04 Memento My Medical Experience
I was banished from a clinic for saying my doctor was bad.
My appointment with Dr. Roulette certainly gave me cause for reflection on my past. Curiously, given her scientific pretensions as a hand surgeon, she had gently taken my left hand in her hands and caressed the life line under the head line on my palm.
"Hands evolved mankind,” she said.
"What?"
"Hands have made man what he is today, and his respective palms outline the hodological paths he is traveling to destruction or to The Beyond. I can see, here, on your left palm, that you have had some medical experience. Hmm…"
I sensed this was routine hocus-pocus she included in her examinations to establish superstitious rapport with patients. She was correct because everyone has had some “medical experience,” especially if mental perversions and alcoholism are medical issues, not to mention the fact of being born with doctor and nurse attending.
I began my education in alcoholism when I was eleven. I recall that I learned artificial respiration as a Cub Scout the night Jim and I got drunk and accidentally set the church attic on fire smoking cigarettes after the scout meeting. I also learned, in New Orleans, where I was underage and using another man’s Navy discharge paper to get smashed and pick up girls in the Quarter, that little crabs like to live in pubic hair. and shaving lotion does not kill them.
I nearly had exhaustive medical experience, twenty-three years ago, when I was hired in New York City to be the de facto manager of a Frost University medical school on the island of Dominion, best known for its tax sheltering. The credentialed manager and the medical director were seldom around, I was told in confidence. I was also told I would be there on a tourist visa, but not to worry because there was a special deal with the leader of the country. And then I read about problems with the descendants of slaves on the island.
My worldly possessions were already in transit when I had a dream: a frightening nightmare of a demonic dragon in a hellish pit. The fire-breathing demon roared, in broken English, that I would be consumed by fire if I proceeded. I called the Frost's Midtown Manhattan office that morning and left a message
"I am particularly concerned about the legality of my employment on Dominion," I said, "and I fear I might wind up jailed on the island. Please call me back right away."
I receive a voice message a few hours later. to the effect that someone else had been found to fill the position; I would read several weeks later that he had been taken hostage by a prominent drug dealer attempting to evade deportation to the United States.
I was in shock at my abrupt termination. So. Instead of catching a plane to Dominion, I boarded a jet to Honolulu, from whence I had come to New York via Alaska, and where I had fainted one day in Waikiki waiting for fast food, resulting in a concussion and my treatment by the same doctor who had treated astronaut John Glen after he slipped and fell down in his bathroom.
That was the tipping point of my storied rise, from a runaway kid on the streets of Chicago at age 13, to a respectable white-collar career in New York, and that despite my 8th grade education. Everyone assumed from my employment record that I had a high formal education, so they did not bother to check with the universities for the bachelor's and masters’ degrees I might happen to mention during the interviews. I happened by necessity to be a master of rhetoric, bullshit, if you prefer. As for modern science, I am terrible in mathematics despite my positions as corporate controller.
My earliest medical experience was with the death of my mother during the polio epidemic in Phoenix, when I was six-months old and she was twenty-two, because there were not enough iron lungs to go around. My father said I smiled and laughed at her funeral, but I have been aggrieved by my loss to this day. for my father’s profound grief imprinted me indelibly during the few years I knew him. His second marriage did not work out because his wife went mad, seeing things like dead babies in drawers. She kidnapped me, and her father, the mayor, got him arrested on suspicion. He got me back when released and left me in a foster home in Muskogee, pending finding employment and a new home.
I had some medical experience in Muskogee when I was seven. I liked to play doctor with the girl next door, probing her orifices with sticks to take her temperature and listening to her heart beat with my ear on her chest. My foster brother put me on top of her. We really could not do much in that regard, so we got her mother's cosmetics kit and decorated the walls of the front veranda with rouge and lipstick.
