Death Be Not Proud (7 page)

Once we celebrated a release from hospital by giving him a spoonful of champagne. He had another spoonful and then announced, “Let’s have a little more formality around here. I’m going to call you Mother and Father from now on, instead of Mutti and Papa.”

Once Mr. Boyden and Mr. Hayden, one of his favorite teachers, drove down from Deerfield to have a day with him. This was a red-letter occasion indeed, and Johnny talked to them soberly about school the next term. Of course it had occurred to him by this time that he
might
be unable to get back to school, but the idea was so unthinkable that for the most part he suppressed it. Mr. Boyden’s visit was a great turning point in restoring hope. Johnny explained to him how he intended to make up the time he had lost, and then registered frankly all the complaints he had previously made to us. Later he amplified his views. “It’s not that I’m complaining; I was just giving an explanation of why I don’t get better marks.” Still later: “You know, Mr. Boyden is the most persuasive man anybody ever met!”

He was busy, impatient and irritated but not discouraged at not being fully well, and packed with wit. Once he said that for me to lie on the daybed was like being a cigar on a toothpick. I was hungry once and he said, “Give Father three beefsteaks for an afternoon snack—it will help his vitality.” One evening the laundry failed us, and he had to wear a pair of my pajamas. “So, “ he sighed with mock weariness, “the dread day has finally come when I am you.” We continually urged him to rest, and it was a struggle for Frances to get him to bed at a reasonable hour. “I f I hear any more of that talk about not staying up till twelve, I’ll disinherit myself,” he would say. One day he said he had discovered a real reason for the existence of relatives and in-laws—“For surgeons to practice on.” He often joked about his illness. “ I bet that ole’ mustard has knocked the tumor out!”

But on August 31 there was again a new leak in the bump, and the white blood count was below 1,000. The papilledema was high again, and he seemed to be fading fast.

Meantime we were working on another tack. Not for a moment had we stopped searching. Early in the summer Raymond Swing told me astonishing stories about a doctor named Max Gerson who had achieved remarkable arrestations of cancer and other illnesses by a therapy based on diet. Gerson was, and is, a perfectly authentic M.D., but unorthodox. He had been attacked by the
Journal of the American Medical Association
and others of the massive vested interests in medicine; Swing himself had been under bitter criticism for a broadcast describing and praising highly Gerson’s philosophy and methods of dietary cure. My own first reaction was skeptical, and Frances was dubious too. Then I learned that Gerson had long experience actually in brain tumor cases, having been associated for years with a famous German neurosurgeon, Foerster, in a tumor clinic at Breslau before the war. I went to see Gerson. He showed me his records of tumors—even gliomas—apparentiy cured. But I was still doubtful because it seemed to me inconceivable that anything so serious as a glioma could be cleared up by anything so simple as a diet. He impressed me greatly as a human being, however. This was a man full of idiosyncrasy but also one who knew much, who had suffered much, and who had a sublime faith in his own ideas. Frances and I had a long talk with Traeger. At first he violently opposed the Gerson claims, but then he swung over on the ground that, after all, Johnny was deteriorating very fast and in any case the diet could do no harm. I stayed at Madison one weekend and Frances went into New York, visited Gerson herself, and looked over his nursing home. She was impressed too. We made a sudden decision over the telephone. We had tried orthodoxy, both static and advanced, and so now we would give heterodoxy a chance. If only we could stave Death off a little longer! And—once more—there was absolutely nothing to lose.

I took Johnny out to dinner in Madison and broke it to him that we would be going into town the next day for new and further treatment. This was a grievous shock. It was the first time that I saw him seriously upset. He struggled to keep from tears. He flung himself away from me and crept upstairs. Mostly this was because he was midway through preparations for another serious experiment. But by the next morning he was buoyant again—so much so that I dreaded more than I could tell what would have to be the next bad news broken to him, that he could not go back to school. “I’m sorry I bawled last night, Father,” he said with his wonderful radiant smile. Then, limping slightly, he pushed off to his laboratory for a morning’s work, sober and dutiful. School—and the science work he was doing—was practically all he talked about.

Frances came out, and on September 7 we drove swiftly in to Dr. Gerson’s nursing home. It was a fiercely hot, noisy afternoon, and Johnny was sick with strain, just plain sick. So a new long chapter in his indomitable struggle began.

