by John Gunther
So he wrote:
Dec. 3, 1946
DEAR MR. HAYNES,
All my thanks for the things you sent. Against my tutor’s advice I took a three-hour trial exam (a N.Y. regents examination) in two hours, getting 77%. Consequently I don’t think I will have any trouble with the one you sent.
The other day I listed forty-six chemical experiments that I have done in the last five or six years. I will write them up briefly in the hope that they will take care of my chemistry lab, for some time to come.
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 eag
erly, 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.
4
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 t
o 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.