CHAPTER 7

There was no doubt that I was back in the dear old USA, for when it came to leaving the plane no one had to work. Everything was done by machine. There we were back in the country where there’s a machine which could do everything; well, almost everything, and don’t be surprised for soon they’ll have a machine which will be able to do that too.
Whatever you do in the military involves a period of hurry up and wait. Mitchell Field honored itself for an entire week while the powers determined whether or not they should grant my request to be stationed at Halloran General Hospital on Staten Island. The rules gave the wounded GI a chance to make such a request, but it wasn’t always a simple matter to station him near his home and loved ones.
On that first evening I wasn’t interested in GI nonsense. My first thoughts were to speak to my family. A phone call from Long Island, New York to the Bronx, New York didn’t seem like a very complicated problem, but my folks had picked that day not to remain in their apartment. A phone call was not only a pleasure, but also a privilege donated by a New York businessman’s organization. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry had the same idea as I, but I had to settle for a call to a friend in whom I entrusted the task of conveying my anxious words.
Those few hours of waiting were horribly frustrating, but it turned out that my messenger was an honest man. I soon found myself kissing my father and mother for the first time in my adult life. My sisters and brother were there too. We talked about nothing, and had a wonderful time. The Army had opened its heart, and visiting was not restricted.
On the following day when the Post Exchange cart was making its rounds the woman in charge asked if I wanted my watch and showed me two samples. I didn’t want to argue with her, for I realized that the patient who had occupied my bed prior to my arrival must have placed the order. There was my opportunity to do what I hadn’t had time to do in months; spend money on a genuine luxury.
I picked the watch that I wanted only to find that I didn’t have enough ready cash to pay for it. I called home for the money. The PX worker set aside my selection, and the next morning my first spending spree began. It was a strange and wonderful feeling to learn once again that America was one place on earth where money had some value.
Every day the newspapers would run ads stating, “Your son has been dying on the battle field just to get home and taste Mrs. Hutesenklutz’s poison.” My poison was watermelon, and the second evening my folks brought some to me. I had the nurse place the melon in the refrigerator for cooling and safekeeping. The following day two ambulance drivers strolled through the ward past my bed eating watermelon, which made my mouth water for mine. I asked the WAC to bring me some only to have her report that there was none to be found. Those damn drivers hadn’t whetted my appetite; I had whetted theirs.
That WAC, whose name happened to be Irene, was a credit to her corps and the female sex. My own mother could not have catered to me with any more sincerity. The WAC had always been the subject of caustic abuse during latrine powwows, but Irene as many more of the girls to follow was to prove that these character-vilifiers would do better if they would swallow their tongues, and kiss these heavenly creatures’ behinds.
Irene was there to soothe my brow on that horrible day when before me stood a bed called “Stryker frame”. To the human eye it looked more like the plumbing innards of a small home. The doctor’s prescription to expedite my being routinely turned was to have me sleep on that conglomeration of pipes and wheels. I didn’t want to do it; my argument was that I had pains from my belly to my head with my neck and shoulders killing me. I was constantly nauseating, and then they wanted to add that ugly monstrosity to my misery. I was doubly positive that it would kill me. How could they give blood transfusions on a gadget that only had wooden wings to rest the patient’s arms on? I was certain that I was in for another medical blunder, but I was finally forced to accede to their demands.
The war was over in Europe, but not quite so in the Pacific, and the public still found time to take an interest in its heroes. At that stage of the game I had deteriorated to approximately ninety pounds. Every jackass who read stories of war atrocities in the papers wanted to know in what prison camp I had been. The look of disappointment that appeared on his face when I told him that I had never seen a concentration camp grew worse when I added that I had rotted to a mere nothing in American military hospitals. He left me with a look of pain and distrust in his eyes. Some were kind enough to find time to suffer with me for a second or two, but most were convinced that I was a little awry, for how could that happen to a GI who has received the modern miracle drugs such as penicillin and sulfa along with the best medical care in the world.
I had weakened to the point where I had to be fed by a volunteer, and thus a new method of torture was introduced. I was subjected to a group of strange women the first of whom enjoyed but a short relationship with me. It was bad enough to have to be fed, but she had a pep talk to go with it. Upon the day of her introduction my nauseating was at an extra steady pace.