3

Those September days were grim at first. Johnny lay there pale
and panting with misery. His blood count slipped lower and lower, and great bruises appeared on his arms and chest, caused by breakdown of the capillaries. We had been warned that the blood would go very low, and perhaps we were needlessly alarmed—it might well have come back of itself. But anyway we were worried sick. One doctor told us that the reason he had seemed so casual when Johnny entered the Gerson nursing home was his conviction that he couldn’t possibly outlast the week anyway. In particular what is known as the polymorphonuclear count of Johnny’s blood (I will not go into the technical details) was staggeringly low— down to 3 per cent, and the red cells showed a profound anemia. One specialist told us later that he has never known of a recovery with such a blood condition.

Within a week, Johnny was feeling, not worse, but much better! The blood count rose steadily, the bruises were absorbed with extraordinary speed, the wound in the bulge healed, and, miracle of miracles, the bump on the skull was going down!

Traeger had walked down the street with me to meet Gerson. He was deeply pessimistic. He said, “We’ll move Johnny to a hospital and try massive transfusions—nothing else can save him.” The two doctors retired into the kitchen, and came out after half an hour. Then Traeger looked Johnny over slowly and said, “Never mind about the transfusions. Let’s do it Gerson’s way for another twenty-four hours.”

First, Gerson took Johnny off penicillin. This we thought to be a very grave risk, but, he insisted, penicillin could irritate a tumor. Second, he refused to permit any transfusions or other emergency measures whatsoever. What a terrible chance we thought he was taking! Third, he demanded that for some weeks at least Johnny should have rest, absolute rest, nothing but rest, rest, rest.

The Gerson diet is saltless and fatless, and for a long time proteins are excluded or held to an extreme minimum. The theory behind this is simple enough. Give nature opportunity, and nature herself will heal. It is the silliest thing in the world to attempt to arrest cancer of the tongue, say, by cutting off the tongue. What the physician should strive for, if he gets a case in time, is to change the metabolism of the body so that the cancer (or another affliction) dies of itself. The whole theory is erected on the basis that the chemistry of the body can be so altered as to eliminate disease. Perhaps this may sound far-fetched. But that diet, any special diet, can markedly influence bodily behavior is, of course, well known. Consider inversely how a milligram or so of a poisonous substance, like potassium cyanide, can almost instantly kill a body. Ho w Gerson decided what foods helped to create new healthy cells, as the diseased cells sloughed off, is not altogether clear to me. At any rate the first principle is to make the diet potassium-rich and sodium-free. Gerson took the line that the body spends an absurdly disproportionate share of its energy getting rid of waste, and that therefore, when the body is ill, it will be much freer to combat illness and build healthy cells if the amount of waste is drastically cut down. Hence, as a patient enters upon the Gerson diet, not only does he subsist largely on specially prepared fruit juices and fresh vegetables that burn down to the minimum of ash, but he has enema after enema—in the beginning as many as four or five a day, till the system is totally washed out and cleansed.

Gerson’s sanitarium, operated by his daughter and Mr. and Mrs. Seeley, was run with the utmost loving care; I cannot possibly pay tribute enough to Mrs. Seeley and to Miss Gerson for what they did for Johnny. Also I saw, month after month,’ a number of Gerson’s cases. One patient, it happened, was an acquaintance of mine of twenty years’ standing whom I altogether trusted. I did not know whether or not Gerson could cure, or even check, a malignant glioblastoma. I did learn beyond reasonable doubt that his diet did effect other cures. Gerson himself, zealot that he is, has never claimed that his diet will “cure anything,” as his enemies sometimes charge. But some of his results have been astonishing.

One of our doctors (hostile to Gerson at first) said one evening that September, “I f this thing works, we can chuck millions of dollars’ worth of equipment in the river, and get rid of cancer by cooking carrots in a pot.”

The regime was certainly onerous. Johnny said wearily after the first week, “ I even tell time by enemas.”

