. We went on to discuss other phases of his report when I took the liberty of drifting away from the conversation long enough to glance across the courtyard at the roof of the five-story building at its other end.
My eye quickly caught sight of a piece of zinc roofing flapping dangerously in the brisk autumn air. I immediately mentioned this to Doctor Weiss, and suggested that he do something about it. It was a poorly received thought, for he gave me no response. I was doubly positive that he was annoyed at me for some unknown reason as not only did he fail to reply by lifting the phone which was at his hand to call the post engineers; he even discontinued our little talk. I beat a strategic retreat back to my room, and was preparing to slouch down in my chair to watch a wild and woolly eastern movie when I felt someone tapping me on the shoulder. I thought that I was politely being asked to unblock someone’s view when I spied Doctor Weiss. “Joe, you’re being transferred back to the second floor tomorrow.” I then began to wonder and still do if those few words that I had uttered in the interests of the taxpayers’ and public’s safety were the cause behind my suddenly being evicted from my comfortable perch on my Stryker frame.
The second floor was no longer restricted to healthy invalids the way it had been when I was transferred from it, and though I fortunately did not need it at the moment I found the bedsore care greatly improved. Being up in my chair and free once again I decided to take full advantage of every moment, for no paraplegic knows when the next skin break or illness will overtake him. The first stop on my itinerary was the library, and I promptly rolled to it, for I wanted to hear once again some of my favorite classical recordings. I browsed through the library as quietly as the sign said, but nowhere could I find any of the records I wanted. I was afraid to reveal my ignorance to the librarian, but eventually had to admit that I was stumped. Before me stood a very expensive hi-fidelity phonograph, but nowhere in the room were there any records to match. With tongue in cheek I approached the librarian, and gave her the question which had so perplexed me.
With a deftness that can only come with experience she pulled a key from her desk drawer, and immediately started towards a locked filing cabinet. This all seemed silly to me, and so I said, “Why do you go to all the trouble of locking things up and keeping them hidden?” She was visibly annoyed but she answered, “How else do you expect us to prevent their being stolen?” I tried to apologize by adding, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know that you had problems with thieves. I should have surmised it, for its no secret that books are stolen quite frequently from libraries.” She then went me one further by adding, “You ain’t seen nothing yet. This is the first place that I’ve worked where they also steal Bibles.” With that bit of truth annoying my brain I stationed myself closely to the phonograph determined not to permit the tale of woe to spoil the recreation which I had come for.
Unfortunately the library wasn’t always open when we wanted it to be, and so we were sometimes forced to do without this form of entertainment. To counter this for two hours of every Tuesday Mrs. Gold brought in her music units. As at Halloran we were treated to something, which I sincerely believe to be better than those transcriptions; live music by a group of aspiring young professionals. As the weatherman always claimed, “When it rains it pours,” and so it was whenever we had an opportunity to see this excellent show. We were always finding ourselves in the unenviable and sometimes embarrassing position of being forced to make our choice. Fortunately on Tuesday nights the competition, which was faced by the music units, was offered by one of the biweekly movies, but with its speaking voice being restricted to the recreation hall we had only to answer to the elderly but very much alive Mrs. Gold and her young and pretty singers. Being young and pretty put them at a psychological advantage; for it was very rarely that they sang second fiddle to any Hollywood production.
