Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I've Learned

by Alan Alda

  “Did you look up to him?”

  “He was my hero when I was a little kid. He was the best athlete in the family. He taught me to appreciate literature. He held my hand when I was learning to cross the street in front of our house. And I watched him disintegrate before my eyes.”

  Now, when Kári visits his brother in the hospital where he’s confined, it depresses him. “Partly because he’s ill and partly because I’m so close to him.” As he talked, I could see why my mother had depressed me, why I had avoided talking with her, even thinking about her, for so long. I was too much like her. I was afraid I’d become her.

  “You see in your own behavior a reflection of the disease of your loved one,” Kári said. “The abnormality of schizophrenic behavior is simply an exaggeration of what is found in the ‘normal.’ Only it’s persistent.”

  Not long after I talked with Kári, I picked up a copy of Nature and read something that brought me the rest of the way: “During REM sleep, there is . . . selective activation of the amygdala and other parts of the limbic system.” The amygdala, the part of the brain that is so important in registering emotions and is crucial in laying down long-lasting memories, is also active in dreaming.

  This is relevant for our understanding of the heightened emotion—especially the feelings of anxiety, anger and elation—that so commonly dictate the development of the dream plot. . . . An abnormal sensitivity to dopamine is thought to mediate psychosis and its unmodulated action in REM may contribute to the madness of dreams.

  The madness of dreams.

  I remembered a dream I had had thirty years ago but is still vivid to me.

  I’m walking in Atlantic City. I turn a corner and out on the ocean I see two large cruise ships lying on their sides. I have a feeling of dread. I walk quickly, anxiously, until I find an entrance to a tunnel. Underground, I open a door and there are twelve people around a table. We eat and drink some wine. We’re all strangers, but there’s a feeling of fellowship, all of us having made it to safety. We introduce ourselves around the table. The last person to introduce himself is a man with a bald head. “Well,” he says, “I’m known by many names.” Instantly, I pitch forward, my head thudding the table in death.

  I woke up after this dream with a pounding heart. I knew I was alive, but in the twilight between sleep and waking, the dream was still real. I saw him say it again, “I am known by many names,” and he almost had me once more.

  Now, not only did I know what it was like to be her, I realized that I actually go through a version of her madness every night when I dream—especially when my dreams stir me with fear and anxiety. She must have felt that same sense of helplessness, except that eventually I would wake up to a world that seemed right again, but she never would.

  chapter 19

  IN THE ZONE OF EROGENY

  Raquel Welch, whom I’ve met but never kissed, once called the brain an erogenous zone. It is. But I’ve had to learn how to woo the thing.

  Starting with a gray cloud of brain cells that was subject to storms and flash floods, I had to learn to make my own internal weather. I had to learn to act on my anger when I chose to and be suspicious only when I ought to. I’d wanted to write since I was eight, but I had to learn to organize my mind so that the pleasure of putting words next to one another and playing with sound and meaning could become a more structured, higher-level game. It meant so much to me to be accepted as a writer the night I won an Emmy for writing an episode of M*A*S*H that I actually did a cartwheel in the aisle on the way to the stage to receive it. But at first, simply getting the words to come out of my head was the achievement. It took three years to write the screenplay for The Seduction of Joe Tynan because I couldn’t get a scene down on paper when it didn’t want to come out. When it was ready, I’d give myself over to it, no matter where I was. So a lot of it was written on planes and in the backseats of taxis.

  With the screenplay for The Four Seasons, I holed up in a room in our house and would come out only for dinner at the end of a long day. After six weeks, all I had was sixteen pages and a tortured look on my face. Arlene said, “Your eyes are spinning. It’s like you’re not here. Why don’t you go off for a couple of weeks by yourself? Maybe you need a break. I know I do.”

  I borrowed a friend’s house by a lake, and on the way there I stopped off and bought enough food to last about ten days. My plan was to turn off the phone and write day and night, stopping only to eat and sleep.

