Read Death Be Not Proud Online
Authors: John J. Gunther
Tags: #Biography, #Autobiography & Memoirs, #Death and Dying, #Grief
Best wishes to all.
It was after this that he made the mildly ironic comment, “Well, my tutors have finally caught up with me!”
Then he worsened sharply. The bump looked like two tomatoes and he became very tired and feverish, with the fever climbing uncomfortably high. Of course he had had some fever right along. Smears showed that staphylococci were present now, and this seemed to confirm Mount’s worst fear, that infection of the meninges might occur. Putnam came back from California and paid a call. He was amazed that Johnny was still alive—let alone that he was well enough to take and pass examinations on schoolwork of the year before. Literally it seemed that Putnam could not believe his eyes, and he, Traeger, and Gerson talked most of an evening, behind closed doors, while Frances and I waited nervously upstairs, and Johnny dozed.
Everybody—except Gerson—thought that we must have a prompt minor operation to avert a wide infection. That bump had become very dangerous, exuding large amounts of pus every day. Also the adjacent skin was beginning to break down, which would in time mean more ulceration. Again, though the bump was bigger, it was very soft now, and drainage might be possible. But Gerson fought like a tiger against this view. His theory was that the tumor was now
dead,
killed by the diet, and that the suppuration consisted of nothing but dead matter; the tumor was, as it were, sloughing itself slowly out of Johnny’s head. Also he resolutely opposed an operation on the ground that anesthesia would be fatal. Johnny had completely won the hearts of everybody at Mrs. Seeley’s. Gerson loved Johnny and wanted to save him as much as anybody, and he wanted more-over to save him in his own particular way.
So began a battle of the doctors that all but destroyed us. I have never known such strain as during that December week. The ultimate decision and responsibility rested, of course, on Frances and me. The doctors could only explain and suggest; what they did was, in the final analysis, up to us. Finally we compromised. Traeger suggested a freezing agent instead of an injectable anesthetic; Gerson finally agreed to this, Mount agreed to operate, and everybody else agreed that even while Johnny was in Neurological he would remain on the Gerson diet. This meant weighty troubles for Frances, because the food and utensils had to be brought from the East 60’s to West 168th Street every day. Johnny was, I imagine, the first patient Medical Center has ever had who was not allowed to eat from its own kitchens. What a scandalized commotion the nurses made!
Johnny’s own comment after Putnam’s visit was revealing. “Of course operate. The bump is poisoning my nerves.” He went on: “The bump will open twice more.” And as it turned out he was dead right.
So I drove him to Neurological again for what we thought would be a stay of a day or two. He stayed five weeks.
The operation was scheduled for the afternoon. Early that morning the bump spontaneously opened of itself, as Gerson had stubbornly predicted it would, and Mount, summoned by Johnny himself who realized exactly what was happening, did the evacuation right in his room, because there was no time to move him. Mount called me at about eleven in the morning, his voice fairly choked with joy, saying that he had successfully drained an abscess that went five centimeters into the brain beyond the table of the skull, and had got out a full cup of pus and fluid.
Now Johnny recovered with great leaps. He regained his confidence about chess, studied hard, greeted friends, loafed, teased the nurses, yawned and stretched and laughed. He passed another exam, which was a real one and which had to be done in a stipulated time, although he was interrupted over and over. His temperature was taken and the wound had to be dressed once, the telephone kept ringing and scrub women cleaned up his room, while he was actually at work against time.
“My goodness, Father! How can anybody be expected to pass an exam under such circumstances!” His voice was testy, but also pleased.
He was massively bandaged and every few hours, under the most elaborate procedure, he had to have a penicillin drip as the pear-shaped sac in the brain slowly closed with healthy granulation tissue, but otherwise he was more comfortable than at any other period during his illness. That horrible, ferocious bump was altogether gone. It had disappeared. Mount had sucked it out completely. Johnny’s skull would be as smooth and normal as mine, except for the scars of the original incision which the hair would cover. Then next year—so we thought—when any further last remnants of the dead tumor had gone, we would put in a plate and all would be well forevermore.