If they hadn’t sung or entertained at all it would have been sufficient, for by just being present and displaying their other attributes, which were mostly feminine, they would have brought us all the diversion that was necessary. I speak of course only for paraplegics and medical patients, but as for the mental patients there is no telling what they would do. One thing that we could be certain of their doing was to make pests of themselves. For some strange reason, which was most likely not even understood by the psychiatrist, each one of those nuts fancied himself as an opera star. Whenever one of our young starlets would attempt to render one of my favorite tunes one of those madmen would join in and force her into a duet. We tried to have the recreation chief put a stop to it, but aside from the fact that he was afraid of them, for they were all taller and wider than he; he also claimed that their doctors who weren’t there at night to watch their shenanigans has granted them diplomatic immunity. It was as a result of these interruptions that we asked Mrs. Gold to bring her units directly to our ward whenever it was possible. She and her girls readily agreed, and the following week we were treated to our own private concert. It was during those visits that I grew to know each member of the troupe personally. It was also during these sessions (not jam sessions of course) that one of the pretty ones with the Hellenic name that I could not pronounce asked the age old question after she had worked her vision past my wheelchair to the individual that occupied it. Putting it in the most discreet of terms she asked what our reproduction possibilities were. I could have answered her question in one word but hated doing so, for I was positive I was destroying someone’s dreams of happiness. There were other visits to the ward with her included, but she never seemed to have her heart in her singing as she had during all her previous visits.
The other girls still seemed to be able to put their full efforts into their numbers, but if I had ever chanced to glance around the ward I would have discovered another problem presenting itself. As the weeks and the girls repeated their visits so did the members of our little audience conversely drop from sight. My efforts to promote an active interest in the classics amongst my fellow ward patients were a magnificent flop. As a public relations man and theatrical producer I was a dismal failure. On the surface it appeared that culture had lost out to the cinema, for Mrs. Gold was forced to discontinue her visits to our ward, but the truth was that we didn’t lose out to the movies; we had been beaten by rock and roll, which she very rarely offered.
To be certain the Korean War was still very much a hot affair, and the public could still be brought to focus its attention upon a television screen, which presented a story about a Korean veteran. In keeping with this vein of thought the producers of “Person To Person” decided to give its television audience a chance to see one of the survivors from that miserable affair, so one of our boys was selected to be the star. Bob Norton was his name, and before he knew it or even had a chance to change his mind he found himself to be the center of activity and advice. His sudden rise to fame and stardom for a night was not without its penalties, for he soon found the manager of the hospital himself at his bedside to go over the show’s script with him to be certain that he knew what and where he was going to do that night.
While they were busily engaged in their rehearsal the ward found itself swamped by a crew of technicians that the Columbia Broadcasting System had sent in to convert it into a television studio. Though the technicians were but following orders the little things that they were forced to do soon began to annoy us. In order to accommodate all the equipment, which was needed for the production, many improvisions had to be made. The first being the eviction of one of the boys temporarily from his bed for that evening as he occupied the one bed that was most accessible to the cameras. His was one of the few beds which was in the only room that had two doors, and so Bob could roll freely to and from it from outside of the room without crossing any cables or forcing the camera to move out of his way. In addition to covering the ward with blinding floodlights and all sorts of wiring the crewmen had to do something to enhance the performance. As it was Christmas time it was decided to decorate the room, which Bob was only going to use with seasonable decorations. That is where we who were sitting on the sidelines watching soured with disgust, for that was the only room in the entire hospital which was so decorated.
It was no secret to us that the double-door room was the only one to be prettied up, but we quickly and sadly realized that the public viewing the performance from the outside had no reason to believe otherwise. With that image in its mind the public would wrongfully assume that the entire hospital had so gaily been decorated. To be certain that the program could be carried out as scheduled little precautions had to be taken such as clearing out one of the phone booths, so that Bob could enter it and place a call without any of us old and not so photogenic veterans being in the way to spoil the picture.
Bob had two more stunts to perform for the television viewers. One of them was to roll into the ward day room, and take a few shots on our pool table, so the audience could see how the game could be adapted to wheelchair enjoyment. While there he was treated to the rare pleasure of seeing himself televised, for the day room set was on, and he was mirrored quite well. The next step was to roll into the nurses’ office, and to introduce Miss Ring our elderly evening nurse with the Irish brogue who was the sweetheart of everyone connected with the ward. Having but fifteen minutes of air time the show soon signed off having accomplished not much more than stirring up a few consciences. The proof of that was seen when Bob received several cards and packages from a small number of well wishers, but that was all.