When the trays were passed out she spotted her golden opportunity and jumped to my bedside. I had hardly had a chance to notice her presence before see plunged the fork into the meat with the same ardor, as a butcher in his shop would have, and shoved the combination toward my face. I tried to beat her off by saying that I wasn’t hungry and to he careful, or I might throw up all over her.
She was determined to do her daily good deed for the boys in the service, and broke up my attempt at good manners. She soon found herself covered with emeses, and in a most embarrassing situation. One nice thing I will say about her is that she never visited me again during the rest of my stay there. The doctors weren’t that patronizing about my problem for when they realized that I was retaining very little of what little I was swallowing, back came the needles and the bottles of blood.
The final decisions were made, and my orders to be moved to a permanent hospital were made up, or as it was called in the Army “cut”. It was to Halloran General Hospital as I had requested. The privilege of being in a hospital near your home was Army policy, but not always possible depending upon the case. Then I was really rolling, for the trip had to be made by ambulance. It was not a meat wagon, but was fortunately of the type used by civilian hospitals and a Cadillac to boot. There were windows on all sides, and the best of shock absorbers to cushion the ride. As we moved along I enjoyed a cook’s tour of Long Island along with New York City in my own vehicle, and had at my disposal an olive drab uniformed private chauffeur.
There’s an unwritten rule in New York City that if a man who’s walking along next to you should suddenly fall dead, don’t turn your head; keep on walking and be sure not to change your pace even if curiosity is killing you. On the other hand you’ve never met a New Yorker who wasn’t nosey. We had to cross Manhattan Island to reach tie Staten Island ferry, and several times I asked the driver to stop and bring me some cold drinking water, for it was July and stinking hot as only it can be in that concrete city.
Every stop brought a mob of curious people poking their heads into the windows to gaze in on me as I lay there bare-chested and emaciated. Those windows that were going to provide me a pleasant tour of the city backfired, and the city had a Cook’s tour of me. I finally found my refuge on the ferryboat that was more famous in song than for carrying me across the narrows of New York harbor.
We reached Halloran Hospital shortly after disembarking, and it was then I decided that it was the right moment to throw in the towel. For the first time since I had been a youngster I started to pray, and with but one thought. I wanted to die. The pain was too much; death would have been a blessing. I don’t think God was listening, though my sincerity was there. Death was the only thing that I could see as my salvation. As it turned out God had other plans for me. I was carried into building number twenty-five which was reserved for paraplegics. I had to be carried through the day room to reach the ward. That little trip we turned into an unwanted adventure for I found myself missing everything from garbage cans to printing presses. Volunteers flooded the room trying to teach the boys everything, but what they really wanted to know. I guess there just weren’t enough girls to go around, so the boys had to settle for occupational therapy to keep their restless minds at ease.
Being critically ill naturally brought me the rank of VIP, and I was given the first bunk on the ward. The only difference that I could find in the ward when I compared it to the day room was that it had beds, but it, too, didn’t resemble a hospital. People were all over the place, standing, sitting, lying, and falling. America was making its paraplegics wanted. Everybody and his kid brother were going to prove that nothing was too good for the boys. As an excellent illustration of what was happening a magician came up to me and pulled out a bag of tricks. After completing his act he left with this corny line; “You look like a big time operator,” and gave me a twelve inch long rubber dollar bill.
An hour later Grover Whelan walked in with his wife who told my mother all kinds of flattering nonsense about me. Colonel Shearer who was in charge of this service filled Mr. Whelan full of tales, and told him of the miracles that he and his staff would perform to put me back into shape. The only lying I did that day was on my back until they decided to put me on another Stryker frame, and then I became a “two-faced lyer”.
Since this was the Army I soon found myself being transported by ambulance to all the doctors who were supposed to examine me.
I suppose it could not have been helped as Halloran has a huge conglomeration of separate buildings, and the surgical offices were in the main one a quarter of a mile away. That evening the “Bethlehem Steel” people started showing their usual Thursday night movie, and I started yelling for mercy. Mercy finally did come in the form of the Officer of the Day who ordered my being transferred to a private room. By this time my sisters had arrived to take over their tour or the eternal vigil, which my family had undertaken for its favorite son.