Doctor after doctor came in to see Johnny, and expressed their free amazement. Miller, one of our old friends, told us that when he heard that Johnny was in hospital again, his first thought was of complete surprise that he was still living, second that he must be in a coma and had been brought in for final palliative measures. And there Johnny was, sitting up in bed stoutly and arguing about the possibility of ionizing lithium hydride!
Then, after some days, the pathologist’s report came in and we learned that the discharged matter showed no infection— the pus was sterile. The cultures showed n o growth at all. Of course sterile abscesses are not unknown by any means; the tumor might have been cut off from its blood supply and the resulting necrotic tissue would be sterile. Even so, the sterility of the abscess seemed to be a tremendous confirmation of the Gerson theory that the tumor was, at least in part, indeed dead, and was emptying itself out as liquid. Gerson himself was dancing with delight. We kept recalling the puncture Mount had made two months before, when the bump had been immovably rigid. What a change since then! Finally came the day when Mount announced that Johnny’s eyes were normal—with no papilledema at all—and that he considered the tumor to have been “arrested.”
My sister was with Johnny and me when he got this news that the eyes were normal. I never knew till this moment just how anguishing was the strain that he strove so hard to conceal. He jumped bolt upright; then slowly, proudly, very slowly and proudly, he relaxed downward to the pillow, while across his face spread the most beatifically happy expression I have ever seen on a human being, and his eyes—normal eyes now—filled just to the brim with tears, but did not spill over, as he smiled with relief, pride, and the exhaustion that comes with release from intolerable strain.
In a second he had recovered, and was telephoning his mother. He grinned. “Every telephone really needs a bed beside it.”
But there were still plenty of confusions and disappointments too. One doctor would contradict another and then himself—because, in truth, the circumstances were so unprecedented. They were terrifically impressed at what had happened, but they could not explain it or vouch for the future. They soberly could not believe that the Gerson regime alone had produced this effect. But when we asked them “Would you yourself take the responsibility for taking Johnny
off
that diet,
now?”
they all said, “No!”
We found out more and more how sickness makes a world of its own. Johnny came to feel that people not in hospital were representatives practically of a different race, from another planet. He banded together with his fellow patients, fellow prisoners, in a kind of mutual defense pact, walling out the external world. But how he envied the healthy outlanders! What Frances did was to give him an efficient balance between the one world and the other. She taught him to adjust himself to the life of the hospital while still maintaining active touch with what went on outside. It was I who was the epitome of the external world breaking in. Sometimes I was too exuberant; the contrast was too acute, and though Johnny loved my visit every evening and looked forward to it eagerly, the letdown after I left was sometimes sharp.
He still felt very strongly that he was actively participating in
Inside U.S.A.
Late in December the Book-of-the-Month Club accepted it, though I still had a good deal of writing to do. Johnny sighed. “Well, that solves the financial problem!”
A little later something gave him great happiness. He had sent a question in to “Information Please,” and it was used on the program one night when I was a guest. I had asked him to listen in but he had no idea that his question was going to be used, and he went wild with excitement when he heard his name on the air. The question asked us to tell what the symbols K,
K2,
K., and
K2
signified. Johnny stumped us handsomely, and immediately made plans for use of the Encyclopaedia Britannica he had so nicely won.
He was gay and confident. He murmured to a visitor, “The doctors are fighting among themselves now as to who cured me.”
Mount let him come home for 36 hours over Christmas, penicillin drip and all, and we had a small party and a happy time. But then he had to return to the hospital because it took time for the abscess cavity to fill. This was Christmas night. I will never forget Johnny’s calmness, covering over his heartbreak, as I drove him back and he limped down the long, empty corridor, and then hiked himself wearily into bed and drank some of his juices—so lonely, so alone, so unyielding, and with the hospital cold and stony and most of the nurses away for Christmas, after the warmth and lights and the presents under the tree at home. “Well, Father,” he said at last, “good night.”