  My brain had been stuck in revision hell, and the reason I had only sixteen pages was that I kept making changes every time I wrote a line. Norman Lear told me once about a way of working that had saved him from severe writer’s block, and I was going to use it at the lake. I dictated the scenes into a tape recorder and disciplined myself never to go back to change or even listen to what I had said earlier. I was working from an outline, so it became a kind of controlled improvisation, but it poured out. If I got stuck while I was sitting in a chair looking out over the water, I moved to another room or walked in the woods. When I got stuck there, I took out the rowboat and sat in the middle of the lake, talking to myself as if I were the characters in the movie. At the end of the tenth day, the food ran out and I had finished the first draft of the screenplay. Later, reading the transcript of what I had dictated, I was surprised at how many useful things I had come up with, things that I couldn’t even remember saying. I reworked the script many times before we shot it, but most of that draft from the lake house wound up in the picture.

  As I got older, I noticed there was a lot more I needed to work on. I had always been a little anxious—uncomfortable in a crowded room, even reluctant to answer the telephone, since I might have to chat, which made my heart rate go up. It wasn’t until I learned to ask questions on Scientific American Frontiers that I overcame stage fright at cocktail parties.

  Actual stage fright hit me once when I was doing a play in London. I was playing the Stage Manager in Our Town, a part in which for most of the evening you talk directly to the audience. There are almost no cues from the other actors to prompt you, and the danger of forgetting your lines hangs over you all evening. As a young actor, I never gave a thought to learning lines. After two rehearsals, I could put down the script and play the scene without missing a word. But onstage in London one afternoon, as I spoke to the audience, I heard a voice in my head that spoke in a taunting tone. This was disturbing, because it was clearly my own voice. What makes you think you’ll remember the next line? it said. I tried to ignore the voice and said my next line. Well, sure, you got that line, the voice said. What makes you think you’ll remember the next one? I could feel rivulets of sweat running down my body. This attack lasted for about a minute, with the voice challenging me on every line. No one watching knew what was happening, but I understood, standing there in my drenched shirt, that I was now, officially, an anxious person.

  I found, too, that I could easily move into a blue mood without much provocation. Early in my life, this was masked by an ebullience that spilled over onto everything I did, but after about forty years together, Arlene said to me, “You know what? You’re not laughing anymore. Everything seems negative to you.” Our friend Steve Cohen, a doctor, suggested gently to me during a walk down a country road that I might talk to his brother-in-law, Sandy, an expert in pharmacology. I hated the idea of taking pills, but I went to see him.

  “What seems to be the problem?” Sandy asked.

  “Well,” I said, “my wife tells me I don’t laugh anymore.” I wondered if there was a pill for that. After a few questions that probed a little deeper, he said he thought I did have a problem and that he could try me out on Zoloft. I said sure, and it worked. He had warned me it might not kick in for a week or two. But he hadn’t known how susceptible I was to suggestion. I had been the star subject in the hypnosis study in the Bronx. I was Mr. Placebo. After the very first pill I was laughing again, back in the erogenous zone. A good thing, too. In a couple of years I would be headed for the
experience of my life, and it was one that needed a pretty good sense of humor.

  chapter 20

  DOWN IN CHILE

  The best things come last. You spend hours with someone, and then as you say good-bye, one of you says something casually that puts your heart up where your head was. It happened when we said good-bye to M*A*S*H, and as the series of science shows was coming to an end, it happened again. I finally got in touch with the inner and outer reaches of the universe.

  8:50 p.m. saturday

  The Andromeda Galaxy is in front of me, and to my right are some nice spiral galaxies and a couple of supernovas. I’m staring at photographs on the wall of a white room eight thousand feet in the sky.

  I’m just outside of La Serena, Chile—in a giant observatory that glows in the night like a white knob on top of a mountain called Cerro Tololo. I’m here to interview astronomers about dark energy in the universe. I’m not aware yet that there is a bit of dark energy bubbling inside me.

