My brain wasn’t. Freeman said that I didn’t know where I was or what was going on. “When I saw him this morning, he recognized me but thought he was on Orange Street and that the day was Monday instead of Saturday. He did not know that anything particular had happened to him.”
Well, I knew something had happened, because I felt terrible. I may have picked up some kind of infection. Freeman’s next set of notes, written the following Wednesday, read, “Howard had a rough time of it over the weekend. His temperature went up to 102.4 degrees, his neck was stiff; he had severe headache and was quite sluggish. I did a spinal puncture which showed some 4,000 white cells and 90,000 red cells, but the culture was sterile. During the waiting period for the culture I had given him about five or six doses of penicillin, 1 million units each, and his temperature promptly came down and stayed down.”
Freeman was sort of famous, or infamous, for that “spinal puncture.” Years before he had developed something he called the “jiffy spinal tap.” Though he was accused from the beginning of risking his patients’ lives using it, he liked this procedure for the same reason he liked the transorbital lobotomy: It was quick, and cheap, and didn’t require an operating room or an assisting physician. With his “jiffy” procedure, Freeman simply had his patient sit in a chair turned around backward, with his head bent forward and his chin resting on his hands. Freeman then punctured the spinal column with a needle and entered the spinal canal at the base of the skull, between the first vertebra and the skull itself. As one medical writer said in his study of lobotomy, “A slight error (in this procedure) can produce a life-threatening injury.”
The spinal tap, the infection, and the excess electroshock had left me pretty weak. Freeman’s notes on my discharge read, “He was a bit wobbly on his feet when he was discharged from the hospital but was eating well, sleeping well and had no complaint of headache; his neck had loosened up and he seemed quite mild.”
From reading Freeman’s other notes I know the procedure didn’t last more than ten minutes. There are no medical records available about my stay in Doctors General Hospital, so there is nothing but Freeman’s notes to explain the fever and headaches and nausea.
But I do have a receipt, a “Physician’s Service Report,” from Blue Cross Hospital Service of California. It says that I was admitted on December 15 to be treated for “schizophrenia, mixed” and discharged on December 21. Under the heading of “Medical Treatment Rendered,” the paper says, “Transorbital lobotomy. A sharp instrument was thrust through the orbital roof on both sides and moved so as to sever the brain pathways in the frontal lobes.”
The charge for the hospital stay was two hundred dollars.
I don’t remember coming home from the hospital. Neither does Brian. He wasn’t there. Lou had him sent away, maybe because he’d broken down in Dr. Lopes’s office. He remembers being gone about a week. When he came back, I was already home. My parents brought him upstairs, where I was tucked into my bed.
“You were sitting up in the bed, with two black eyes,” Brian said later. “You looked listless. And sad. Like a zombie. It’s not a nice word to use, but it’s the only word to use. You were zoned out and staring. I was in shock. And sad. It was just terribly sad.”
Brian couldn’t remember what explanation Lou or my dad gave him for my condition. He thought they told him I was going to have an operation, something that would make me less angry.
George, being older, was given a little more information. He had been told I was going in for an operation. Lou said they were going to separate the two halves of my brain so I would stop being so “violent.” George was frightened by that. He didn’t think I was so violent. I was no more violent than he was. He knew that Lou got mad at me a lot, and that sometimes I got punished for things I didn’t do. He was afraid they were going to hurt me. He may have been afraid they might hurt him, too. When he saw my black eyes and what shape I was in, George was scared.
I might have been a zombie for a while, but I was not a vegetable. The fight had not gone out of me. Freeman’s next notes, on December 24, are short: “Howard is a bit of a handful, screaming at Mrs. Black and throwing a pillow at her, striking her on the arm and so on when she became too attentive; other than this, he is quite indolent, but he eats and sleeps and smiles well.”
I don’t have any memory at all of the days and weeks that followed. It was as if a fog had settled on me. I don’t remember being in pain. I don’t remember being unhappy. I don’t remember convalescing. Was I in bed? Were people taking care of me? Other than the reference to me hitting Orville’s wife, Evelyn, with a pillow, there’s no information available to help me remember.
This was the beginning of what Freeman referred to as “the echo period.” He said in his notes and his writings that this was a delicate time, following the surgery, when patients must be treated with great care. He had told my father and stepmother that they had to be very gentle with me during this period. I wasn’t supposed to be put under stress. I wasn’t supposed to be yelled at. I was supposed to be babied.
But on January 4, I was back in Freeman’s offices. It was time for him to tell me what had happened. His entry for that day said: “I told Howard what I’d done to him today and he took it without a quiver.”
So now I knew. But, did I? It was only a couple of weeks since the operation. And I was barely twelve years old. How conscious was I? How much could I understand? I wish I remembered.
Freeman’s notes continued: “Also I discussed his activities in front of his parents, much to their concern since Howard has always shown such intolerance to open discussion of his activities. He’s smiling a bit better and he says he doesn’t hate George or his step-mother as much as he used to; he can hardly understand it himself since they still bore in on him.”
All the way back to the first lobotomies, when Freeman was still drilling holes in people’s skulls to do the surgery, he reported that his patients became almost immediately uninterested in the problems that used to make them crazy. The problems were still there but they no longer cared about them. One of Freeman’s first patients became hysterical when they told her, the day before the surgery, that they’d have to shave part of her head to do the operation. She had to be restrained and sedated. A few days later, she was laughing about her bald spots, and thought it was silly that she’d ever been worried about them.
I seemed to have a similar reaction. I was not troubled by anything, Freeman wrote. I seemed almost happy, he said. “He says he doesn’t have time to do much hating because he spends practically all day in front of the television. He still grumbles a bit if a different station is turned on. On the occasion of the Rose Bowl game he thoughtlessly went between his father and the television screen and jumped when his father yelled at him and apologized. He seems more easy to get close to and when his father puts him to bed and gives him a little rubbing or a gentle pat he seems to accept this.”
Freeman went on to say that I was getting along well with Orville but not with Evelyn, so I guess I was back to spending Sundays with them. He also noted that I still teased the dog, and sometimes even teased Kirk. Freeman called these “hangovers” from my “previous activities,” and said he advised Lou to “do a little yelling on her own.” He added that my dad wanted a tutor to come in for a few hours a day. Freeman said he saw no problem with this. He concluded by saying, “Howard looks quite relaxed; he sleeps well, eats well and no longer gives the spine-chilling looks at his stepmother.”
Freeman may have been trying to convince himself that I was all better. He was going to have a hard job convincing his medical colleagues.
A week after that visit with me and my parents, Freeman came to the house to pick me up in his car. We were going to drive up to San Francisco, for a presentation at the Langley Porter Clinic.
Along the way, we picked up two other young lobotomy patients. I didn’t know them, and hadn’t met them before. Richard was about sixteen, Ann was about fourteen.
&nb
sp; I was excited to be going somewhere. Freeman talked the whole way up, not about anything in particular. I got the idea that we were going to some kind of a meeting to talk to people about our operations. Since I always liked it when Freeman wanted me to talk about me, I was happy to go along.
Freeman recorded in his notes that I seemed interested only in road signs, the length of the drive, the populations of the cities we were driving through, and the map of our journey.
When we got there, it wasn’t what I expected. It was a big auditorium, and it was full. The seats were raised, angling away from the stage, almost like an operating theater, so that everyone was looking down on us. There were a lot of people there.
We sat on chairs onstage with Freeman off to the side, standing behind a podium with his notes. He talked a little bit about what he had done to us. He asked each of us a few questions. He recorded that I answered “in quite a low voice, and didn’t have very much to say.”
