When they pulled into the parking lot and started walking up, I remember being a little shocked. Here was this big tall guy, carrying a notepad or something, and behind him was this small woman, carrying a huge amount of radio gear. To a man of my generation, that’s just not right. You don’t make the girl carry everything. I didn’t realize Piya was working for Dave, that she was in charge of all the radio equipment, and this was her job.
They had brought gifts. Somewhere in our discussion I must have told Piya that Barbara collected snow globes, because she had brought one for her. We invited them in and we all sat around the living room, talking, getting to know each other.
In person, just like on the phone, Piya was comfortable to be with. Dave was not as easy. He was very nice, but he had this habit of always moving his eyes around, always looking around the room, like he was searching for something. It made me a little uneasy.
Then, when it was time to do the interview, Dave said he wanted to see our bedroom. That’s where all the junk was. I didn’t want him to go in there. But he said the interview had to be done there, because that was always the quietest room in the house. So we went in. Dave sat in a chair at the side of the bed. Barbara and I sat on the bed. Piya sat at the foot of the bed, holding a big boom microphone.
I don’t remember what Dave asked me. I know I talked about my operation, and my family, and how things went wrong in my family. I was nervous. Dave had a notebook on his lap, and he would make notes with a pencil, and sometimes he’d interrupt me and ask a question. “How did that make you feel?” or “What happened after that?”
After a while we took a break. We decided to get some dinner. We went to a good Mexican place right near our house. After dinner, Dave and Piya went back to their hotel.
Sometime in the night after that dinner, they made a decision. They loved my story. They loved my voice. They decided to drop Walter Freeman as the subject of their documentary. They were going to make their documentary about me.
The next day, they played to my vanity. They told me I had such a beautiful voice and such good radio “presence” that they wanted to tell the story of Walter Freeman by telling the story of my lobotomy. They wanted me to interview all the doctors, nurses, and patients they could find. I would be the voice on the radio interviewing all these people.
I agreed. But I had a few rules. I would not let them use my last name. I would not get on an airplane. I would not interview my father.
They agreed to my conditions. We began. And almost immediately I had to change my mind about the rules I had set down.
First, they wanted me to come to Atlanta, to interview a woman and her mother. The mother had been a lobotomy patient, and the woman had agreed to let her be interviewed. But I didn’t want to fly.
They also wanted me to interview my father. Piya kept harping on this, but in a nice way. She’d say, “We really think we should interview your dad,” or, “We really think it would be good if you interviewed your dad.” I just kept saying, “I don’t want to do that.” I never refused, exactly, and she never insisted. I just kept saying that I didn’t want to do it, and she kept coming back to it.
My problem was that I didn’t want my dad to get upset with me. Our relationship was not great, but at least I had him in my life again. I was afraid that if I told him about the documentary he’d get mad and disown me, or threaten to never speak to me again.
In early 2004, Dave and Piya called with some important news. They had contacted George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where Freeman had donated all his professional papers, and discovered that the archives were open to anyone who had been one of Freeman’s patients. I could ask to see everything Freeman had on me—notes, documents, photographs, everything. But I had to come to Washington in person. The records couldn’t be released any other way. I had to come right away, and I had to fly.
I really didn’t want to. Not because I don’t like flying. It’s because I’m afraid to fly. Really afraid.
I’ve always felt that way. So, because I’m not stupid enough to do things that scare me, I had never been on a plane. But I’ve seen the airplane crashes on TV. I figured, if I’m not on the plane, I don’t have to worry about it crashing.
The other problem is I’m a little claustrophobic. I don’t like to be in confined spaces. And a guy my size on an airplane is automatically in a confined space. I wouldn’t be able to curl up and go to sleep, like some people do when they fly. So that means I would be wide awake, and scared, every minute of the flight.
I know it’s not completely logical. But that doesn’t change the way I feel. When I’m on the ground, in a car or on a bus or a train, I feel like I’m in control. I can get out. Plus, I understand how they work. I don’t understand the plane. I just can’t understand the logic of this giant building up in the air, flying around with people in it. It doesn’t make sense.
But Dave and Piya were insisting. They needed me in Washington, D.C., to get to the archives. They needed me in Atlanta, Georgia, to do that interview. There wasn’t time for me to take the train. There was also the question of the expense. Dave’s production company had frequent flier miles with Delta Airlines, so I could fly to the East Coast and back for free. If I was going to take the train, and get a sleeper, and get my meals taken care of, it would take three days and a lot of money to do what we could do in a few hours, and for free, on an airplane.
I didn’t care about any of that. But I cared about the archives. I wanted to see what was in there. I wanted to see it so badly that I even agreed to get on an airplane.
I tried to psych myself into thinking it was all going to be okay. Why wouldn’t it be okay? People fly all the time. It was going to be fine.
It wasn’t fine. Barbara and I went to the airport. We had planned to take the red-eye to Atlanta, so I wouldn’t have to look out the window and see how high up we were. I took some melatonin to help me sleep, and some Xanax. Neither one of them worked. I was wide awake and scared to death the whole trip.
We landed about five in the morning. I understood why they called it the red-eye.
But I didn’t have too much time to feel sorry for myself. Dave and Piya met us at the hotel lobby early the next morning. We had some breakfast and went to work.
Our first interview was with Ann Krubsack, a woman who had been lobotomized by Freeman at Doctors General Hospital a week after me.
To my surprise, and disappointment, her feelings about Freeman, and her lobotomy, were all completely positive. This little, round, silver-haired woman thought he was a great man and the operation was a wonderful thing.
We got something different during the second interview, with Carol Noell.
She’s the woman I had met on the Internet a couple of years before, through the Web site psychosurgery.org. In person, she was an attractive, light-haired woman. She suffered from MS, so she moved a little slowly.
She had suffered from a lot more than that as a child. Her mother, Anna Ruth, was lobotomized by Freeman in 1950, after being treated for a series of crippling headaches. The procedure cured Carol’s mother of her headaches. It also left her with the mind of a child. And, like a child, she was carefree and without anxiety of any kind. Carol never had a real mother after that.
Piya set up the microphones and recording equipment. I started asking the questions I had worked out with Dave. Carol was easy to interview. She had a story to tell about her mother, and she was ready to tell it.
“Did she worry about stuff?” Carol said. “Nope. Didn’t worry. Just as Freeman promised…”
But she also had “no social graces,” Carol said. If she was out walking and saw people getting together for a party, or sitting down to dinner, she’d walk right into their home and make herself comfortable—even if they were people she didn’t even know.
“She was the greatest playmate we ever had, and the best friend, and we all loved her to death,” Carol said. “But I never called her Mama, or Mommy, or anything. I nev
er even thought of her as my mother, or as my daughter’s grandmother. And I never even took my daughter to see her….”
It was a heartbreaking story, and a very emotional interview for me. This was the first time I had met someone whose life had been damaged, like mine, by a lobotomy. It wasn’t Carol’s surgery, but it affected every day of her life after it took place.
We left Carol Noell and drove the rest of the day to Birmingham, Alabama. By the time we got there, we were all exhausted. We got rooms in a Holiday Inn, and after dinner finally got some rest.
The next morning we met with Rebecca Welch. Her mother, Anita McGee, had been suffering from severe postpartum depression when she was lobotomized by Freeman in 1953. The lobotomy had relieved her depression, but left her distant and disconnected.
“She’s there, but she’s not there,” Rebecca said to me.
Rebecca’s mother had lived in a nursing home for many years, and Rebecca had dutifully visited her, every single week. But she never told anyone about her mother. She never talked about the lobotomy, like it was some kind of shameful secret. In fact, in the nineteen years she had been married, Rebecca had never once taken her husband to meet her mother.
We were scheduled to meet Rebecca at the nursing home. When we arrived, we were taken into a little side room where Rebecca and her husband were waiting. Rebecca was a slender blonde with long curly hair and a strong southern accent. We said our hellos, and spent a few minutes getting to know each other, while Dave and Piya prepared their recording equipment.
Then they wheeled Rebecca’s mother in on a sort of gurney.
She was in bad shape. She tried to talk, but she couldn’t. When she spoke, it sounded like she was gargling. I couldn’t understand anything she said. We tried to talk a little but it was no good.
So Rebecca had her sing something instead. She said, “What was that song, Mom? Remember?”
Together, they began singing “You Are My Sunshine.”
After her mother had been taken away, Rebecca said, “I don’t know who could have perceived this procedure as a miracle cure. The only thing I see that came out of it was hurt and pain for a lot of people.”
I asked her why she had waited so many years to bring her husband to meet her mother.
“It’s been so painful that I’ve tried to stay very far away from it for a long time,” she said. “Kind of like, if you leave it alone, it will go away. But it never goes away.”
“What has changed your mind about hiding from it?”
“You,” she said, and started to cry.
We both broke down. Through her tears, Rebecca told me I was helping people just by standing up and asking the questions I was asking.
“Do you know how many people you’re championing?”
I hadn’t thought of it that way. But hearing her say it helped me believe I was doing something worthwhile. I had been a little leery at times. Was I doing this the right way, going so public with it? Was I doing it for the right reasons? Was I being unfair, or vindictive?
Rebecca said, “You’re like all those people who were locked away, who could not go on this quest, who could not ask all these questions. You’re doing it for all of them.”
That was very moving to me. We sat together and cried for long enough that Barbara started to feel a little left out. Rebecca and I had made a sort of bond. Like me, and like Carol, she had lost her childhood—not to her own lobotomy, but to her mother’s. And like us she had this sense of pain and loss and outrage. And now she finally had met someone who understood that.
I felt stronger about the whole project after that interview. I felt like I could go through anything to get it finished if I was doing it in a way that was going to help other people. It would also heal me in ways I never could have seen ahead of time.
I felt strong enough to get back on an airplane, even. We drove the whole way back to Atlanta from Birmingham that afternoon, with barely enough time to ditch the rental car and get to the airport. We flew up to Washington, D.C., that night.
We were up and out early the next morning. It was February. It was cold. There was snow on the ground. Barbara and I left our hotel escorted by Dave and Piya and their radio equipment, and headed for the archives.
The walk took us past the White House, down Pennsylvania Avenue, toward Washington Circle, until we got to George Washington University. It’s a stately campus, full of trees and historic red-brick buildings. The archives room was in a big, square, modern building with a lot of glass.
The university archivists, led by a guy named David Anderson, took us up to the second floor to a brightly lit room with glass walls and sleek furniture. They were ready for us. There, on a table, was a folder with my name on it. Out of the twenty-four individual boxes of private papers, notes, correspondence, photographs, and published work that Freeman had donated to the university, this was the folder on me.
Piya and Dave asked me to sit at the table in front of the folder, but told me not to open it until they were ready. They set up their recording equipment. Then Dave took the folder and began studying the documents. He wanted to see them before I did, he said, so he could have an idea of what was coming. He wanted to be ready to record my reactions and ask me follow-up questions.
I was nervous—nervous and kind of scared. In that folder was the evidence. This was the proof. The papers inside held the answers to the questions that had been plaguing me for more than forty years: Why did they do this to me? What did I do to deserve it? Was I going to find out I had been an ax murderer or something?
I was the first Freeman patient, and maybe the first lobotomy patient, ever to come forward to see his case history. But the archivists were prepared. There were several boxes of tissues on the table beside the folder. The archivists were ready for someone to do some crying.
Piya held the boom microphone. Dave turned on the recording equipment. One by one, he began handing me things from the folder.
First came the pictures. There were three eight-by-ten black-and-white pictures of me on the operating table. There were before, during, and after pictures—of my face, my head with the needles sticking out, my face bruised and swollen.
They were pretty brutal.
In the before picture, shot with the camera looking straight at me, I’m wearing a hospital gown but the surgery hasn’t started. I’m alert, and calm, and maybe a little defiant. There’s something about the set of my jaw and the look in my eyes that says, “Okay, show me what you’ve got.” I think it must have been taken the day I was admitted, the day before the operation.
In the during picture, I’m lying flat on my back. The photograph was taken of my profile, from my left side. My hair is brushed back off my forehead. My mouth is open. A man’s left hand, with a hairy arm and a shiny wristwatch, is holding one end of a leucotome. The other end is sunk into my left eye socket. It looks like about three inches of the leucotome is actually in my skull.
In the after picture, the photograph was taken straight on again, perhaps by someone standing over me. I’m either asleep or passed out. I look like I’m dead. My face is swollen and my eyes are just slits in my face.
The pictures were not that upsetting to me. They were really graphic, and gruesome, but they didn’t contain any new information. I pretty much knew what they did to me in that hospital. I knew what happened because of it. But I didn’t know why. The pictures didn’t tell me anything about why.
Dave and Piya and their researchers had already seen some of Freeman’s archives. Those twenty-four boxes of his material contained similar photographs and similar documents on all the men and women Freeman had lobotomized over the decades. Freeman was an archivist’s dream. He saved everything—case files on literally hundreds and hundreds of his patients. Most of the files had photos of the patients. There were before, during, and after pictures of them all.
According to Dave and Piya’s research, the highest percentage of the patients were women. Some of the after pictures showed th
em recovering, on vacation, or posing with their husbands or boyfriends or families. The progression from first picture to last was not always an improvement. Some of the patients looked more disturbed in the after pictures than in the before ones. Others seem to span decades. Some of them begin as young women and finish as graying old crones.
Some of the photos were accompanied by holiday greeting cards, or newspaper clippings about the patient’s activities. A lot of the patients appeared to be writing in response to something they’d received from Freeman. These letters began by saying, “Thank you for your recent card,” or something like that.
Some patients were writing to report on their health. Others wanted marital advice. A surprising number talked about the weather. I thought that was weird. If you were exchanging letters with the doctor who had penetrated your brain with an ice pick, why would you write about having had a lot of rain this summer?
Other boxes contained holiday cards from former patients, each with a handwritten note indicating whether the patient had undergone a lobotomy or a transorbital lobotomy, and when. A woman named Onoria, of Harrodsbury, Kentucky, appears to have been Freeman’s ninetieth lobotomy patient. She wrote on a Christmas card, “How often we think of you—and how we were directed to you. God gave you a wonderful brain and skill. I feel good and am thankful I was saved….”
Another woman, named Adelle, appears to have been Freeman’s 537th lobotomy patient and then his 43rd transorbital patient. In 1958, she wrote to thank Freeman for his recent greeting card but went on to complain that “negros were crowding in to the neighborhood” where her sister was building a house. Three years later, a handwritten note explained that Adelle had moved in with the sister. Three years later still, the holiday greeting card was from the sister, not the patient. In the final note, the sister thanked Freeman for his message of condolence. Adelle had died.
My Lobotomy Page 23