This is what Johnny had to eat during the next months. For breakfast, a pint of fruit juice, oatmeal, an apple-carrot mash, and a special soup made of fresh vegetables—parsley root, celery knob, leek, tomatoes. This soup he continued to take at intervals during the day, until he had a quart or a quart and a half. For lunch, heaping portions of cooked vegetables, a salad, fresh fruit, the soup and mash, and a baked potato. For dinner, the same. Later he was permitted pot cheese, skimmed milk, and dry pumpernickel. Nothing canned. Nothing seasoned, smoked, or frozen. Above all nothing salted. No meat, eggs, or fish. No cream, butter, or other fats. No sugar except honey and maple sugar. No candy, sausages, ice cream, pickles, spices, preserved foods, white flour, condiments, cakes, or any of the multitude of small things a child loves. Very little water. All the vegetables had to be cooked with no added water or steam, after being washed, not scraped, and without using pressure cookers or anything with aluminum, and the fruits had to be squeezed in a nonmetallic squeezer. Back to nature!

Do not think this was starvation. Some patients gain rather than lose on the Gerson diet. The meals are enormous in size and, as Mrs. Seeley prepared them, exquisitely com-posed. Then to compensate for the lack of minerals there are injections of crude liver extract every day, and multitudinous pills. These were assembled in a glass dish every morning, in various colors to denote what minerals and vitamins they contained—thirty or more in all. Johnny took niacin, liver powder, lubile (dried powdered bile), vitamins A and D, iron, dicalcium phosphate with viosterol, and lugol. Iodine—in a precisely calculated amount—is essential to the cure.

Johnny’s attitude to all this—he was a youngster with a vigorous, healthy appetite—can readily be imagined. He loathed the diet, but he held onto it with the utmost scrupulous fidelity. Carefully he checked off in his notebook the pills he took each day. Once the reason for a thing was explained to him, he faithfully accepted it. The jokes and protests he made were to let off steam, or provide wry humor to the occasion. One evening I asked him if he wanted some-thing, and he replied instantly, “A dose of bichloride of mercury.” Once he said that the husks of vegetable in the Gerson soup were deliberately left there as “abrasives to scour out the stomach” and he announced that he had discovered a cure for tapeworm. “Put the patient on the Gerson diet and the tapeworm will evacuate itself in despair.”

All that Johnny was really losing was the taste of food. But the monotony depressed him and he sighed on one occasion. “Really, Mother, this
is
too much to bear!” Once as I was leaving for the evening he called out, “Have a big steak for me and come back and tell me all about it!” Later he was worried that when the diet finally ended there might still be a meat shortage. One night his voice was sick with worry. “Wouldn’t just a
little
meat strengthen me and help the bruised nerves in my head heal?”

But he was getting better. This, overwhelmingly, was all that counted. The papilledema dropped sharply, and by the end of September the pupils were almost normal—this was an almost unbelievable demonstration of recovery. Moreover the blood count was up to normal, and, incontestably, the bump was smaller. I left Mrs. Seeley’s one evening and walked to the corner and had a cup of coffee, almost insane with sudden hope. I was beside myself with a violent and incredulous joy. Johnny was going to recover after all! I thought of all the surgeons and the specialists and how dumfounded they would be; I thought of all our friends and their sympathy and how the burden of grief would be lifted to a whole small community. Johnny was going to pull through, after all, despite everything, and get well! He was going to beat this evil, lawless thing! He’d show the surgeons how a boy with a real will to live could live!

For these extravagant hopes I had, I must say, a certain medical backing for a time. One of our doctors was very optimistic and all were co-operating well. We had feared that, once we delivered Johnny over to Gerson, the more straight-laced physicians might refuse to see him in this so-called black sheep’s den. One doctor, out of the whole lot, was in fact angry and did wash his hands of us—temporarily; he said we had spoiled the “controls,” as if Johnny were a rabbit. But Traeger came over to have a consultation with Gerson every Saturday for months; Putnam, a great man, had no hesitation in visiting him and later Gerson several times visited Neurological (which we had been told would be utterly impossible), and Lester Mount, who as time wore on became the closest of all the doctors to Johnny except Traeger, and who loved Johnny as Johnny loved him, came to see him regularly, though a surgeon of Mount’s standing rarely makes calls at all.

Parenthetically I might mention the K R episode. We were committed to Gerson for a time at least, and he was a dictator who permitted no opposition; but this did not preclude our fishing quietly in other waters. Frances in particular never for an instant gave up searching. She saw in the papers that Russian scientists, working with a trypanosome, had successfully treated certain exposed cancers such as those on breasts or nostrils. This led us into a telephone chase almost like that on the mustard. I talked to the United States Public Health Service and to a doctor in Philadelphia who had actually worked with K R in Moscow. But there was none available in this country, and it could not be shipped because it would not keep. Again parenthetically, we explored several other long-shot chances, but from these and other forays, nothing at all resulted. As of the autumn of 1946, it was the Gerson regime or nothing.