By midnight I found myself being introduced to a Captain who was then the not so famous paraplegic Doctor Arthur Abrahamson.
It seemed that the Officer of the Day was busy elsewhere, and I was in need of another transfusion. Since “Abe”, as we were to grow to call him in later years was a patient in the officer’s ward it was a simple matter to yank him out of bed; dump him into a chair, and wheel him into my room. Before he was able to get around to finally inserting the needle into the vein he gave me a long line or bull as to now healthy I was, He actually had me believing that I wasn’t really sick. It was a pep talk to up my morale and keep me fighting for my life though I don’t think that any doctor in the country will ever forgive him for its ultimate effects. He stumbled for an explanation when I asked him why earlier in the evening one of the doctors had taken away the pastrami sandwich which one of the volunteers had so generously given to me.
To prove that his lecture wasn’t exactly in order; the next morning an oxygen tent was placed over me (naturally it was an old-fashioned type that made the visitors peep in through a small window one at a time to see if you were still alive). My father, in order to shorten the queue that had formed at the peephole, and to help keep his mind off of his worries took a volunteer’s job of helping to serve trays.
Around about that time in walked Doctor Richmond Moore, the famous chest surgeon, who started bellowing orders as only he can. Ten minutes later I was in a private room in his air-conditioned ward in the main building. I suddenly found myself in a real hospital, for there is nothing that makes Doctor Moore happier than to save a human life. I didn’t know it then, but I know now that this man whom the Army had only ranked as a Major was one of the foremost thoracic surgeons in the United States, and rated a professorship in surgery at Columbia University in New York City. It was ironic to know that this man performed operations assisted by full Colonels who at other times also saw fit to go to him for advice. Sometimes they forgot themselves and saluted contrary to protocol, but befitting their respect.
Things were going on behind my back that concerned me, but about which I knew nothing. Doctor Moore frankly told my mother and father that he didn’t know what was killing me. The things that he knew about my condition didn’t explain why I was deteriorating so rapidly, but that he would try to build up my strength with intravenous and blood feedings after which, if my folks would consent he would operate on my chest in the hope that he might find something.
So started my bloody campaign to which my parents painfully agreed. It was a strange paradox to have to need my folks’ consent. In Europe I was a man, and could be sliced up all over without even my own volition, but back in the USA I was a minor not old enough to vote, and no one could attempt to save my life unless my parents gave their permission.
Little things piled onto the story such as the day the doctor told me that he didn’t want me to smoke or drink coffee. When I replied that I couldn’t stand the odor of tobacco, and I did not care for the taste of coffee he gave me one of the dirtiest looks I had ever received in my life. I imagine he believed that no infantryman could say such things, and not be lying. Funny thing though; he never did mention whiskey.
It soon grew to be a rat race, for every day when my blood count was taken the results would not always be in my favor. Doctor Moore walked in one morning about a second after the technician had taken his daily specimen of the precious fluid, and asked how long have I been having these samples taken. I replied that the doctors on the paraplegic ward had ordered them on the day that I had arrived at his building. With this he roared, “If you permit anyone to poke your veins and not tags advantage of the same puncture to give you your transfusions, I’ll court-martial you, Son,” he added in a fatherly tone, “your veins are precious, so don’t let anyone waste an inch.”
This gave me extra courage, for the next morning when one of his underlings came in to give me my daily intravenous feedings he poked my vein several times without success. I suggested very rudely that the needle might be blocked; he tested it very sheepishly only to find that I was correct. With a face of red he withdrew asking another one of “Hippocrates’ heirs” to complete the operation.
All this made me curious, and I started reading my thermometer. When I questioned my one hundred and four reading I was told to relax, for it had to go to one hundred and seven to affect the brain. Hell: By the time it reaches one hundred and seven a person is in the crematorium. My temperature rose high enough for me to lose control of my thinking. Every day I asked why the ward movie was being shown so early in the morning before breakfast. My delirium taxed my mother and father to the end of their wits especially the day I asked the doctor if he thought that I were sick enough to be eligible for a discharge. Mom could hide her tears from me, but she could never break her habit of running from my sight to hide every time a nurse entered the room with an injection. I don’t think it was the presence of the needle that bothered Mom, but her mistaken respect for the medical protection.
