by John Meadows
I was surprised to see that the patient was actually lying face down. She was unconscious and without all the tubing, gauges and dials of last week. The theatre nurses positioned the trolleys, and then lifted the green sheet to expose the back of the patient’s leg. It was as white as a marble sculpture by Michelangelo. “That’s because of the tourniquet,” explained one of the nurses, noticing my surprised expression.
The double doors opened, and in walked the surgeon, arms held slightly aloft in the customary manner. (There I go again, sounding like a seasoned operator).
“Good evening everyone,” said Mr Habib as he walked towards us. He had a pronounced limp, and from the echoing sound of his footsteps it was apparent that he had a false leg. An orthopaedic surgeon with a wooden leg! I couldn’t help wondering if he was a particularly clumsy orthopaedic surgeon. I was reminded of ‘Not Only, But Also’, the popular television comedy show of the 1960s and the classic sketch in which a one-legged Dudley Moore hopped around while auditioning for the role of ‘Tarzan.’ A bemused Peter Cook uttered the immortal line, “I can’t help but noticing that you seem to be deficient in the leg department, to the tune of one.”
Mr Habib was aware that I was a vacation student, there to merely observe the procedure. However, he still instructed me to stand at the operating table, but this time near to the patient’s feet.
With the team in position, he began by making an incision about six inches along the back of the patient’s lower leg and ankle. I was almost as close to this as last week’s operation. Again I was totally transfixed, but what was totally fascinating was that there wasn’t any blood, apart from the odd drop which was quickly dabbed away by the nurse using a swab held by a metal implement. It looked like a cold chicken drumstick. The surgeon then carefully probed the six inch incision with a few spatula-type instruments and skilfully separated and identified the ligaments, tendons, and nerves. He even gave us a commentary as he identified each one, using medical terminology.
It was not dissimilar to watching an electrician doing a re-wire or a telecom engineer working on a seemingly unfathomable tangle of wires and cables in a junction box. The important difference being that if an electrician or telephone engineer cuts a wrong wire it can be rectified. If a surgeon cuts a wrong ‘wire’ a patient could be crippled for life. What skill, knowledge and responsibility. I was in awe.
Mr Habib identified the Achilles tendon and explained that he was going to cut half-way through at two points a few inches apart on opposite sides. He would then split the tendon lengthwise between those two incisions, a sort of z-shape cut. This would enable him to re-adjust the angle of the foot and, at the same time, stretch the tendon. After he had made the three cuts, while wearing specialist magnifying spectacles similar to those worn by a jeweller, the surgeon said that it was time to re-adjust the foot.
“Can you just give me a hand here?” he asked me casually.
‘Here we go again,’ I thought. He asked me to support the slightly elevated leg by holding it firmly. As I held the leg, he said that he would now straighten the foot. He seemed to put his whole weight behind it as he pushed the sole of the foot up from a pointing position. The foot had been in that position for about forty years. Once it started to move it made the most dreadful crunching, cracking sounds. It sounded like footsteps on a gravel path.
Once the foot was in its new position, the surgeon sewed up the tendon and checked on the position of all the other ‘cables’ which operate the ankle. The incision was closed, sewn-up with precision, and the foot, ankle and lower calf set in a plaster cast. Exactly the same operation would be carried out on the patient’s other leg a week later.
“She should be up and about in six weeks’ time,” Mr Habib told us later over a cup of tea. Somehow the chicken drumsticks didn’t seem quite so appetizing. I never managed to find out why the surgeon was deficient in the leg department, to the tune of one.
A denouement to this particular story happened during my final week at Rainhill Hospital. One morning Henry told me that I had a visitor waiting to speak to me in his office, but he declined to tell me who it was. I felt as though I was a schoolboy on his way to the headmaster’s study. I was greeted by a nurse who I had seen around the hospital, but we had never actually met.
