I.Asimov: A Memoir

by Isaac Asimov

  But when I moved in with Janet, I found that things had changed. She was a physician and the daughter of a physician and she was a great believer in perpetual conferences with doctors over every itch and scratch. I was appalled when she began to insist on a general medical once-over.

  “I’m perfectly healthy,” I protested.

  “How do you know?” she said, with a hint of steel in her voice.

  (I’ve discovered that when I hear that hint of steel, the safest thing is to give in gracefully. Janet says I may have discovered it, but I’ve never yet managed to do it.)

  In any case, she had picked up from a colleague of hers the name of Paul R. Esserman. He apparently had the reputation of being an internist (which is what we used to call a “general practitioner” or a “GP”) of unusual intelligence and medical knowledge. Janet insisted I go to him and I was in his office on December 16, 1971.

  Paul, as it turned out, is six feet tall, a trifle overweight, has a soft and soothing voice, and (as I eventually found out) a perfect bedside manner. As usual, I was unable to maintain a business relationship. We became friends and he has been my doctor ever since. I wish earnestly I didn’t need his services as a doctor, but, as it turned out, I did.

  He carried through the first examination and I asked him how things were with me.

  “Perfect,” he said.

  “I knew it,” I said.

  “Except for the nodule on your thyroid.”

  “What nodule?”

  He had me bend my head back and sure enough there was a visible bump on the right side of my neck. “Didn’t you ever notice it when you were shaving?” he asked. “No,” I said petulantly. “It was never there before. You put it

  there.” “Of course,” he said agreeably, “and now we’ll need a good endocrinologist to tell us what it is and what we ought to do.”

  The endocrinologist was Dr. Manfred Blum, who subjected me to a test with radioactive iodine. The thyroid nodule was cold; it did not take up iodine, and therefore was not performing its function adequately.

  “What does that mean, Doc?” I asked.

  Blum hesitated.

  Whereupon I said, rather coldly, “You’re allowed to say ‘cancer,’ Doctor.”

  So that’s what he said, but he pointed out that the thyroid was so specialized a tissue that a thyroid cancer almost never spread and it could easily be cut out.

  So I went to a surgeon, Carl Smith, who cheerfully agreed to take out any affected portion of the thyroid for me and the operation was scheduled for February 15, 1972.

  It was the first time that I had ever had to face an operation requiring general anesthesia, and I was not happy about it. I had heard of rare cases where a person was sensitive to a particular anesthetic and died on the operating table. I also knew that I was fifty-two and that my fellow writer William Shakespeare had died at the age of fifty-two, and I thought that the Fates might easily confuse the two of us. In short, I was scared stiff.

  So I called Stan, the levelheaded member of the family. A few years earlier he had faced, and survived, a serious operation on his spine. I asked him how he had managed to work himself up to face the grim task.

  “I was in dreadful pain,” said Stan. “I could hardly walk. I’d have done anything to rid myself of the pain and I didn’t fear the operation. I looked forward to it. The trouble with your thyroid condition, Isaac, is that it isn’t giving you pain and so you don’t really feel the need for an operation.”

  He was perfectly right and I managed to calm my fears. In fact, before I went in for the operation, they shot me so full of sedatives (over my protests that I was perfectly calm and didn’t need them) that, far from being nervous, I was hilarious.

  When Carl Smith arrived in his green robe and green mask, I greeted him joyfully, and intoned:

  Doctor, Doctor, in your green coat,

  Doctor, Doctor, cut my throat.

  And when you’ve cut it, Doctor, then

  Won’t you sew it up again.

  I don’t remember that anyone laughed. I did hear someone say, “Give the anesthetic, will you, and shut him up,” or words to that effect. And I passed out of consciousness.

  Later, Carl Smith told me exactly how foolish I had been. He explained that he had to cut very carefully to avoid slicing through a nerve, the destruction of which would have left me hoarse for the rest of my life. “Suppose while I was doing that I thought of your little verse,” he said severely, “and started to chuckle over it, so that my hand shook.”

