This Won’t Hurt a Bit, Young Man
Part One
This is the story of what I call HospitalWorld. To paraphrase Abbie Hoffman’s description of the Woodstock music festival, HospitalWorld is not so much a place as a state of mind – the encompassing experiences, mysterious, exotic and routine, of a whole ‘nother world.
I know very few folks who have escaped admission to HospitalWorld. Its protocols, its rigors, its successes and failures have been inescapable for me. Its presence started early and persists to this day. See if you relate:
PART 1
I was on my back. As I wobbled into consciousness, a stranger wielding a smile and a handful of plastic tubing stared down at me.
“Vitals,” she said, by way of introduction. I snapped awake and immediately wished I hadn’t.
“Open up,” she said, all but prying open my mouth with her thermometer.
Reveille at HospitalWorld couldn’t be more fun if they threw a bugler into the room with you.
Once the nurse’s aide was satisfied I was warm enough to slice open later that morning, she gave me another big smile, wished me luck and left.
It was 6:30 in the morning and I had no place to go, nobody to see. So I closed my eyes and got in the Wayback, looking for a place where I could gain a little perspective, to scope out this thing that was hurtling my way in slow motion: cancer surgery.
I emerged in 1958, in the same hospital where I’d been born. I was a skinny eight-year-old with a chronic earache. My parents had been convinced their eldest son could be cured of his affliction with a little surgical intervention. I was to have a tonsillectomy.
The attending physician was an eye, ear, nose and throat specialist we’ll call “Dr. X.” It was at his hands that I formed my first impression of HospitalWorld.
I didn’t understand how removing my tonsils could possibly cure my earaches. Turns out, neither did many other people, for many years and many reasons. Medical science has been wondering what exactly tonsils do and how they do it for the better part of 2,000 years, with only mixed results.
But a lack of certainty or even understanding has never stopped thousands of doctors and their forebears over millennia from yanking, cutting and snipping millions of tonsils out of as many aching throats. By 1958 tonsillectomies were all the rage in HospitalWorld, especially for children.
Tonsils are the bad boys of medical science. They don’t seem to have much purpose, so why not snip them out before they cause trouble? It seemed a safe bet back then, as leeching once seemed to the ancients.
Whatever Dr. X may have believed were the compelling reasons to remove my tonsils, he was not a man who was easily deterred. His determination was as obvious as the scars on his face.
Dr. X was scary looking, and not only to my eight-year-old eyes. His face looked like an unmasked Lon Chaney at the climax of The Phantom of the Opera, except where Chaney’s fire-ravaged face was dead-white, Dr. X’s face was the warm brown color of beeswax. Of melted beeswax.
The doctor’s red-rimmed eyeballs bulged from their sockets for lack of flesh beneath them. His nose was little more than a memory, a double slit in the middle of his shiny face. The flesh around his mouth had been pulled taut around his jaw so that a smile was as good as a sneer. His breath came in dank gasps that you could hear from across the room.
My parents had prepared me for my first meeting with Dr. X. I should feel sorry for him, they told me. They said he’d been disfigured by somehow having stayed too long under an X-ray machine. He was, they told me, a nice man who had gone through a lot. By the time I’d been admitted to the hospital, I was almost used to the way he looked.
On the big day, Doctor X came to assure me that there was nothing to be afraid of. I would be fine. And when it was all over, he’d be sure to tell my mother I could have all the ice cream I wanted. And no longer would the earaches plague me.
His words of assurance are familiar to any kid whose Boy Scout knife ever folded on his finger or who ever stepped on a rusty nail or had his broken arm reset in the emergency room. “You won’t feel a thing, young man,” they tell you, even as the needle goes in, the nail comes out and the bone snaps into place. It hurts. It hurts, in my eight-year-old words, “a whole big lot.”
Any kid who’s made it to parenthood recognizes this tactic as classic misdirection, the psychological head-fake that’s intended to ward off further suffering for a son or daughter. But deep inside a kid’s emotional vault, where such memories are deposited as deeply as spent nuclear fuel rods, these promises of painlessness are the words we all recognize as the Original Lie. They are our introduction to an unexpected world of pain. And we never forget.
***
Dr. X’s was the first face I remember seeing at the foot of my bed as I emerged from the fog of anesthesia. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t. My throat was too raw for screaming. Or for breathing.
The anxious faces of my parents floated into view. They leaned over me, trying to console me with nervous smiles and calm voices. Dr. X turned to them and dramatically announced I’d been quite the brave little guy, that the operation had gone well and that—
“Goddamn doctor!”
The words were mine, and they stopped him in his tracks. My parents looked like someone had just slapped their faces, hard. I’d been raised to speak well of my elders, if I spoke of them at all, and to address them when I did speak to them as “Sir” or “Ma’am.” Never, ever was I to swear. To anybody. For any reason.
The truth was, “goddamn” was the only swear word I knew at the time. It was the first time I’d ever uttered it aloud, and I didn’t give a flying . . . goddamn who heard me say it. I just knew I was in a blazing new world of pain and I knew who had put me there, despite his measly promises.
I still remember the taste of blood coursing down my throat and how I imagined its heat was only making matters worse than they already were, if that were even possible.
The other post-tonsillectomy kids in my ward—all of them about half my age—ran around the place like it was a playground. It seems that the one good thing you can say about tonsillectomies is the younger you are, the quicker you recuperate. I wanted to throttle every one of those grinning little twerps, slowly.
My parents took me home later that day. My reward for enduring the surgery so little-manfully was lots of flat ginger ale, warm vanilla ice cream and a Crusader Rabbit comic book. They never spoke to me about my outburst.
The earaches returned within a month.
COMING SOON: PART 2 — RETURN TO HOSPITALWORLD