It angered me to have Mom run from anyone since I had pictured myself as the war hero who had made these people free. These free people had another way of reciprocating. They invented television, and decided that since this poor slob was still alive perhaps we should find some way to keep him amused. TV was just breaking out about that time, and they decided it was cheaper and perhaps safer to send us a TV set instead of one of their daughters. In the back of their minds was the pleasing thought, “He’ll soon forget about sex, women, marriage and children.” All this didn’t apply to me, of course, for I was too damn crazy with pain to know a girl from a dog, or when a girl was a dog.
The great moment came and I was prepared for my operation, but for reasons that no one would explain the bastards kept postponing it, and all day long I did nothing but cuss and raise hell. Facing death was not my worry or fear, but the pain was brutal, and all my hopes lay in that operation. I’m positive Mom blushed all during those hours of waiting until I was finally placed on a green litter and taken to the operating room. I’m fairly certain about it being green although my delirium made it seem as if it had red polka dots.
The trouble with that darn litter was that it moved too slowly, for it took an eternity to reach the operating room. They were supposed to be shooting hypodermics into my body to ease my pain, but I would stage my oath against any one of them, and swear that they were all placebos (fakes).
When they finally dragged their arses around to making the first incision I discovered that I was thirsty and started yelling for water. The doctor consented to permitting the nurse to wet my lips with ice cubes, which were wrapped inside a towel. I tried to follow his order and just suck on the towel, but as the scalpels cut deeper I felt an unorthodox pain in my right shoulder. With each pain I would chew a cube; soon the nurse became weary from bringing replacements. Suddenly I thought I heard the sound of wood breaking. I butted into the doctor’s secret routine to ask what the hell was going. Doctor Moore’s reply was reserved, out polite, “Don’t worry son, it’s only your ribs.”
For a second I thought the good doctor was only jesting, but then it sank in; it had to be my ribs. I found myself sinking into a vicious cycle; a pain in the shoulder, an ice cube chewed up, cracking noises, the whispered conversations of the doctors as they played Rogers and Clark in my thoracic regions, and the definitely feminine breathing of the nurse as she hurried to me with the ice cube replacements. This routine went on for about two hours after which the pain began to ease, and the conversations become louder. The ice cubes became fewer, and I flew higher than a kite. It was then that I realized that I had missed a golden opportunity, for the nurse’s breasts were the right size mid-height for biting. I had wasted two good hours holding her hand and chewing ice cubes. That was a case of what might be called almost die and learn.
My Pop was waiting for me when I returned to my room, but instead of saying hello and telling him that I felt better I started clamoring for food. That scared hell out of my old man, and he high-tailed it for the doctor. When I insisted to Doctor Moore that I was hungry he broke into a broad grin; turned to Pop, and said resonantly, “Feed him.” Off Pop went to raid the ward kitchen. Doctor Moore turned around and said, “Son, I’m proud of you.” This took me back a bit, for if there were any laurels to be thrown they should have all landed on my good doctor. I told him so. Before leaving he told me that he had discovered a subphrenic abscess (an abscess underneath my diaphragm), and that was the reason that all their efforts to keep me alive had been failing.
We settled for a handshake, and as Pop brought in a tray full of Uncle Sam’s “best” the good doctor stepped from the room. When I say good doctor, I mean it, for not one of the boys in the ward would consent to any sort of operation unless he had at least a guarantee that Doctor Moore would be in the Operating Room to advise.
It was a gay week. I ran my folks ragged sending them out on all kinds of excursions for my favorite foods. If they couldn’t find it on Staten Island my sisters or brother would pick it up in Manhattan before they came from work to visit me in the evening. The Army was extra pleasant to the families of critically ill men; it even gave them apartments on the post to live in as long as their favorite GI was on the danger list.
The sudden change from a desire to throw up to a yearning for food made me forget my throat pains, for the satisfaction of taste overcompensated any torture that I was inflicting on myself when I swallowed. Then came the funny part. A piece of steak found its way into my esophagus, but wouldn’t go any further. It just hung there. Now that was no cause for alarm I thought, for many a person has caught something in his food pipe.
