CHAPTER EIGHT

Chapter VIII

We returned home and back to our job responsibilities. For the next few days, I would sit alone in my office and take inventory of my life and try to make some plan out of what future I had. I started off with the idea of taking one day at a time without regard to the future, and I found that this makes tomorrow nothing to lok forward. I learned from a Buddist friend of mine that religion was not only a faith but a away of life and that one complemented the other. I tried to practice this; and in so doing, I found my life so full of love and warmth of friends that I had little time for resentment and self- pity. I began to feel sorry for people living on limited time who spoil what time they have left by being miserable.

I reported to my superiors exactly what my prognosis was, and by this time my hands had begun to gradually lose their strength. The president of y company told me that as far as he was concerned, I could keep my hospital until they brought me in on a stretcher.

For some time I had noticed that when I would go under an overpass, it would take the form of strange arches and sharp steeples. Cars began to pass me that I wouldn’t notice until they were by. The condition became gradually worse until I made an appointment with an ophthalmologist. While examining my eyes, he asked me to read what letters I could see on the chart with my right eye. I asked him what chart; he asked me how many fingers he was showing me on one hand, and I couldn’t even see his hand. With my left eye, I was much better; I still couldn’t read any letters, but I did count his fingers. He diagnoses my problem as some rare eye disease that there was no known cause or cure for and declared me legally blind and informed me that there was no lens that would help me to see better.

By August of 1972, the disease had progressed until I couldn’t hold a pen to sign my name, and the muscle facicullations had spread all over my body. One day after using the restroom, I had to call one of my lab men in to assist me in arranging my clothes. At last the time had come. I had always felt that the head of any organization should be its strength and never its weakness. I gave notice and retired September the 1^st, 1972.

We again went to Mayo Clinic where dye was inserted in my bloodstream and colored pictures taken of my retina, showing the right one completely destroyed by scar tissue and the left one partially destroyed. They again concurred with the diagnosis and said that it had nothing to do with my muscle disease. Since I had always enjoyed reading and had expected to watch television to pass some of the many hours that I knew was to be my fte, this new adversity was a little hard to take.

My body chemistry had become out of balance and had made food that I had always liked become tasteless; this became increasingly worse until there were only a very few things that I could force myself to eat. Before I became too weak to walk at all, I persuaded my wife that we should make a trip. Not having been to Europe, we decided to go to Madrid, Spain. We stayed a week and the weather was miserable. We didn’t particularly enjoy it, but we enjoyed being together; and it gave us something to talk about later, so it was worth it.

As the days and weeks passed, I began to get weaker and weaker until it became necessary that we get someone to stay with me while my wife was on duty at the hospital. My son had graduated from Vanderbilt and because of the difficulty of getting into medical school, worked at the hospital for a year before being accepted. His being at home did a lot toward making my condition more acceptable. Friends came by daily, and it seemed that providence was so designed that my ways would be easier.

During this time I began to find a strange peace with solitude. About once a week my friends would come by and take me to the lake. I would take my foloding chair, my drink and some kind of food and have them take me to some inaccessible gravel bar and leave me. I would stay there from early afternoon until ten or eleven o’clock at night. Everytime I would hear a motor boat, I would hope it wasn’t them. I could never understand how I could love to be with friends so much and yet enjoy complete solitude.

My legs became so weak that it became necessary to use a wheelchair or a walker. One morning as I started to shave, I can remember standing in the bathroom preparing to do so; and the next thing I knew I was in the hospital emergency room having my head sewn up. For the next few weeks, things are rather fuzzy in my memory. I can remember that I was kept in the hospital for a few days because of concussion and returned home. My wife tells me that on the morning of May the 5^th, 1974, she was unable to awaken me. We lived next door to our hospital chief of staff, and she immediately got in touch with him. When he failed to revive me, I was sent to the V.A. Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee. I vaguely remember being taken out of the ambulance at the hospital; then I lost consciousness again.

The next nine or ten days were filled with a terror such in all of my war years, I never experienced before. All experiences were so real to me that I recognized my wife, my family and my friends but had created a situation that had instilled into me a mortal fear. I thought that I was lying underneath the Veterans Administration Hospital where all of their trucks and vehicles were parked. I had overheard a male medical technician telling a group of nurses aides that I was to be killed. I was to be taken on the interstate highway and thrown out of an automobile traveling at the speed of one hundred miles an hour. None of the nurses would talk to me when I cried to tell them. I would beg my wife and my brother-in-law to please take me out of there because they were going to kill me. They would, of course, try to placate me and convince me it was my imagination, but nothing was ever so clear in my life. When the technician would come for any purpose I would try to offer him whatever I could possibly get not to do this thing. He, as the nurses, would act as if he hadn’t heard me at all. My wife would cry because she was helpless. I hope I never experience this sort of thing again. After what seemed days, I again lapsed into unconsciousness.

A strange thing happened later, a man died in the hospital that I was in, and his wife told me that never again to let them put him in intensive care in the V.A. Hospital because when he was there, they threatened to kill him.

When things finally became clear to me, I found that I had a tracheostomy tube and was permanently attached to a respirator. The neurologist that I was assigned to said that my unconsciousness was caused by narcotic poisoning. I was breathing in oxygen, but my pulmonary muscles had gotten so weak they were not forcing out the carbon dioxide. It was so tiring upon my wife to stay in Nashville and to commute back to Smithville to take care of personal responsibilities that I kept asking that I be allowed to go back to DeKalb General Hospital. When my family doctor and my former employer heard of my request, even though the hospital was not equipped to take care of me, they provided this equipment and asked that I be transferred. My wife was disturbed over the fact that my insurance only covered fifty-nine days of hospitalization. My neurologist told her that it saddened him to say so; but she need not worry about that, I would not be alive in fifty- nine days. That was two years and nine months ago. You see this doctor had forgotten to take into account what love and tender care under the direction of God can do to statistics. On June the 6^th I was returned to DeKalb General Hospital.

I often think about the little simple things that would ake our lives more libable, if we would only take time to reflect. For instance, one f the first things we learn in school is that the word “like” is to be used in connection with inanimate objects and the word “love” is applicable to living things. As we grow older, we forget this and not only do we stop using the word love, but it begins to take on erroneous interpretations; and we are even embarrassed to use it. I have no reservations, and I find no other way to describe my feeling for the dedication that my nurses, my doctors and friends have shown toward me in these years of complete incapacitation.