He was not discharged till January 12. He wanted urgently to go home, but we decided to fill a small additional interval at Mrs. Seeley’s; of course we were still following the diet adhesively. Frances drove him up to the hospital for a series of last dressings, and finally he was in his own comfortable small room at home again. He had been away since August, and this was February 6. In a minute he was jumping around arranging the chemicals on the laboratory shelf. Mount came up a few days later and, venturing beyond any-thing he had ever said before, expressed the opinion that the tumor was “quiescent.” The miracle had happened. We were wild with hope.
To this day, what caused Johnny’s spectacular improvement
during the winter is unknown. Anybody may have his guess; the plain fact is that we simply do not know. The recovery may have been due to the X-rays, the effect of which is often delayed and cumulative; to the mustard which can do unpredictable things to a body; to the fact of his youth and the growth of healthy cells despite the tumor; to mysteries in the human spirit; to the Gerson diet; or to combinations and per-mutations among all these. Similarly, we do not know— nobody knows—what caused the severe deterioration that came next. Something,
something
kicked that volcanic tumor loose again. We do not know what. All we know is that for some months Johnny was miraculously better, and then very suddenly and sorely worse again.
February, 1947, started very well. Three months before, Johnny had scarcely been able to walk. Now, though it would be an exaggeration to say that he romped all over the place, he was capable of walking half a mile or so. He veered a little to the right, his left foot was wobbly, and he needed a modicum of guidance—which of course he resolutely refused to admit—but the improvement was incontestable. Even his left hand could not have been very bad at this time, because one evening, at his insistence, I watched him give himself a hypodermic injection of liver extract on the side above the hip, an awkward place to reach. I could not possibly have done on anybody, let alone myself, what Johnny did so skillfully. He took the big syringe apart, boiled the two sections, put it together unaided, even though his fingers had little grip, inserted the needle into the ampule, drew it out, carefully tested it to eliminate the tiny bubbles, pinched up the flesh for the injection, explored to see if there were any veins nearby, and rammed the inch-and-a-half-long needle home. He sat down, grinning; and the sweat was coming out on my forehead, but not on his.
Frances had rehearsed this with him several times, though she had a horror of doing the actual injection herself. In fact one of the reasons he did it alone was to spare her. They called it “bayonet practice.”
Steadily, too, she helped him in physical activity. She taught him to be deliberate about almost every physical movement, so that he picked his stance carefully and knew exactly what he was going to do next before doing it. The stronger parts of his body must, she told him, be trained to assist those weaker; more and more his good right side must take up some of the burden from the other; she showed him how his right hand could unobtrusively assist the left. In all this two mentors were of assistance—Buddha, with his lesson
BE AWARE,
and, of all dissimilar personalities, Mr. La Guardia and his slogan
PATIENCE AND FORTITUDE.
Johnny was vigorously interested, too, in things external. An item came in the papers to the effect that the Dutch royal family was having some sort of minor dynastic trouble. He sighed. “T o think that after two thousand years of science, history still gets snarled by that sort of thing!”
Years before, at Lincoln, Johnny had met and liked a girl named Mary. Often Frances talked to him about falling in love and marrying some day; once he smiled in reply, “Very well, just throw a chemist across my path.” Mary came back to his mind. Johnny was very casual about it. “Oh, by the way ... “ he began with Frances, and then recalled Mary to her attention. Frances called her mother, and then Johnny talked to Mary herself on the telephone, and they arranged to meet. Johnny felt very proud and grown up. He chuckled later. “As soon as I talked to her my temperature went up and it’s taken three days to get it back to normal.”
Once a strange thing happened. Frances, on whom this struggle was exacting a frightful toll, telephoned Mount to ask some question, after she had tried to get Traeger, and as the connection was made—the odds against this happening are probably a billion or more to one—she was cut in, by pure accident, on a talk Traeger and Mount themselves were having at that very instant. She never told them that she unwittingly overheard their conversation. I would like to think that this small episode shows how closely we were all held together by some invisible bond.