It was soon after that when I tried to learn if I could make a success of outside living, and going against the advice of the doctors I took a discharge. I seemed to he doing a fair job of it when much to my luck running true to form one night at around twelve I came down with a new pain. To my dismay my left shoulder began to ache. At first I tried to pass it off as one of the hazards of my wheelchair occupation, but it persisted and grew worse. I soon began to act like a new medical student in his first year of pre-med. Each new pang of pain set my mind to imagining that I was undergoing an attack of all the miserable diseases of which I had learned during my years as an unauthorized student of medicine. Not wishing to alarm my parents I said nothing and proceeded to phone the family physician. It was then that I learned that medicine as practiced by the civilian world in New York City is entirely different than that to which I had been accustomed in government hospitals.
My family doctor didn’t answer the phone at night yet alone make house calls. I was forced to call the Bronx County Medical Service. The operator at that office was very blunt, and before I could say anything of my complaint she coldly stated, “The fee for a doctor’s visit is ten dollars; can you pay this fee?” I agreed, and about an hour later a young medic who obviously was taking these night calls to make money while he built up his practice rang our doorbell. After a glancing examination he conceitedly said, “Here’s a sleeping pill; outside of your ears needing a bath I can’t find anything wrong.” Feeling no remorse about my money or me he took it and left. The pain worsened, and despite the pill I had no sleep that night.
The dawn cracked, and I was on the verge of doing the same when a new symptom added itself to my puzzle. I began to have the sensation of breathing through my left ear. Remembering that my buddy Joe Freeman’s big brother Stan was an ear, nose, and throat man freshly home from the Navy I promptly phoned him. When I had completed relating my symptoms to him he responded with a loud laugh and said, “Don’t worry, it’s nothing serious; all you have is dirty ears.” I hadn’t mentioned the doctor’s visit, but Stan being very proficient in his trade diagnosed my case rapidly. He then went on. “All you need to have done is to have your ears cleaned out. I’ll be up in a half hour with a syringe.” He kept his promise, and the pain promptly began to ease. Needless to say he refused to take any fee claiming that he couldn’t take money for such a little service. After he left I couldn’t help but think of that avid bastard who the night before had taken ten dollars for a sleeping pill.
I had no sooner gotten that minor problem out of the way when I found myself with an infection which often plagues paraplegics; epididymitis. The treatment for this ailment in those days was heavy doses of penicillin. I again was forced to look to a hospital for care, as the little sick room which I had in my home was far from adequate to meet the needs for periodic sterile injections. Having left the Bronx hospital on my own I decided that I wasn’t going to give its doctors the last laugh, and so I decided to check in to the Veterans’ Hospital in East Orange, New Jersey. As I was super service connected being admitted was no problem, but after being taken to the paraplegic ward I found myself in for a few surprises. Receiving my penicillin shots was no longer any real task, but to my dismay I had entered myself into a brand new hospital, and chaos was the order or the day. The paraplegic service was having growing pains, and outside of the injections the physical setup wasn’t much better than I had at home. Having made my choice I could do no better but grin and bear it, but before I ridded myself of the infection I managed to befriend the few paraplegics who were patients there.
In the budding ward the one who interested me mostly was a former Navy veteran who had come down with polio while in the service. He occupied the room across the corridor from mine, and I could not help but notice that practically every day there was a constant spate of guests. He was friendly for what I believed to be a big shot, and he always said hello when he passed my room. I took the liberty to invite him into the room after one of these salutations, and during the course of our conversation he revealed to me the source of his parade of well wishers. He was a fully ordained priest, but despite his being a man of the cloth came down with the crippling disease. The parade of guests was not made up of visitors, but of people who came to him for religious guidance despite his being wheelchair bound.
I may have been doing quite well socially, but my old trouble in my esophagus again began to plague me, and I was forced to approach the doctors to ask them to renew my weekly dilations. I found myself up against the proverbial wall of bureaucratic red tape, and with the unhappy choice of either fighting out my case with the doctors and starving as I had done on so many previous occasions or taking a maximum hospital benefits discharge to go home and take my treatments from there. Hunger quickly made my decision for me, and I found myself back on my old merry-go-round.