I guess I was cut out for art instead of science even though medicine, I hear, is an art too. All hell broke loose when our art critics appeared from inside the house. I got a good licking with a big switch I was made to cut from a bush in the yard. I did not, however, give up on the female sex; it just took time to learn the ropes. Adults back then were not helpful. Not at all! I remember that my grandmother back in Phoenix repeatedly told me not to touch it when I was a tot. War was a big thing then, so kids played with toy guns, pretended to kill each other. Some actually did.
My father found a new wife, and I was hauled down to Topeka. She did not want me when I arrived, and I heard her that night asking him to get rid of me. She defined me as a “bad boy” and I complied with the definition. She went so far as to knock me out from behind one morning as I was eating the breakfast she had just served me. Surely being knocked unconscious counts as medical experience.
Mental health was popular in Topeka thanks to Karl Menninger. A doctor by the name of Freeman was touring the country doing cheap 10-minute lobotomies, a therapy that had become popular because it was emptying the mental hospitals of the surge in patients after the war. Phillippe Pinel observed at the outset of the French Revolution that the notion of heroism had emptied out the Salpetriere mental hospital, leading me to suspect now that there was a rebound in neurotic patients after the Revolution.
I liked to play at war when I was a kid, imagining myself killing scores of Germans like heroes did on TV in Combat, but I was born too late for WWII and the Korean police action, so I wanted to go to Vietnam to kill enemies. The drug culture changed my mind, and it was not long before I was protesting the war. Otherwise, I am certain I would have heroically survived combat to become a Senator if not President of the United States.
What boy in his right mind does not want to fight and kill enemies? But I was a bad boy as far as my stepmother was concerned. I remember my poor stepmother yelling “Love does not cure bad boys!” at the doctor at Menninger’s, where she took me, believing she could get me lobotomized. Disappointed, she dragged me over to Topeka State Hospital nearby. While she was trying to get me admitted there, I snuck out of the waiting room and fled downtown, where I got drunk with the rednecks and redskins, the circus hands in town for the fair, and the Mexicans at a bar and grill on Kansas Avenue, a saloon I remember most for the pools of urine in the restroom. I managed to get smashed on 3.2 beer, but the heavy drinkers guzzled muscatel and white lighting. The patrons came to customary blows that night, piling out of the bar onto the street after a man got himself sliced up badly by a squaw who pulled a knife from under her skirt where he had tried to grab her in a booth inside. Cue sticks and balls from the pool table were the preferred weapons. I got the hell out of there pronto.
My beloved stepmother screamed bloody murder when I crept back into the house early that morning. My father, who was about to set off for work at the missile base, engaged her in conversation. A primal scene ensued. He dragged me out the front door, put me in the car, and drove me to the coffee shop, where he got us some coffee, putting his thumb in it to complain it was not hot, bought a newspaper, and examined the For Rent ads.
My dad was a hardworking man, a veteran, and he understood me because I was like him before he became a teetotaler who believed aliens were landing on earth in flying saucers. While driving around Topeka that day, he complained as usual, that I was persecuting him because my mother had died. He found and rented me a room across the street from Topeka High School, walked me over there and enrolled me in an evening biology class. I would soon be fascinated by the amoebas as well as the horse’s eyes obtained on an outing to the slaughter house down by the tracks where the Mexicans lived in tar paper shacks. I imagined I would become a doctor or a scientist if not a singer.
I loved my rented room and my freedom. Well, not too free, really, for I had to mow the lawn and rake the leaves. Otherwise I liked to slick my hair back with Brylcreem, admire myself in the mirror while singing along with Elvis Presley records on the little phonograph he had bought me. And sometimes I visited one of the few black men living nearby; he treated me to his favorite drink: whiskey and orange juice.
I took a liking to that whiskey. Running loose one evening, I stole a pint out of a garage in the alley. Of course I would not steal a dime nowadays, surely not anything less than a million dollars even if I could get away with it, but back then I had a Plains Indian attitude, inclined to taking whatever I needed from other tribes. I got drunk on the stolen whiskey and used my allowance to treat myself to a Salisbury steak at a diner, after which I polished off the whiskey. A policeman pulled up beside me as I staggered home.