Everything seemed better day by day. But—by the end of February it seemed that, after six weeks of being contained, the bump was ever so slightly beginning to bulge out again, almost imperceptibly, but definitely.
On February 18, Gerson held a demonstration. This was against our wishes. But inasmuch as we thought he had been largely instrumental in saving Johnny’s life, we could not refuse permission. Gerson, absolutely sure that Johnny was saved and very proud, invited some twenty prominent New York officials and physicians to see him and six or seven other patients. He had taken color photographs of Johnny’s head during the pre-ceding autumn; we saw to it that Johnny would not have opportunity to see these, which might well have frightened him. The assembled doctors looked over his chart and all his records back to the original operation, and then examined his skull which was beautifully healed, watched him walk, tested his grip, and asked a few questions. All went smoothly and swiftly. Yet I am convinced that this event—perhaps the half-hour wait with the other Gerson patients—upset Johnny gravely. He seemed indifferent, however. Frances and I walked him home, and he stopped at my hotel for tea.
The next day, February 19, at breakfast, he had a sharp attack of trembling, together with amnesia. He talked to Frances more or less like this:
“Is it eight o’clock in the morning or the evening? “Where am I?
“What happened yesterday?
“ I can’t remember.
“Oh, yes, of course.
“It’s the queerest thing—I can’t remember!”
The most remarkable thing about this was that Johnny had completely forgotten the exhibition with Gerson the day before. Of course he was subconsciously blotting out from himself and obliterating what must have been a fiightening experience. Absolutely all memory of the preceding day had vanished. But none of our doctors seemed much troubled by this amnesia, terrifying as it was to us. I talked to Putnam on the telephone and he said that it might well occur, as the result of temporary blood displacement, even if the tumor
were
actually dead. Mount came and made a thorough examination on February 22. The head still looked wonderfully better, though a small odd blister had developed, and, despite the amnesia, Mount was as optimistic as I ever saw him.
But the next day, though he loved Mount and had been with him for a full hour, Johnny could not remember his visit until we jogged his memory. Again, he was trying to blot out all recollection of something that alarmed and worried him. A day or two later, feeling his head (he never looked at it), he himself could see that the bulge, though closed—we never had any leakage trouble again—was ever so slightly bigger. He turned to me with a grim voice. “Father, if it comes out again, will it be
for the last time?”
Several times Johnny had these amnesia attacks, and Frances developed a technique for handling them. Usually the attacks came if Johnny thought that a
doctor
was worried about him. He sought to believe in each of his doctors implicitly—more than we did, perhaps. He had to, to survive. Usually his first question was, “Where am I? “ and then, “What day is it?” or “What year is it?” He always—helping himself by groping toward concrete reality—strove first to
place
himself in both space and time. Then, as a rule, he would ask about Deerfield and when he could return there. Frances sought to shield him from the terror she felt herself; she would pull herself together, laugh with him, and say sharply if necessary, “Who are you?—You are John Gunther, Jr. and you know perfectly well who you are—you live
here,
and don’t joke with me!” Then she would proceed and tell him what date it was, of the Christian era, and remind him how he had wanted to throw a baked potato at her the night before, and slowly progress outward in both space and time—showing him his notebook, perhaps, or something similarly concrete—until he had recovered. Usually, mercifully for her, the attacks were brief.
During the next days he talked incessantly of schoolwork and the Harvard entrance examinations. He wanted to know why, if he
had
to stay on the diet, he could not go back to Deerfield, live on the diet in the infirmary there, and resume his classes. The diet was certainly a major worry and preoccupation. Yet we could not dare to stop it. No doctor, even the most orthodox, would let us even consider taking him off the diet now. We had comforted Johnny by saying that he could quit the diet in “June,” and day after day he would count the remaining weeks on his fingers. Gerson, of course, thought he might have to remain on the diet at least for a year and maybe for several years.