I made an odd picture sitting in the cold weather every Monday afternoon on a sidewalk corner trying to hail a taxi as they passed by well loaded with passengers because of the rain or snow. By always allowing myself an extra hour for traveling time in order to be half way certain of obtaining a cab I managed to be punctual for the majority of my treatments. Though it was more than a trying ordeal the only part of it which annoyed me more than the actual pain of the treatments was when I would be passed by those few bastards of taxi drivers who despite having empty vehicles would not stop for me as they did not wish to be bothered by having to load a wheelchair.
During one of those visits to Vanderbilt Clinic I saw something which was to bother me for a long time. As I sat waiting next to the desk outside the treatment room a young father sat down with his bright-eyed youngster who could not have been more than six or seven. He talked about things that were not important while the child played happily on the bench. The nurse then asked the man to step into the clinic. He picked the child up into his arms, and did as she requested.
The two had entered but a few feet into the clinic when the boy let out an agonizing wail. I first took it as a sign of sympathy for his father but then realized it was otherwise. The parent was not the patient; it was his youngster, and the mere sight of the torture chamber’s insides was enough to upset him, and make him cry. I found out later that he was one of those rare unfortunates who was born with an incomplete esophagus. I could not help but cry a little along with that unhappy child, for I at least had seen almost twenty years free of esophageal troubles while he was forced to face an entire lifetime of torture and misery.
Strangely as it may seem and perhaps in the interests of the poor taxpayers the Veterans’ Administration makes a sincere effort to keep the seriously disabled such as myself out of the hospitals for as long as possible. With this in mind it provides for the service-connected patient to be visited at his home by a nurse twice a week, and a
doctor at least once. If the patient is fortunate enough not to have any serious medical complications this program can work out quite well, but then again there is the problem of supplies. To take the place of this chore, which is ordinarily handled by Central Service in the hospital the Regional Office, is supposed to send to the homebound veteran by mail all that he may phone or write for. Again the human factor enters into the picture with the same unavoidable errors. As everything is supposed to be planned in advance it can be quite embarrassing if not downright dangerous when the requested supplies fail to keep their rendezvous, and a hurried call has to be placed to the neighborhood pharmacy to supplement the sick room supplies already on hand.
As the patient is only visited several times a week by his authorized doctor and the Public Health Service nurse who has been assigned to him he may find that the lack of supplies may not be the only thing to overwhelm him, and inevitably he has to place an emergency call to his family doctor. It is very rare that a general practitioner is equipped to cope with the many complications that beset a paraplegic, and he must finally place a phone call to the Veterans’ Hospital to send an ambulance with which to hospitalize the patient. Such was the case for me on a Christmas Eve with doctors being impossible to find, and so my dad had to place the call to the hospital himself.
The doctors took hold of that little problem, and I found myself back on the second floor of Kingsbridge, but on a Stryker frame and in the ward’s only private room. My four months of civilian living at home had extracted their toll, and I found myself facing a major surgical procedure to close a decubitus ulcer which had formed on my sacrum. By then I had been in and out of the operating room so many times for so many varied reasons that I signed the necessary consent slip with the same indifference that one would have when he registered at a room in a hotel. The doctors don’t always expect their patients to go under the knife as easily as we old-timers of the operating room do, and so as with all patients I was given a mild sedative. A general anesthesia is not usually used for a decubitus ulcer operation on a paraplegic, for on ninety percent of the operations the area involved in the surgery is below his level of sensation.
Usually the sedation is nothing more than a couple of sleeping pills to assure the patient’s not becoming nervous at the sight of the insides of the operating room, and not throwing up all over the surgically clean arena. The doctors may always have the psychiatric factor in mind, and worry about how it affects the patient’s well-being, but the thing that bothers most of us as we lie on our stomachs is the boredom, for the procedures take quite a few hours. In an effort to soothe the doctor as well as the patient music is piped into the room but as with everything else not all like the same type of music.
The selections that they were sending in for my operation were quite pleasing to my taste, but the surgeon in an effort to calm his nerves had a habit of reciting stories during all the operations which he performed. Not only did he make it impossible for me to enjoy the music; he told a story about his being in England that would have bored even his own mother. It took six weeks of lying constantly face down on my Stryker frame for the operation to heal, but as it turned out to be a very successful one I can’t remain angry at the surgeon for giving me such a hackneyed time on that operating room table.
Everyone became so accustomed to seeing my lying there in that private room that soon it was being called “Joe’s room.” It may have been a compliment of a sort, but lying prone and alone in a private room can create another terrible boredom, so once I was positive that the surgery was healed well enough to withstand the strain I started to push myself about with sawed off crutches as many of us had done at Halloran. It was then that I had an opportunity to appreciate how far the sphere of my great white father’s friends reached as a nurse who was a friend of his wife’s visited me. She was but the first of many other people both important and ordinary whom he was to introduce me to. Though he was hundreds of miles away and though I had not spoken or written to him in years he was constantly busy in an effort not to give me too much of an opportunity to concern myself with my troubles.
When there was a slight break in this parade I could strike up an acquaintance by saying hello to any of several men who parked themselves in front of the doctors’ offices with briefcases in hand. One thing which they all seemed to have in common was the ability to speak well, and sometimes after letting them rant on long enough they would end their little soliloquies by informing me that they were drug salesmen. On parting they were certain to inform me for which company they worked. It was ironic, but even the medical profession is plagued by bell ringing, fast talking vendors of the tools that are needed for its trade.
I was just as proud of myself as I was of the doctor who had operated on me, for in that short period of time I had healed up completely, and was despite all I had been through still proving myself to be the excellent healer I had always been. I made it off that Stryker frame just in time to be invited to the wedding of the boy the doctors had tried so hard to evict from the hospital by daily messing up his bed. During my time down on that Stryker he had courted one of the young and pretty Red Cross Gray Ladies, and by the time when I had completed healing either one or the other of the two had talked the first into marriage.
To me though I was the only paraplegic there outside the groom it was more than a mere wedding reception which I was attending; it was my first chance to howl after many months of confinement. With that idea in the back of my head I had the presence of mind to leave my car parked on the hospital grounds, and to proceed to the affair by taxi. The party started out slowly, but then as we sat down to eat someone placed a fifth of whiskey in front of me. I’m not a drinker, but I didn’t realize it until after four or five shots later when I found myself back in my hospital bed. I never knew what hit me, or how I had arrived there until I was awakened by the sound of the evening aide as he stood in the doorway laughing at me in a reserved tone.
Before I could ask him what happened he said, “Joe, where’d you park your car?” I bewilderedly looked at him and replied, “It’s downstairs in the parking lot; why?” He laughed louder and continued, “Then how did you get to the wedding?” 2wI told him my story of taking the taxi, and he then went on, “Why in the Hell didn’t you tell these people that you took a cab when you first got there. They wanted to drive you back after you passed out, but searched all over the restaurant’s parking lot and couldn’t find your car.” It wouldn’t surprise me if some of them are drunk enough to still be looking for it.
My friends at the party may have been a little unhappy with me, perhaps even angry, but the crew in our ward kitchen still held me in high esteem. Martha, the woman in charge of the unit, always took it upon herself to worry about each patient’s food consumption as if she were his own mother. Though she was well aware of the difficulty that I was having with my swallowing she repeatedly made efforts to induce me to try a more substantial diet than the soups upon which I was subsisting. Despite my protest she brought a steak to my room, and insisted that I try to eat it. Realizing that the only solution was to pacify her by attempting to down it I proceeded toward the water fountain to fill my water pitcher. I rolled back to the door of the room all set to make a supreme effort for our sweet little lady when I realized that the tray with the steak on it was gone.
I was secretly pleased at the theft, for it saved me from going through the misery which was necessary to chew up and then swallow a steak. Unfortunately I had to report the incident to the kitchen, for despite my relief I still needed nourishment. Martha upon hearing of the theft promptly blew her top, and said, “I pay for a meal a day whether I eat it or not; I’m going to search out the ward and find the guilty culprit.” Before she started to make the rounds of the closets to see if she could find an aide inside of one with his hands and mouth full of steak she ordered her assistant to promptly prepare a duplicate tray. I had high hopes that because they were serving steaks that day that they were rationing them. No such luck, and I again found myself facing a problem of some heavy chewing. Martha’s luck was no better, for even with one of her male assistants searching the latrine she couldn’t uncover the steak’s crooks. If she hadn’t let her temper rule her thinking she would have fared better, for how long could it have possibly taken a healthy esophagus to down wholesome steak?
While during the daylight hours we were busily occupying ourselves playing cops and robbers in the evenings we found it more profitable to resort to playing practical jokes on the more gullible members of our unhappy little family. The subject for the next masterpiece of humor was the elderly patient who had been given hell by Doctor Abrahamson for passing out tips to the aides. He had always fancied himself to be an expert at originating plots of humor, and it was decided that he was to literally have a taste of his own medicine. With the evening nurse’s consent and knowledge we put some jellybeans into a medicine cup, and placed it on his bedside table. It was a simple matter to accomplish this, for he was off the ward at a movie and out of harm’s way. It took very little effort to persuade his roommates to remain silent until the principal of this little drama returned.
He noticed the bait as soon as he rolled to his bedside, but being a quadriplegic was forced to call to one of the aides to feed him his medicine. Acting with the caution which all experienced paraplegics have, he asked the aide to let him look at the cup before he downed its contents. He studied the insides of that cup and remarked to the aide, “What kind of pills are these? I’ve never seen any like them before.” While we were all painfully trying to restrain our laughter and anxiously waiting for him to swallow the damn things the aide said, “I don’t know; do you want me to ask the nurse?” “No; never mind,” the old man added. “My urinalysis must have come back from the lab with a poor report, or else the doctor wouldn’t have ordered these. It must be OK; give them to me. It was a long time before we stopped calling him the dope who didn’t know the difference between jellybeans and real medicine.
While the old grouch was receiving his due from the patients and ward personnel many of the rest of us were catching our share from the volunteers. Outside of the few exceptions who plagued every volunteer program the majority is well meaning and very sincere. Despite these good intentions their ignorance of the true picture of hospital life often causes antagonisms and hard feelings. Every once in a great while another one of these organizations takes it upon itself the altruistic idea to have a gift distribution. Not bothering to let their minds lead their hearts its members go all out for the big day with the assumption that they are bringing to us the panacea we’ve been waiting for all the years. Not wishing for anyone to believe that they are cheapskates they travel far to be certain that the present will be something extra nice.
It is a bitter but true fact of the disabled veteran’s life that the majority of these people have a connection with the New York textile industry, and are also to secure its products wholesale. With this in mind they bring up all the pretty sport shirts, which they can afford, and wrap them as if every day were Christmas. With nothing left but goodness in their hearts they wait for the great moment, and when it comes joyfully pass out their little tokens of appreciation to the disabled veterans. After the “thank yous” have been made and they’ve left the ward the fun begins. Everyone wishes to be polite, and so no one tells them that their gesture was ninety percent wasted. It doesn’t have to be so but it is, for there are very few fat healthy patients in a hospital who wear size forty-six shirts, and even less who expect to grow to a size that would fit them. All this could be avoided if one of their group would bother to canvas the hospital and make up a gift list before they go to make their purchases, but despite the news of the blunder leaking back to them the following gift season is just a repetition of the previous fiasco.