  I’m sure I turned a very pretty green at that point, and I have to repress a shudder every time I think about it, even now. The operation gave me occasion to prove how delightful it was to be a writer. Carl charged me $1,500 for the operation (well worth it)

  and I later wrote up a funny article about it (including my little verse) and charged $2,000 for the piece. Ha, ha, and how do you like that, you old medical profession, you? (I was happier than ever I hadn’t been accepted by any medical school.)

  A side effect of the operation was important.

  My last serious remark before my operation was: “Don’t touch the parathyroids.” It was probably impossible, however, to follow that order. Carl cut out the right half of my thyroid gland and, in the process, two of the four small parathyroid glands normally embedded in the thyroid were undoubtedly cut out also.

  The parathyroids control calcium metabolism, and my kidney stones were calcium oxalate dihydrate in structure. Once the diseased half of my thyroid and those two parathyroids were gone, I never formed another painful kidney stone. That alone was worth the operation.

  Just the same, I was annoyed about the whole thing. I was no longer intact, and I had the scar across the bottom of my neck to prove it.

  Three months after my thyroid operation, Janet’s gynecologist found a lump in her left breast. There was, of course, a period of agonizing uncertainty and, finally, it was decided that a bit of exploratory surgery was necessary.

  It took place on July 25, 1972, with Carl Smith again officiating. I waited in Janet’s hospital room, and as the hours passed my spirits fell. The exploratory surgery had shown the advisability of a mastectomy and Carl Smith performed a radical, taking out the muscle behind the breast also. (Radicals are no longer popular. Janet’s may have been one of the last.)

  It took Janet two or three days to fully realize what had happened. She had lost one of her two small breasts and she wept bitterly. I managed to worm out of her the real reason for her weeping. She felt “maimed.” We were not yet married and she was convinced that, with nothing legal to hold me, I would simply drift off and find someone who was younger, prettier, and had two large breasts.

  I was at my wits’ end. How was I to convince her that what I loved in her was not something one could see or that a surgeon’s knife could reach? Finally, in desperation, I said, “Look, it’s not as though you’re a showgirl. If you were, and if your left breast was removed, you would fall over to the right. As it is, with your tiny breasts, who cares?

  In a year, I’ll be squinting my eyes at you and saying, ‘Which breast did the surgeon remove?’ “ It was a terribly cruel thing to say, but it worked. Janet burst into a laugh and felt much better.

  Janet and I both knew how queasy I was, and she feared that at the first sight of her scarred chest I would gasp in agony and leave and never return. And I was afraid that, although I knew I would not leave, I would indeed gasp in agony and make her forever miserable.

  So I had Carl Smith tell me in detail just how her chest would look and I practiced pretending I was looking at it. Then a few weeks after the operation, when I thought that she had been carefully concealing the matter long enough, I waited till she was through with her shower and gendy drew her towel away from her chest. I did not gasp in agony. I maintained a perfect air of indifference and she was infinitely relieved.

  To this day, she is occasionally stabbed with regret and embarrassment at the missing breast, and asks if I�
��m sure I don’t mind. And I say, in all truthfulness, “Janet, you know I’m not an observing person. I don’t even notice.”

  And I don’t.

  I was even able to joke about it to others. Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey came to visit during the convalescence and carefully talked about everything in the world except missing breasts. Then Judy-Lynn said something or other about “swinging single” bars and said to Janet, “Have you ever been to a swinging single?”

  And I interrupted and said, “Been to a swinging single? She has a swinging single.”

  Judy-Lynn was infuriated and was about to chastise me in her own eloquent way, but Janet intervened. “Don’t listen to him,” she said. “He’s only boasting. Mine isn’t large enough to swing.”

  A magazine on popular medicine asked me to write on some medical emergency faced bravely by myself or a close relative and I said there was Janet’s mastectomy but I didn’t want to write about it till after we were married so that the readers would know that there was a “happy ending.”