I evolved a simple solution for that trouble. I drank enough water until it backed up high enough in my esophagus to make me gag. By repeating this process I managed to wrench the piece of meat from my gullet. A few meals later I found my esophagus stopping up on finer foods, and I again was forced to repeat my wrenching process to clear my throat. It wasn’t many meals later before I found that water too wouldn’t pass through to my stomach on every attempt.
The first examination for such symptoms as mine was the swallowing of Barium under a fluoroscope with a doctor viewing the flow. The roentgenologist’s (X-ray specialist) diagnosis was that I had developed a spastic esophagus. It was a simple thought. Had I not just completed nine months of hell? The prognosis was even simpler; psychotherapy, and that’s how the new parade began. It might more fittingly be called “the march of the wooden doctors”; all numbskulls.
To break the monotony one of the boys who loved his whiskey more than his wife would occasionally drop into my room to tell me his troubles with a drinking glass filled with the spirits and a tea bag to act as camouflage. I never did figure out how he concealed the odor. The medical care during the interim was enhanced by the fact that there were quite a few prisoners of war working on there as aides. My favorite POW would always respond to my call of “Hans, another one.” He wasn’t a bartender; he was just bringing me a drink of water.
My first psychiatrist was short, fat, and cocky about his sheepskin. The first day that he visited me he had my case completely diagnosed without asking me any questions. The solution was simple, and all he had to do was to find the proper relaxant or antispasmodic, and all my troubles would be over. He started with the simple ones such as elixir of phenobarbital and tincture of belladonna, and worked up to the long complicated ones that I had never heard of before.
I didn’t know whether to listen to him or to the noises down the hall, for there were always plenty of them and all interesting. One afternoon a woman was marched past my door guarded by a squad of military police. She was determined to see her dying husband, and she wasn’t going to let his father stand in her way. The yells and screams were wonderful. It was just like being back in the old neighborhood, but it didn’t last too long. Her last minute efforts to see her dying husband and have him make out his National Service insurance to her failed. She left crying on the shoulder of one of the MP’s — “a poor heartbroken widow”.
This gave me something to think about until the next morning when the doctors made rounds. One of the young so-called promising residents gazed into my open chest wound and remarked, “My God, you can see his liver!” That lowered my morale again until that evening when I was awakened by the crying of two women as they walked slowly past my door. The nurse who was my “special” explained their tears as she rolled me over to change my bedsore dressings, which at that time were made of silk as an experiment. (I should point out that silk was still hard to obtain, and Doctor Moore very sheepishly was going around to the nurses and my female visitors asking if they had any old slips which they cared to donate so he could have them cut to the proper size and sterilized to replenish my supply of dressings as they became contaminated from usage.) They had just lost the younger one’s husband who had had cancer. The elder was his mother. There was a family that wasn’t going to have any mother-in-law fights from then on.
It was during that trying week that I met Mrs. Gold and her famous “Gold Music Unit”. Mrs. Gold and her husband are people whom I was to meet and appreciate during the rest of my hospitalized life. The Golds have brought musical entertainment to the hospitalized GI’s in the metropolitan New York area ever since World War I, and intend to die in their tracks doing so.
My psychiatrist was batting a perfect zero, and my X-ray diagnostician refused to alter his findings. It was then that they discussed the possibility of transferring me, and it was decided that since I could no longer be considered critically ill it would be best to transfer me to the newly opened paraplegic ward in Building twenty-seven. They felt that once I was with other paraplegics my mental well being would improve, and I would forget my troubles making me swallow normally again.
As time passed I became even more curious and less believing. Several weeks of medication with no results, and that short obese psychiatrist parading in and out of my room brimming with confidence began to grow on my nerves. Realizing that he had come up against a disbeliever he came up with a new theory. His explanation was wonderfully complicated. The reason I couldn’t swallow was that in the back of my mind I couldn’t swallow the idea of being a paraplegic. Now this mental block of mine was supposed to have grown so greatly as to overflow into my physical system and manifested itself in my throat. Therefore every time I attempted to swallow the block would assert itself, and close up my esophagus. Things like that must have led Freud to his grave.