Medically, the situation became more puzzling all the time. During March, Johnny was in good shape, though the bulge continued to grow very slowly and he had intermittent periods of seeming dazed and dopey and the hand and foot became somewhat worse and the lag in the mouth deepened. Also he was apt to drop things if he didn’t watch his left hand. But the eyes were better. There was no recurrence of papilledema. How, we wondered, could he get better in one direction and worse in another, at one and the same time? We took him to an eye specialist who said that he did not think Johnny’s eyesight would deteriorate further, and—blessed relief—that we need no longer fear blindness. But—suppose the partial numbness, the insidious creeping paralysis, should spread and so affect the right hand and foot in addition to the left? Some doctors said this was impossible. Others disagreed. If only the doctors would get together!
Straight through March and April, despite everything, Johnny worked on and on. He was utterly obsessed about getting into Harvard in the fall. But to achieve this he had to complete making up his work at Deerfield and graduate as well as pass the college entrance exams, a double task that seemed impossible. Then on March 18 we learned that he had caught up with his history course at Deerfield—though he hadn’t been there for eleven months—and on April 7 he had a letter from Mr. Boyden that gave him radiant happiness: he had passed his English examination satisfactorily and so was abreast of this course too. I took him to the science room in the Public Library, where he did some advanced work, and he proceeded to write up no fewer than fifty-four chemistry experiments! Then Frances found out about the New York Tutoring School, where Mr. Matthew is a wise and considerate headmaster, and we enrolled him there. Johnny’s marks after six weeks were 90 in English, 95 in history, 95 in trig. This in a boy with half a brain!
We made formal application for him to enter Harvard, and in his own handwriting, now wretchedly uneven, he wrote the following paragraph to answer the question, “What are your reasons for going to college and why do you wish particularly to come to Harvard?”
I wish to go to college primarily to complete a sound general education and to prepare myself for the years to come. Also, I wish to prepare myself for research work in physical chemistry. I have chosen Harvard to atain
(sic)
these ends because I have been advised that it is the institution where I may most fruitfully attain these aims.
On April 12 he took the college board exams. It had been arranged, through the courtesy of Dean Gummere of Harvard, that he could split these into two sessions, taking the Aptitude tests at this time and the Achievement tests later. Johnny said he preferred to do both together, and who were we to say no to him? He announced, “ I never felt better in my life.” But it was a grueling day. We drove him down to a school near Gramercy Park early in the morning, and he had to wait almost an hour, standing mostly, in a huge milling crowd of tough, husky youngsters—many of them G.I.’s who had seen combat abroad—and then squeeze his way inch by inch into elevators packed and jammed, and run down long confusing corridors. A couple of the other boys laughed at him, and he flinched. Johnny looked so pitiably frail. His gait was lopsided, and his bandage made his pallor even more striking than it would have been otherwise. Frances kept close by. The exams lasted six and a half hours. We didn’t get home till dinnertime, and Johnny flung himself on the couch, exclaiming, “Boy
am
I tired!” Then he eagerly snapped to the phone to compare notes with other boys who had taken the same exams.
That morning Frances had picked up a benzedrine tablet from Traeger and she asked Johnny to take it, thinking it would stimulate him during the ordeal. He had never had benzedrine and he refused, couching the refusal in a quotation from Shakespeare to the effect that he preferred the terrors of the known to those unknown.
There were other activities, too. The day he enrolled at the Tutoring School I took him to
The Best Years of Our Lives
as a kind of celebration, my sister took him to
Brigadoon,
and with Frances and me he saw matinees of
Joan of Lorraine
and
Finian’s Rainbow
(wearing glasses for the first time which made him look like a juvenile professor). He kept up his acute interest in politics and he still read the news of the day with great care. I took him to shop for a lot of clothes—he had grown at least three inches during all this time—and our friends dropped in and once or twice we played chess and of course he beat me. So that I might improve my game he wrote out a series of hints and precepts; any chess enthusiast will realize how sound they are, and at the risk of boring the non-chess-playing reader I will print them: