“What worries you, Doctor?” I asked. For a moment he looked at me,
perhaps wondering if it were best to make a clean breast of matters;
then without any mollifying preliminaries he said: “That kidney
will have to come out; it’s your only chance. Septicemia and uremic
poisoning have set in, and with the utmost haste we shall be none too
soon.” (Any physician will understand what a meager chance a patient
has under these conditions.)
No judge in pronouncing the death sentence on a criminal ever dealt
a more staggering blow. It fell upon me like an earthquake upon a
tottering structure, and my emaciated physique proved unequal to the
shock. The whirling in my head suddenly increased and in my weakened
highly nervous condition when I thought of cutting in through the newly
healed wound, an oppressive darkness settled over everything and for a
brief space I passed out of the interview. When I came to, the first
thing I noticed was that the air seemed fresh, and the ceiling had gone
back to its normal height. Doctor Braasch regarded me with an anxious
inquiring look.
“Make it as quick as possible,” I said. “Lucky you discovered it.”
“It was _you_ who made the discovery,” he frankly admitted. He
then gave his orders to the nurse. Twenty minutes later I was on
the operating table; Doctor Will and his staff, with a considerable
audience of physicians, all in white masks and gowns, were standing
in readiness, and a nurse was saying, “Now relax and take deep
breaths.” The urgency was such that they broke all precedents of the
institution, since kidney operations were never done there, and Doctor
Will never operates in the afternoon, after operating in the morning.
A dozen or so doctors from the clinic having heard of the _affaire
extraordinaire_ came in to view the proceedings.
Were it possible to relate in detail what followed the next few
days it would only prolong agonizing scenes which would be more
depressing than diverting to both the reader and the writer. If it be
difficult for one with sympathetic tendencies to read of such harrowing
experiences, it is doubly hard to write about them.
They changed my nurse for two others more skilled in surgical cases.
For the first time Doctor Will refrained from his customary jokes, and
whenever he called his face wore a look of seriousness. He was plainly
disturbed; he was also unusually tender and solicitous.
From two or three sources my wife heard that kidney operations do queer
things to people, and some Gloomy Gus assured her that even if I got
well I’d be so peevish that no one could ever live with me. And on the
fourth day after the second operation she chanced to hear one nurse
remark to another in the corridor outside my door--“Isn’t it too bad
that Doctor Will’s patient in Number 88 is going out!”
Nowadays, hospital patients don’t _die_; they merely “_go
out_.”
At night my sleep was broken and constantly haunted by all sorts of
weird dreams and illusions. If there is anything more boresome than the
act of listening to a detailed account of somebody else’s operation, it
is to lend an ear to some fantastic dream; but seeing that the ancient
writers used to lay great stress on these somnific aberrations I will
risk telling of a curious one that still haunts my memory. I dreamed
that someone had brought me a number of small sleep storage tanks,
resembling oxygen tanks, and told me that while I was getting my best
sleep in the early part of the night I should sleep them all full, then
later when the opiate wore off I would have a reserve supply to draw
upon. I took the tanks one by one, slept them full and after capping
them securely I laid them down carefully in a row. Later when I became
semi-wakeful and restless I took up one of the tanks to extract some
sleep from it; but to my amazement the cap had been removed and it was
empty. I examined the others and found the sleep had all been drawn
off. For a moment I wondered who had tampered with my tanks; but the
villain was not far to seek, for lying serenely there beside the last
tank was a husky looking kidney, sound asleep!