  I’m sitting on a blue leatherette bench in the waiting room while the crew lights the observatory’s control room for the last shot of the day. I hear a gurgle in my stomach and feel one of those very slight cramps that signal you may or may not be in for a night of urgency. But it’s only one gurgle. It could go away.

  Maybe this is the afterglow of that hot pepper sauce I had at lunch yesterday at the observatory up on Las Campanas. Everybody warned me against it. When I got some of it on my fingers, my astronomer friend, Alan Dressler, took me into the men’s room and washed my hands so I wouldn’t get any of it in my eyes and blind myself.

  Now my stomach is gurgling again. And this time the cramps are sharper. I’m pretty sure the discomfort will go away. On the other hand, my belly is getting larger. It’s actually swelled to almost twice its normal size. I undo the top button of my pants and pull my sweater over the open zipper. I decide not to tell the crew I’m not feeling well. I must think it’s a minor problem, because I love to tell people I’m in pain. I’m macho only when I can get credit for it.

  9:00 p.m. saturday

  The observatory’s control room is all computers and keyboards. The astronomers, Nick Suntzeff and Chris Smith, are taking me through the process of locking the telescope on to a patch of sky and taking two-minute exposures, hoping to catch that moment when a star begins exploding eight billion or so light-years away.

  My stomach is very much distended now. It’s pushing the top of my pants farther apart, but it’s hidden under my sweater and the pain isn’t that bad yet. I joke with them as they explain to me what they’re doing. They tell me that tonight is the beginning of a new run of observations that will pinpoint the exact locations of supernovas so the Hubble and other telescopes can look at them with greater resolution. By examining a supernova’s red shift, they can tell how fast its galaxy is moving away from all other galaxies. All of which will throw light on the ultimate fate of the universe. Contrary to what everyone thought until recently, the expansion of the universe is not slowing down. It’s speeding up. What is the dark energy pushing it apart? Will it keep spinning away from itself, faster and faster, forever?

  After about twenty minutes, we’re done with the interview. Peter Hoving, the cameraman, closes in for a tight shot of my face. If you look at the tape of this shot, you can see my wan, slightly green face as the energy drains out of it. “I can’t do this anymore,” I say to the camera. “I’ll be in the toilet.”

  9:30 p.m. saturday

  I’m facedown on the blue leatherette bench in the waiting room. Now I’m really sick. I’m ER sick. The pains are coming in waves. They form my own private universe, and the expansion of my universe is not slowing down, it’s accelerating. The final fate of my insides is as much a mystery as the final fate of the cosmos in the other room.

  In a case like this, you read the faces of the people looking at you as you writhe to figure out how bad it is. Graham Chedd looks concerned. In the past, I’ve kidded him about his casually putting me next to sharks and volcanoes and wild bears. Now, as he morphs in and out with the blue vinyl of the bench, he doesn’t look casual. Reassuring me, he says, “We don’t have to go back to La Serena tonight. We can stay here and go down in the morning when you feel better.”

  I lower myself back down, and the blue vinyl fills my field of vision. Stay here? Here is what’s killing me. I want my natural habitat: a hotel lobby. Room service. Cable.

  “I have to get off the mountain,” I say, lifting up my head. “Maybe I have altitude sickness.” We did a story once on altitude sickness, so of course that’s what I think I have.

  I get another wave and sink back into blue vinyl. Days later, on the Internet, I’ll read a formal description of what’s going on.

  The Merck Manual, Sec. 3, Ch. 25

  Mechanical Intestinal Obstruction: Complete arrest or serious impairment of the passage of intestinal contents caused by a mechanical blockage. . . . In strangulating obstruction, arterial and venous flow of a bowel segment are cut off. . . . Severe intestinal distention is self-perpetuating and progressive, intensifying the peristaltic and secretory derangements and increasing the risks of dehydration, ischemia, necrosis, perforation, peritonitis, and death.

  None of the people around me has quite the turn of phrase possessed by the folks at Merck. But their huddled muttering produces a decision.

  They call for the medic. Because of a history of mining accidents, Chile by law requires a medic and ambulance to be standing by in remote mountain locations like this. A few minutes later, the medic is palpating my belly and looking as uncertain as Graham.