“What’s your name, kid?” he asked me. I leaned in the window on the passenger side and belligerently replied, “Nikita Khrushchev,” knowing well from newsreels that Nikita was feared yet he liked corn. And then I barfed on the front seat of the squad car. The cop hauled me off to jail, where I passed out in the tank.
My dad came and got me the next day and drove me up to a relative’s farm in Minnesota. I guess he figured I needed someone to look after me, and he feared his wife would kill me if he took me home. She had run off one night, naked in a bathrobe, carrying a big kitchen knife, so he had her committed to Topeka State Hospital for observation.
“Son,” he wisely said, “remember that all a man has to do in this state is call his wife crazy to get her committed if she doesn’t behave.”
Another cool thing he taught me was how to get oneself committed for observation to avoid being arrested and jailed:
“Be sure to wear different colored socks and lick your hands before shaking the doctor’s hand, jiggle your legs around a lot and look very nervous.”
My poor stepmother was released from the hospital 90-days after committed, uncured of her hatred for her stepson, namely me. Dad had promised my own mom before she died of polio that he would keep me, so he arranged to leave me at the farm in Minnesota for my own good, where I had more medical experience in the form of a pubertal episode that landed me at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester.
I felt safe on the farm. I baled hay, picked strawberries, and milked cows to earn my keep. I got to drive the tractor, and I learned to type. I went into town one day with a one-armed boy living on the farm. He had lost his right arm in the corn picker. He was a damn good southpaw but I always won the manure fights. We saw a big Bowie knife in a shop window. We had no money so we braves went in and stole it and headed over to the swimming pool. I clung to the edges of the deep end of the pool so I could look under the girls swimming suits. It was not long before I got a terrible pain. I was taken to Mayo Clinic in an ambulance with the Bowie knife. Two nurses came in after the doctor diagnosed my condition. One of them offered me a handy pain relief. I was a shy kid, so I just said no and returned to the farm nursing my terrible ache and the knife. That night I had a wet dream starring myself and two blondes in a swimming pool, getting an even better feeling than what I had in school when my friend Jim showed me how to straddle a bathroom stall door frame at school and pull myself up and down.
So, despite the efforts of my foster brother to teach me about the main fact of life in Oklahoma with that little girl, I did not learn the correct placement of man’s vital organ until I was 15 and working for Illinois Masonic Hospital in Chicago after Sam turned down my application for a job with the Outfit, and sent me to an employment agency in the Loop, telling me to learn how to use an adding machine.
I started out as an orderly. My medical skill at transferring heavy patients from beds to gurneys and wheelchairs, and vice versa, were deeply appreciated by the nurses. My favorite position was as the X-ray darkroom technician. That was before they got a giant automatic developing machine. I was pretty good at getting the film developed manually just right. I did make a major mistake, I recall, on the very day the Sputnik was a big success, I fell asleep in the dark one day after being up all night with a 16-year-old stripper who worked for the Outfit at a strip club in Calumet City. She showed me the ropes one night. I wanted to marry her right off the bar, but she belonged to the Outfit. They had to break the lock on the door of the darkroom to wake me up and get the films processed. Fortunately, the hospital administrators liked me despite my faults, so I was not fired. I have only been fired once in my life, and that was because I refused to work full time at an ad agency in New York many years later, so the owner had someone to chat with.
I returned to Topeka for a while after I ran away to Chicago. I worked at the Sante Fe ("Holy Faith") Hospital, where I helped doctors who struggled to save railroad workers and their families. Many were saved, so I learned to have great respect for doctors, not to mention strong affection for certain nurses. Death visited the floors of the hospital; in a pattern, sometimes haunting the even floors in ascending order, one by one, and descending the odd floors, one by one. Part of my job was to move the corpses to gurneys and wheel them to the morgue in the basement. I was occasionally assigned to Surgery. A surgeon told me to leave the operating room if I felt sick. I did not heed him because I thought of myself as the Switchblade Kid after seeing Sal Mineo in Crime in the Streets.