Neither did Richard. Maybe he got freaked out by all the people, or the lights. He wasn’t able to answer the questions Freeman asked him. Freeman got frustrated, and pushed him to try harder. Richard said, “I’m doing the best I can.” Freeman pushed him to try again.
Someone in the audience shouted something. Freeman explained that we had all had our surgeries quite recently, and besides, we were only children. Someone asked him how old I was—remember, I was a big kid. When Freeman said I had just turned twelve, the doctors were shocked. Only twelve? It was outrageous. The doctors started shouting and yelling. Freeman shouted back. Soon the whole place seemed out of control.
I thought we had done something bad. Other than Lou and my dad, I wasn’t used to seeing adults lose their temper.
And Freeman really lost his. He had brought a box with him, and he suddenly pulled it out and dumped it onto the stage. It was filled with cards—Christmas cards, birthday cards, greeting cards of all kinds—hundreds of them.
“These are from my patients!” Freeman shouted. “How many Christmas cards do you get from your patients?”
He was booed off the stage. We got into the car and drove home.
Freeman later wrote his autobiography—it was never published, but I was able to see some of the pages from it—and he included his memories of the episode at Langley Porter. He said the audience response surprised him.
“I thought I had made a favorable impression,” Freeman wrote. “Such was far from the case. The staff and residents at the institute are steeped in the Freudian tradition, and I was met with a barrage of criticism. Even when I pointed out that these youngsters were adjusting reasonably well at home and some of them even attending school, the specter of damaged brains prevailed. I had with me a box of Christmas cards, over 500 of them, and dumped them on the table. I had lost my temper….”
His notes for the day added that when he got me back home, he presented me with a pocket knife. I told him that I already had two, but that my stepmother had hidden one and my uncle had taken away the other.
“I asked Mrs. Dully about the desirability of him having a knife and she said that he’d jabbed the furniture with a pencil and made deep scratches in it. I told her to see that Howard used it only outside, and to let me know if anything disagreeable happened.”
For the next couple of months the “fog” continued, and so did my stepmother’s irritation with me. I’m not sure why. Even Freeman’s notes seem to suggest I was easier to get along with.
“Mrs. Dully came in with Howard and he seems to have grown another inch,” Freeman wrote on February 4, 1961.
He sits quietly, grinning most of the time and offering nothing. Once in a while, when asked a direct question, he answers, “I don’t know.” Something happened to his bicycle tire so he hasn’t been able to ride that, and he mostly stays around the house, goes outdoors and plays basketball and entertains himself pretty well while the other boys are away, and doesn’t get into as many fights with them. It is a little hard on Mrs. Dully, who has to be there all the time, but Mr. Dully seems to be able to shrug it off pretty well. Mrs. Dully is not an affectionate sort of person nor demonstrative, and Howard certainly isn’t, but it will take a while to get a greater degree of acceptance on the part of his family for Howard. At the present time they are inclined to call him lazy, stupid, dummy and so on, but Howard seems rather serene through all this and doesn’t seem to be upset by such things. He doesn’t go off and sulk and brood over things. He’s sleeping well and eating well, although his table manners are deplorable.
My memory was still shaky, and I don’t remember very much from this period. I know my bicycle was important to me, because my bicycle meant my freedom. I must have gotten it fixed, and I was allowed to ride almost anywhere I wanted. I could take the bike and ride up into the foothills, and be gone half a day without anyone asking where I’d been. When I was gone, no one was around to tell me what to do, or call me lazy, stupid, dummy, or anything else. I remember taking lots of long, long rides.
Whether Lou appreciated these breaks as much as I did, I don’t know. But now that I’d had the surgery, she seemed even more frustrated by her inability to make me the boy she wanted me to be.
“Howard is getting his stepmother down,” Freeman wrote a month later.