It’s always hard to argue with a volunteer, for though his actions at the time can be terribly annoying he is still only there because he wants to be, and not because he is being financially compensated for his efforts. This can at times leave many of us in an awkward position to reply to the stupid remarks which may originate from any of the do-gooders. The utterance that irked me mostly was made by a volunteer as she was passing out purple heart money. I was lying in bed on my stomach, and was completely nude from the waist up. When I asked her where my gift was she stared down at me as if I didn’t exist and said, “You’re not entitled to one; you weren’t hurt in the war!”
I wanted to throw back at her, “What do you think made that hole in my back you dumb bitch; a baseball bat? I can’t even stand to watch the dumb game yet alone play it.” It was more than an effort to lie there and accept the insult from such a person who was either blind or totally ignorant. Whatever the reasons were for her unwanted display of rudeness we were stuck with her though in that instance I felt it could have been avoided if the Special Services Department had been more proficient, and sent one of its paid employees to perform the task which was rightfully its own. My argument for a staff man was more substantial, but the old human failing of laziness was still present. Besides why should he dare worry about whether we received our gift or not; he wasn’t getting any.
Though there was always this unavoidable undertone of hostility between the patients and the personnel there were, fortunately, some members of the evening crew whose mere presence did a great deal to brighten our dreariest days. I had the pleasure of meeting one of the more friendly ones when my dad sent me back to the hospital on that cold Christmas Eve. I had been referred to the psychiatric department, and though I was too far out in outer space to realize it my problem had been assigned to a very comely psychiatrist. Psychiatry is one of the few branches of medicine that aside from the dangers presented in treating violent patients offers a young lady who wishes to enter the profession a chance to do so without dirtying her hands. Despite the prejudice against females, which the males show toward the girls in their sacred field, the ladies acclimate themselves quite well, and do an excellent job of it. Since mine was an easily remedied problem our professional acquaintanceship lasted but a short while.
As my ward was the avenue that led to the psychiatric service she had no choice but to pass through it whenever she came to and from her duties giving me many an opportunity to greet her with a friendly, “Hello Doc.” Though saying, “Hello Doc” to a woman had made me feel quite uneasy; saying it to her seemed to be quite the proper thing. One evening around eleven as I came off the elevator after enjoying a few hours on pass I almost bumped into her. Quickly recognizing her I said, “Hi Doc; what are you doing here so late at night?” She tersely replied, “I have to be; I’m on call.” Having lived in a male atmosphere and not thinking I snapped back, “Oh; you must be our call girl.” That was where she proved her proficiency as a psychiatrist, for she did nothing but turn her head towards me, smile, and then continue on walking.
Though she had proven her worth as a psychiatrist her services were not always made available to all who needed her, for the initial decision to have a patient receive psychiatric care rested with whatever doctor he may have been assigned to upon entering the hospital. When such a problem beset one of our boys it was up to Doctor Weiss to send a consultation slip in for whichever patient may have been troubled. We had a patient on the ward whom all the others considered quite a mental problem, and though we often wondered why nothing was ever done about it we could do nothing more than laugh at what we took to be his playful antics.
Sometimes it was hard to relax as we sat in the latrine watching him as he took the arm off his wheel chair, and started to clean the windows of a storage cabinet with it. To him all the panes were terribly dirty, and the quickest way to remedy the situation was to smash them out with that armrest. When that became too passive he found another method to keep us from becoming bored and perhaps also to make us worried. It was always difficult to discover how he consistently managed to put his hand on matches, but he always did. Having the knack of a professional showman he started his little conflagrations where and when we least expected. That also didn’t upset Doctor Weiss any more than the window cleaning, but it made all us laymen wonder if the doctors were not crazier than the patients. Finally the hero of this little drama committed the unpardonable sin, and it was one the reserved medics couldn’t overlook. When no one was watching he sneaked into the latrine, and started plastering human manure against the ceiling. The porters made certain that the doctors heard of that and, though we were losing a good source of amusement and hated to see him go, we found ourselves bidding him a fond and permanent farewell.