  Merck: . . . if cramps become severe and steady, strangulation probably has occurred.

  The cramps are severe and steady. And I’m feeling the strangulation. Someone has his hand inside my belly and is squeezing it like a pink Spalding.

  Merck: The bowel becomes edematous and infarcted, leading to gangrene and perforation. . . . Strangulating obstruction can progress to gangrene in as little as 6 hours.

  Thank you, Mr. Merck. You can shut up now.

  10:00 p.m. saturday

  They take me a couple of hundred yards down the mountain road to the clinic. We stopped here when we arrived earlier in the day. I said hello to the medic and stuck my arm out the window of the car to shake his hand. Now he’s trying to stick a needle into the artery of that arm, but he’s having trouble jamming it in. He wants to check my blood oxygen.

  I have the sudden, grateful urge to throw up. Grateful, because I cling to the hope that if only I can get the badness out of my system, I’ll be all right. I make a vomitory announcement and lean over the side of the gurney.

  Merck: Vomiting starts early with small-bowel obstruction.

  It certainly does. But of course there’s no relief. It’s getting worse. It hadn’t occurred to me it could get worse.

  The medic and I both think it might be appendicitis. He calls down to La Serena, maybe the fourth largest city in Chile, and tells them to have a doctor standing by who can do an appendectomy.

  11:00 p.m. saturday

  I’m packed into the ambulance for the trip down the mountain. But we sit there.

  They can’t get the ambulance started.

  The motor turns over, again and again, without success. Someone gets out and tinkers under the hood. Finally, the motor rumbles and we start the hour-and-a-half descent down bumpy mountain roads. With every peristaltic thrust, I moan. About halfway down, Nick Suntzeff, the astronomer, reassures me that we’re getting onto a stretch of smooth road now, but it makes no difference. The pain gets worse, and I can tell by Nick’s involuntary wince that my moans are getting louder.

  1:00 a.m. sunday

  Ceilings are skimming by overhead as they wheel me down corridors of a clinic. We’re in La Serena. I go in and out of consciousness, but I never take a break from the screaming. The show must go on.

  Later, I pieced together much of the rest of this night and the days that followed.

  We were
met by Dr. Nelson Zepeda. Not only could he do an appendectomy, he’s a fully qualified colorectal surgeon. As we met, I was all moans, but he couldn’t give me morphine until he knew what was wrong with me.

  Quickly, he arranged for X rays and ultrasound. He had a CAT scan machine, but no one could find a radiologist. It didn’t matter. He knew what was wrong. I didn’t have appendicitis, and it wasn’t the hot peppers at lunch; I had intestinal blockage. Some of my bowel was poking through a band or loop that had grown on the side of my omentum. The omentum is an apron of tough material that lies over the gut, protecting it and defending it against injury. In this case, like a corrupt police force, it wasn’t trying to protect and defend; it was causing the harm. The small intestine had poked through the loop on the omentum, and its blood supply was choked off. Peristalsis kept pushing it through. With each passing minute, more and more of me was dead and dying. He had to operate as soon as possible.

  But this clinic wasn’t as well equipped as the public hospital across town. So we headed for that hospital.

  Back down the hallways, ceilings going by overhead. Bumping across the sidewalk, listing precariously as I was lifted into the ambulance. The ride. Out of the ambulance, listing as they lift. Another bumpy sidewalk. (Another bumpy sidewalk?) More ceilings flashing by overhead, but this time the ceilings and walls were older, dimmer, dirtier. In spite of the dinginess, though, this was where the equipment was better. At one point here, I finally got some morphine.

  1:30 a.m. sunday

  The pressure on Graham was enormous. He had to weigh everything he saw and heard and then get through to Arlene, five thousand miles away in New York, and then to me, five thousand light-years away on planet Morphine, and help us decide whether or not to go ahead with an operation. What did he make of the dingy, dirty hallways, the dimly lit emergency room?