Our routine was now established. Mrs. Seeley’s nursing home was only a few minutes’ walk from my flat. Johnny telephoned us the first thing in the morning, and again just before lights-out at night. He was frightfully depressed some-times, and he hungered for contact with us the first and last minutes of the day. But he would always say, even if his voice was quavering, “ I feel
wonderful!”
As a rule I dropped in to see him at noon, and again briefly in the late afternoon or evening; Frances came at lunch and stayed with him until he went to sleep. Soon, we thought, we would move him home—though this would entail a difficult lot of routine because all his food would have to be cooked specially with special paraphernalia. Frances worked on this and got the apartment ready. She moved in presently, and I took quarters in a small hotel nearby. But as it worked out it was several months before Johnny was able to come home.

I read him the typescript of the Montana chapter of
Inside U.S.A.
“Father,” he grinned, “it’ll sell a million copies.” This week too, I took him for a brief ride. He said, “Ah! I feel alive again!”

I asked him what he wanted most to eat when the diet should be over.

“A glass of full milk, an artichoke with hollandaise sauce, spaghetti and meat balls, and a chocolate ice-cream soda.”

One night he had a heavy nosebleed, which could have had the most disastrous consequences. Both Gerson and Traeger raced over in the middle of the night, and since Johnny had a slight bronchial cough that might have started the bleeding again, Gerson relaxed his inflexible rule against drugs and let me rush out to a pharmacy open at that hour and bring back some codeine. Johnny was frighteningly tired. He started to cough again at about five in the morning. Mrs. Seeley crept into his room, and he whispered to her, “I’ m afraid I’m being too much trouble.” She replied with a cheery “Don’t worry about me!” whereupon he considered for a moment and then said, “Somebody’s got to worry over you.”

Once Frances had an argument with the doctor. Johnny told the doctor later, “The way to handle my mother is to stand up to her.” Once, smiling, he exclaimed to me as she came into the room, “Mother looks just like a schoolgirl!”

Frances was lifting his morale all the time. She bought bright-colored scarves which he wound around his bandage, and this amused him no end. She read him biographies of great scientists and all manner of news items and stories about science. Another thing that helped his morale was, if I may say so, my book. He was passionately interested in it—almost as interested as I. He knew what a race I was running, against time and circumstance, and constantly he egged me on. He read every chapter in manuscript, calculated its length and weight and how it would fit into the book as a whole, criticized its content adequately, and continually watched out for errors in judgment and inaccuracies.

Miss Gerson’s little girl, aged about six, was fascinated by Johnny, and often came in to see him. He was polite, but bored. Girls of six were really not his dish. Once the little girl tiptoed in and asked if it were all right to stay. Johnny replied. “Okay, if you don’t compromise me. Keep the door ajar.”

Again from Frances’s diary:

Today Johnny said, “Oh, Mother—I’ve been waiting for you—I have a confession to make—You were right—as usual—about the dancing. At the end of this term, you know, they have the senior prom. When I get back to school, what’ll I do? . . . I’ll
have
to dance! Oh, Mother, I’ve been so depressed—” He was cheerful, confessing. . . . Now he said would I practice with him and I said I’d love to. I was surprised. But then injections interrupted and dinner. But after dinner he asked again, and I pushed back the chairs and rug. And we danced!

Max Kopf came in one day with his cheerful “Hello, Chonnie” and played him a game of chess. He played well for an hour, and then got tired; Max eased off, to try to let him win. Then I discovered that Johnny’s field of vision was so limited by this time that he could no longer see the entire board at one glance, and hence had to memorize during the whole game the position in the rook files. Other friends dropped in during the placid afternoons, became duly appalled by the number of pills he had to take, and were cheered up by him. Clare Luce organized prayers for Johnny—if that is the proper way to express it—and she offered us her Connecticut house for his convalescence. On November 4, his seventeenth birthday, we had a party, and Mrs. Seeley made a kind of imitation ice cream. Johnny adored parties, and that he should have been well enough to receive guests on this his own special day was a happy event. We tried to record everybody’s laughter on a soundscriber—the instrument into which, on other days, he sometimes poured his secret fears.