  After our marriage, I wrote the article. Naturally, I asked Janet’s permission, and at first she didn’t want to blazon forth her misadventure for all the world to see. But I said, “You know, Janet, it may be die only article ever written on a subject like this in which die writer

  will not carefully give credit to God for giving him die faith and strength to overcome the disaster.” Janet agreed at once, on that basis, and the article was published.

  Cruises

  My animosity toward planes does not extend to ocean liners. Indeed, I love the liners and I suppose it might be a matter of size. When you’re on an ocean liner, you don’t feel as though you’re on a vehicle. You feel as though you are in a hotel that is built horizontally rather than vertically.

  My first experiences with ships were involuntary. I traveled by ship from Riga, Latvia, to Brooklyn, New York, in 1923, but I have only the vaguest and most uncertain memories of that. I also traveled by ship from San Francisco to Hawaii in 1946, but I was in the army then, so the trip was not a joyous one for me. The trip to Hawaii was useful, however. I managed to avoid seasickness although the ship pitched and rolled badly, and the sleeping quarters smelled of vomit because others did not have my hardihood. That helped convince me that I had good sea legs. Of course, I would never of my own accord have volunteered to go on a cruise, even though I didn’t mind being on ships, because such a cruise was bound to take time and I hated to spend that time away from home.

  Once I was living with Janet, however, the pull of the sea grew stronger, because Janet loved it. She had traveled, in her day, much more than ever I had, and this included sea voyages to Scandinavia during the 1960s and earlier to Europe on tramp steamers. She attributed her love to her “Viking ancestry,” of which she is proud. (She also feels that she has preserved some Neanderthal genes, because, she

  says, she has a Neanderthal nose, but I much prefer the theory that she is descended, in some mysterious way, from angels.)

  Because of Janet’s predilection, I was the readier to listen to a fast-talking young man named Richard Hoagland when he came to tell me of his plans to organize a cruise on the Queen Elizabeth 2 no less. In December 1972, it was to travel down die coast of Florida to view the launching of Apollo 17, the last of the planned trips to the moon and the only night launching. I had never watched a launching and I knew that Janet would be overwhelmed with delight at a chance of traveling on the Queen, so I agreed to go. (Janet was indeed delighted at the prospect.)

  As was perhaps usual with plans made by a young man who accepted no limits to his imagination, the reality was not quite the fantasy. We did not go on the Queen Elizabeth 2 but on the smaller (yet quite adequate) Statendam. We did not have a ship filled with eager participants but a ship that was largely empty (which meant we got good service).

  A few celebrities did show up. Among the science fiction writers (other than myself) were Robert and Virginia Heinlein, Ted Sturgeon and his current wife, Fred and Carol Pohl, and Ben and Barbara Bova. Also present were Norman Mailer, Hugh Downs (who was the master of ceremonies), and Ken Franklin (an astronomer with the Hay den Planetarium, who had discovered the radio-wave emissions of Jupiter).

  A terrible mistake was the inclusion of Katherine Anne Porter. She did nothing particular in the course of the voyage but she had made a hit with her 1962 book Ship of Fools, so you can guess what the reporters called us.

  Later in the trip, the astronomer Carl Sagan and his second wife, Linda, joined us. I had first met Carl in 1963, when he was only twenty-eight. He was a science fiction fan and we struck up a good and enduring friendship and indeed I signed his wedding certificate as a witness when he married Linda. There is no need to describe him; everyone knows what he looks like. He and Fred Pohl gave the best talks of the voyage.

  We did see the launching on the night of December 6-7, 1972. It was beautiful and incredibly impressive even when seen at a distance of seven miles out to sea. We watched Apollo 17 climb into the sky, lighting the night into a copper-colored semi-day, and a full minute

  after we had watched it do so, the sound waves reached us and the world trembled. That alone was well worth the trip, even if we hadn’t enjoyed ourselves—but we had.