I really did not have the stomach for surgery. I did not even like eating meat, to tell the truth. I fainted onto the floor after one patient was cut wide open. I heard about a school for a new specialty called Surgical Technician, but I completely lost interest in the course after holding down a patient for whom anesthetics was out of the question, so surgeons could shove a long tube down his throat and take a look around. On the other hand, my fellow orderly, Rod Rodriguez, loved to work in the operating room, and he made considerable money from the bottles of anesthetics that he stole.
I remember most of all the unfortunate patient suspended in a sling from the ceiling of his room at the hospital. He had been terribly burned when he tried to pour gasoline on some embers to get a fire going. He was a nice fellow despite his painful ordeal. He kept begging for beer. I took him a beer whenever a nurse was willing to look the other way.
My medical experience and poverty qualified me to work at the Stormont-Vail Hospital in Topeka, where I had been confined in my younger days for three months with a rare disease that caused me to run dangerously high fevers, get immersed in ice baths, have wooden wheelchair races with other kids in the hall, and have exploratory surgery. My most notable medical experience there as an orderly was when a nurse there mistakenly gave me the wrong schedule and I catheterized every female on the list, much to the horror of the head nurse,
What else?
My son was a baby when he had a similarly strange disease that I had, but he was also bleeding from his pores. The poor boy had to be kept in an isolation tank. My sainted wife stayed with him, outside the device day and night. My little girl slammed a door on her younger brother, severing the end of his thumb. I was complimented at the hospital for putting the severed piece in a towel filled with ice. A retired police dog owned by a police friend of mine bit the end of my stepdaughter’s nose off. Same thing. Wrap the piece in a towel with ice, but do not let the ice touch the skin. A great doctor from Korea sutured it back on so well there was scarcely a mark when it healed, but she got a little plastic survey, anyway, so she could be a model. That doctor told me I had a “devil’s tail” when I got a bad pain in the ass. He took pains to explain it in detail, showing me medical texts because, he said, I was a “dangerous intelligence.” He offered to remove the pilonidal cyst surgically in his office to save me money; I kept it: so far so good. Oh, I had a horribly sore throat once, could hardly swallow, so I went to a doctor, who said there was nothing wrong with me, so I did not pay him, and he got very angry. I had a bad ear infection, so another doctor gave me a good prescription, and I gladly paid him. I finally got some medical insurance. I started having fainting spells. A primary doctor sent me to a specialist because the EKG had indicated heart disease. The cardiologist put me on a treadmill. I did not want to stop running when the time expired. He said I was fit as a fiddle. Of course, I was a dancer in my spare time.
And, most recently, during the Covid Pandemic, I had a very unusual medical experience at my local medical clinic. My symptom was a dry cough that persisted night and day for several days, which resulted in a sort of mental hysteria, from lack of sleep and frustration. I called my doctor because her card with her phone number had been in the lobby. She called back in a few days, quite angry, because, she said, I was not to call her about my medical conditions because that was limited to face-to-fact visits. I was given an appointment a few weeks from my call. By the time I arrived, my symptoms had almost disappeared except for the neurotic condition. I tried to discuss that with her. She desisted, wanting to send me to a specialist for something else that I considered impertinent, so she walked out of the consultant. When I complained loudly in the private hall that she was a bad doctor, although I loved her, I was banished from the clinic; therefore, access to many doctors in my area was precluded. The big insurance company agreed and continued to recognize the clinic despite the evidence that it was operating contrary to a state law that would subject its doctors to felony charges for working there.
I am having a few more medical experiences as I write this. My hand arthritis, of course, not to mention prostatitis and sarcopenia and the fact that I am almost dead already. And depression is medical experience. I am depressed by the news of all the suffering of miserable people in the world.
So much for medical experience. People my age are dropping like flies. Woe is me, for nobody loves a poor old man, plagued by guilt on his deathbed. If only I could be rid of painful memories without being born into hell again, I would want to live forever. Wherefore my keen interest in stem cell brain regeneration.