“Good morning John,” she enthused, greeting me with a warm smile as if we were old friends. “Do you recognise this lady?” she asked as she gestured toward her companion who was sitting on a chair next to Henry’s desk. It was a lady in her mid-40s, who was obviously a patient in view of the fact that she was wearing a dressing gown.
“Erm, let me think,” I answered with a quizzical expression. I then noticed light bandages around her ankles and realised who she was. “I know who you are. You are Helen, who had the operation on your legs.”
They both nodded, and as I started to walk towards her to shake hands, the nurse put out her hand towards me and said, “No John, you just stand there.”
At that point Helen slowly started to stand up from her chair, while steadying herself with her hand on the desk. She then gave me a beaming smile and took her first steps towards me. I felt like a parent watching a toddler take her first-ever steps. I almost instinctively adopted a pose in readiness to catch her if she stumbled forward.
“Don’t worry,” the nurse assured me. They had obviously practised this demonstration. Helen walked hesitantly and greeted me with both hands.
All I could say was, ‘Fantastic’.
Her nurse explained that Helen had been told by the theatre nurses that I had been present at her operation. They had pointed me out to Helen as I had walked past one day. It must have been during a rare time when I was wearing my white coat on my way to the canteen, because the nurse whispered to me that Helen thinks that you are the surgeon who performed her operation.
I walked outside into the bright sunshine with them and Helen gave me a big hug and whispered, “Thank you,” before setting off very slowly back to her ward, without a walking frame. I couldn’t speak. She had been disabled since birth. My insignificant contribution was to have merely held her leg, but as I watched Helen walk away I felt as proud as if I had been the surgeon.
When I returned to the office Henry said, “Wasn’t that nice.”
I had a lump in my throat and I merely nodded. Eventually I said, “How could Helen possibly think that I am a consultant orthopaedic surgeon? I’m only twenty two!”
“You should have realised by now John that many psychiatric patients have little concept of age or time.”
There was a television police series in the 1960s which always ended with the American narrator saying something like, ‘There are ten million stories in the ‘Naked City’, this has been one of them.’ To a lesser extent it also sums up my experience at Rainhill Hospital. Norma and Jeff, in the geriatric ward, and Bill, in the secure unit, provided hours of fascinating stories: funny, sad, poignant, awe-inspiring, and downright frightening. It was an amazing time for all of us, and even forty years later we all look back on a richly rewarding experience.
Just before we left to go back to our studying, Norma was called to the hospital administrator’s office. She was offered a full-time job and they asked her to train to be a fully-qualified psychiatric nurse. She had impressed them with her dedication, compassion and aptitude, but she politely declined the offer. It is ironic that Norma had been the reluctant recruit who only entered the hospital as moral support for Jeff and me.
Today in the 21st century, the site of Rainhill Hospital is occupied by residential housing, and the once-imposing high sandstone wall is now the height of a garden fence. Whenever I am passing, I cannot help but visualise the familiar faces from all those years ago: the ghostly images of Charlie, Ernie, George and all the others, and memories of the care, professionalism, and humour of former colleagues Henry, Malcolm and Anne.
Oh, by th
e way, I am sure you must be wondering if I ever played Charlie Rosewall at chess. Well, I did eventually pluck up the courage to take him on. Unfortunately I didn’t learn much or pick up any tips, because the games didn’t last long enough.
When the Oscar-winning movie ‘One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ was being shown at the cinema a couple of years later a friend in the pub asked us if we had seen it.
“Seen it?” answered Bill whimsically, “We’ve lived it!”