  In the next year, there was an opportunity for an even more elaborate cruise. This was arranged by Phil and Marcy Sigler; Phil was incredibly retiring and usually talked with his eyes firmly fixed on the floor, while Marcy was incredibly dynamic with her large and beautiful dark eyes transfixing yours. The cruise would be on the Australian liner Canberra and was designed to travel to the shores of West Africa in order to observe a total eclipse of the Sun on June 30, 1973. Remembering the pleasure Janet and I had had on the Statendam, I agreed at once, even though it entailed my giving four talks on astronomy, each talk to be given twice if they managed to fill the ship.

  The cruise was scheduled to leave on June 22, but five days before that Janet had a subarachnoid hemorrhage. What could I do? I knew very well that I was to be the star of the voyage with my talks, but I had to cancel anyway. It was a terrible blow to the Siglers, who begged me to reconsider, but, under the conditions as they existed, I was helpless.

  Except that Janet herself changed the conditions. The subarachnoid had temporarily wiped out much of her mind but enough was left for her to be moaning, “I’ve spoiled everything, I’ve spoiled the cruise,” over and over.

  Paul Esserman said to me, “You’ll have to go on the cruise, Isaac.”

  “I can’t go and leave her in the hospital,” I said.

  “There’s no reason not to. There’ll be no operation. We must simply wait for her to recover, but I can’t be sure she will if she broods only over the cruise. You must go, and I must be able to assure her that you went.”

  So, immersed in misery, and with enough Jewish guilt to drown all the hosts of Pharaoh, I called the Siglers and uncanceled, to their unbounded joy. I made them agree, however, to arrange it so that I could call the hospital, ship to shore, every day.

  I did exactly that, going up every day to the small radiophone room and waiting my turn. I calculated that in the course of the sixteen-day tour I spent about twelve hours in that room. I spoke to her every day but one and received her assurances that she was getting better and that she was happy I was on the cruise. The one day I missed I called Paul Esserman instead to make sure Janet wasn’t lying to me. In the

  end, I saw the eclipse and I was glad I did, for it was the only total eclipse I had ever seen, but all I wanted to do was to get back to Janet (who, by the way, having missed that eclipse, has never seen one to this day).

  In order to pass the time and drown my bitter misery while on the trip, I made myself a “tummler.” That is a Yiddish word meaning “one who makes a tumult, or noise.” They have tummlers at Jewish summer resorts and their function is to tell jokes, organize fun and games, flirt with the plainer and older women, and, in general, create the illusion that there’s a hot time in the
old town tonight.

  I became the tummler for the two thousand people on board ship and, in addition to my eight talks, I told jokes, sang songs, kissed the ladies, took part in the show organized by the crew, and, in general, made enough noise for fifty. It was all completely successful. For years afterward, people I encountered who were on the Canberra told me what a wonderful time they had had.

  It reminds me of one of my favorite stories, which, somehow, I never included in Isaac Asimov’s Treasury of Humor. It goes as follows:

  A gentleman passing through Vienna in the early years of the twentieth century was feeling enormously depressed, even suicidal—so he went to see Sigmund Freud.

  Freud listened to him for an hour, then said, “This is a serious and deep-seated condition not to be dealt with in an afternoon. You must seek professional help and prepare yourself for years of treatment. Meanwhile, however, you may find an evening of surcease. The great Grimaldi the Clown is in town and he has his audiences convulsed with laughter. Attend a performance. For two hours, you will surely enjoy yourself and this may have an ameliorative effect that will last for days.”

  “I’m sorry,” said the depressed gentleman, “I can’t do that.”

  “But why not?” asked Freud.

  “Because I am Grimaldi the Clown.”

  This may sound as though I was feeling sorry for myself on the cruise (an emotion I detest, as you know), but I wasn’t. I lured myself into thinking I was having a good time simply by acting as though I were. It was only afterward, when I was safe with Janet again, that I could look back on the trip and identify myself as Grimaldi the Clown.