But I notice a great change for the better. He’s much more open; he writes and draws better, is more responsive, smiles and, according to his father, is really less trouble in the home than he used to be. Nevertheless, Mrs. Dully says she has to spend all her time keeping Howard separated from the other boys since his behavior with them is difficult in the extreme. There is a plan to find a foster home for Howard; it may be with the Blacks since Mr. Black is so stable although his wife is an unsettling person. I believe Howard will be able to stand this provided he has a room to himself and this may be the fly in the ointment. I called Family Service in Palo Alto and they referred me to the Welfare Department in San Jose…. Evidently Mrs. Dully needs a rest.
My memory began to return to me that spring. It’s 1961. I remember the music on the radio. I can hear Ben E. King singing “Stand by Me,” and Dion singing “The Wanderer” and “Run-around Sue.” There was Del Shannon’s haunting “Runaway,” and the sad “Daddy’s Home” by Shep and the Limelites. It was a great time for music. Ray Charles did “Hit the Road Jack” and Ricky Nelson, one of my favorite singers, did “Hello Mary Lou.”
But the pressure at home continued. By April, Lou had found a way to throw me out of the house.
She found a home for me with a family named McGraw. Mrs. McGraw was an old lady with red hair and glasses who ran a sort of home away from home for kids. She lived on Sunshine Drive in Los Altos, only about ten blocks or so from my house. Her husband was a chubby, quiet guy who worked for the post office.
I liked it there. The McGraws had two sons named Danny and Tommy. They were about eleven and twelve, and we had fun together. They went to school. I didn’t. A “home teacher” named Mrs. Van Horn came in to tutor me for a couple of hours a day. There were also these two little girls, preschool age, who came to Mrs. McGraw’s for day care.
It seemed like my family liked the arrangement, too. Dr. Freeman ran into my dad one afternoon in May at Whitecliff Market, probably when my dad was bagging his groceries. Freeman made a note that “the family has had five weeks of peace.”
They must have liked that peace. I stayed with Mrs. McGraw for several months. I would have stayed longer, but there were several problems with the arrangement.
First was the financial problem. It cost quite a bit to keep a kid like me in a private home. (I learned later that Mrs. McGraw charged six dollars a day for my care.) My parents didn’t want to spend the money, or couldn’t afford to spend the money.
Second was the question of my dad’s pride. It disturbed him that I wasn’t a behavioral problem when I lived at Mrs. McGraw’s, or when I was with Uncle Orville. He didn’t want to admit that someone else might be able to raise his child better than he could. He was hardh
eaded, and a do-it-yourself kind of person. He couldn’t accept that another person or another family could do the job better than him.
So he and Lou tried to get me placed in a state mental hospital.
At their request, Freeman wrote a letter to the superintendent of Napa State Hospital in March, asking him to take me on as a resident patient. “Howard Dully is now 12 years old and a schizophrenic since the age of four,” the letter said. “His behavior was improved for a month or so after I performed transorbital lobotomy on him December 16, 1960, but he is going through the echo period and his step-mother cannot endure his behavior. There seems to be no foster home available.”
Napa was willing to play along. The superintendent wrote back to Freeman, and urged him to have my family bring me in for an evaluation later that month.
I don’t remember going in for the examination, but I must have. The doctors reported back a while later that I was not qualified for residence at the Napa mental institution.
“We did not find him psychotic,” the superintendent wrote to Freeman. “He is not suitable for hospitalization.”
Freeman suggested to my family that they try to get the government to foot the bill for my stay at Mrs. McGraw’s. The superintendent at Napa had another idea: He wrote to Santa Clara County to ask whether I might be made a ward of the court, then adopted by Mrs. McGraw, so that I could stay on there without it costing my parents anything. The county would pay Mrs. McGraw for my care.
The plan took months to organize. There were letters back and forth. Napa State Hospital’s superintendent sent letters repeating his opinion that I was not psychotic, but suggesting to the county that Mrs. McGraw would adopt me or become my official foster parent if my parents would agree to make me a ward of the state.
My Lobotomy Page 11