Chapter Four
West Side Stories
‘America Needs You’ proclaimed the poster on the notice board of Leeds University Students’ bar, a place where I seemed to spend a lot of my time. If the poster had been in the library, I would probably have missed it. It featured a top-hatted ‘Uncle Sam’, wearing a stars and stripes coat, while pointing his finger to recruit students to go to the USA to work as counsellors as part of the British Universities ‘Camp America’ programme. It was of course a parody of the famous, now iconic, war-recruitment poster of Lord Kitchener demanding ‘Your Country Needs You’. The prospect of spending my summer holidays working in yet another hot, sweaty, noisy glass factory in St Helens was hardly appealing, so I picked up an application form from the front office. Also, it happened to be the year that Norma completed her training at college and her first job required her to work for some months in London. So the time was right for me to go to America. One of those ‘if not now, when?’ decisions. I wanted to spend the summer on predominantly outdoor activities, and consequently, when completing the application form, I accentuated my sporting attributes and played down my artistic background in the hope that I would avoid working all summer inside an art room. However, the only sport which I considered myself any good at was rugby, which wasn’t exactly a major sport in America. I enjoyed playing tennis, five-a-side football, swimming and running, but only for enjoyment and certainly nowhere near any competitive level.
I started to grasp at straws when I remembered that during my first year at University I had signed up for the fencing club, and only because a flat-mate had joined and it was something to do on a Wednesday night. We had been taught by a visiting French instructor who apparently had been a renowned fencer in his day. I went for lessons for a year and quite enjoyed it, but rugby commitments took over and I had to give up fencing. Since I was becoming desperate looking at the vast empty spaces of my application form, I decided to include it and keep everything as vague as possible. I was going to include baseball on the flimsy premise that we used to play rounders at school as an alternative to cricket, but a friend very wisely advised me that it would not enhance my application in American eyes.
To my great surprise, I was invited to attend an interview at the Queen’s Hotel in Leeds and was subsequently accepted on to the scheme. I was offered a position as a counsellor at Maplehurst Camp in Michigan. I couldn’t believe that I was being given free flights to the USA with connecting internal flights. I felt as though I had won a holiday in a competition.
I like to be in America
Flying to America alone in the early 1970s was quite a daunting prospect. British stag parties to Las Vegas, family holidays at Florida theme parks, and weekend Christmas shopping trips to New York were still some way in to the future. The only person that I knew who had actually been to America was Bill, who had worked at a summer camp in New York State in 1969. I remembered him telling me that he had been to a music festival at somewhere called Yasgur’s Farm, at some place called Woodstock. I received my flight tickets, a hotel voucher for one night in New York, and on-going connections from La Guardia airport to Detroit, and then Traverse City on the shore of Lake Michigan. Finally, I caught a bus to a small town called Kewadin, the kind of mid-American place that ‘Rambo’ would be run out of by the local sheriff. If you imagine that the State of Michigan is your right hand, palm upwards, then Kewadin is on the tip of your little finger. The only other name I recognised on the map was Bay City on the southern edge of Saginaw Bay; which is between my index finger and thumb, an inlet of Lake Huron. The current boy-band sensation in Britain at that time was the Bay City Rollers, who apparently chose their name at random from a map of the USA. I suppose it could have been worse, the pin could have landed on Gobblers Knob in Pennsylvania. Or what about Wanker’s Corner, a town in Oregon, or Shitbritches Creek in California. My favourite is an island on the Potomac River in West Virginia, but somehow I don’t think there would be a great music career for a group called The Piss Pot Island Rollers.
As I made my way from the bus I was warmly greeted by the owner Dr. Thomas Cohen who escorted me to the main lodge, which was in a beautiful setting surrounded by pine trees and overlooking a lake. It was a white building skirted by the ubiquitous American porch supported by stone-built pillars, the type that should have some bearded old guy sitting on a wooden rocking-chair whittling all day. It was quite a hectic time with cars and buses constantly arriving disgorging children and adults; all struggling with baggage, but it was a sort of organised chaos as the luggage detail of older campers took charge of the unloading. Everyone seemed to know each other as they exchanged whoops and high-fives. One guy threw an American football an impressive distance over to his friend.
“Hey, I see you’ve still got your arm,” he shouted enthusiastically as he caught the pass. I looked over sympathetically, but with admiration, as I thought he was performing exceptionally well since he must have had a prosthetic limb. Just the first of many Americanisms I was to come to terms with.
I was introduced to Bob Speilman, who was to be my co-counsellor sharing responsibility for a group of boys. Bob could not have made me feel more welcome as he greeted me with a firm handshake and a broad smile. He was about twenty years old, slim build with wavy brown hair, and he wore large glasses which made his eyes appear slightly too big for his head. He had a very relaxed, easy-going manner and I liked him immediately.
“Have you met Richard yet?” he asked.
“No.”
“Oh, he’s from England as well, you might know him,” he added, as if we all knew each other. Richard Harris had been teamed up with Bob’s best friend Bruce Tabener, and, following further introductions, we all became instant friends. Richard was tall, slim and athletic-looking. He had straight brown hair with a traditional left-side parting, which seemed to suit his rather reserved English manner. Bruce was simply an Art Garfunkel lookalike. I wondered if it took him four days to hitch-hike from Saginaw.
“I see you’ve got Robert Minichello in your group this year,” Bruce muttered wistfully to Bob, who smiled faintly and nodded with the resigned air of someone who had just drawn the short straw.
The family who owned Maplehurst could have been straight out of central casting for a Judy Garland movie. Dr. Cohen was a Paul Newman lookalike and his wife Gillian had the blonde hair, looks and complexion of a Bridget Bardot or a Marilyn Monroe. Not surprisingly their son (and co-director) Lionel and two teenage daughters, Anna and Lena, had all inherited the genes to become the epitome of the all-American family. For the rest of the afternoon, campers and counsellors arrived steadily, mainly from Chicago and Detroit, and it soon became obvious that Richard and I were the only newcomers as everyone knew the well-worn routine of settling in. After our first evening meal everyone assembled and it was time for Bob to introduce me to our group, a fresh-faced bunch of 12 year-olds who greeted me with an indifference to be expected from boys of that age. Robert Minichello was an angelic looking boy with large dark brown eyes which had a faraway look. His hair was thick, straight, shiny and jet black, combed forward to a straight fringe just above his eyebrows. Terry Banner was small and skinny with straight black hair. He wore thick horn-rimmed glasses which made him look like a mini Woody Allen. Only when they found out that I was from England did they show any enthusiasm, with questions like “Have you met the Queen?,” “Do you know the Beatles?,” and “Why is it always raining in English movies?”
The following morning we were given an introductory tour of the camp which had facilities for numerous indoor and outdoor activities including arts and crafts, drama, ballet, photography, baseball, basketball, archery, golf, martial arts, tennis, horse riding and water sports such as water skiing, kayaking, yachting, scuba diving snorkelling and fishing. All the counsellors were asked to assemble at the main lodge for a briefing. We were introduced to the Activity Coordinator, a formidable-looking character with the gloriously American name of Moose. I found out sometime later that his name was actually Ralph. He was about six three with a frame to match, long straight brown hair, and a handlebar moustache. He had the healthy complexion of someone who spends all his time outdoors. He worked freelance and travelled around in his huge American Winnebago to other summer camps and elsewhere to organise other programmes for sports clubs, corporate business men and schools. Everyone knew him from previous seasons but he made a special point of personally welcoming Richard and me during his opening address. From his clip-board he started to read out all the various positions allocated to the assembled counsellors.
“Bob Speilman, baseball as usual.
“Judy Asnavour, swimming.
“The first of our Englishmen, Richard Harris, will be coaching tennis.”
And so it went on as everyone smiled and nodded their approval when they were given their responsibilities for the forthcoming season. Golf, water skiing, and scuba were all ticked off, and then Moose announced “art and craft studio.” I tensed, hoping that my name would not be called out, especially after seeing all the outdoor facilities under a beautiful blue sky in the glorious sunshine. Fortunately, three names were called out, and I was still like a kid in a school playground waiting to be picked for the football team.
“Now, the second of our two Englishmen, John Meadows,” announced Moose looking up towards me from his clip-board, “...Fencing.” I found myself nodding and smiling as everyone else had done, but as he moved on to the next counsellor my mind was in secret turmoil.