Course Correction

In September of 1946, I arrived home almost three weeks before the next semester started at MIT. As a returned veteran, I was given readmission preference and expected to continue toward the BS degree in Course 10, Chemical Engineering. Before settling down to serious study and after two-plus years in the military, I longed to enjoy civilian freedom. Three of us, Leon Schindel, Sherman Kronisch (mentioned in Chapter Four) and I, whose parents’ homes were near each other, took a quick two-day trip up to New Hampshire for some hiking and swimming. We were slowly floating down a creek on our air mattresses, otherwise used to sleep on the ground, when a local fellow walked up and asked us to leave immediately. We were on his property. I don’t really recall but perhaps we had not mentioned that we were returning veterans. It was a year after the end of the war so being a veteran would no longer have carried much weight. I felt embarrassed, so leaving quickly was the best thing to do.

In Sherman’s home darkroom, we enjoyed cropping, enlarging, and replicating photos of our trip. Leon and I decided to take another quick trip up to Cambridge to make some arrangements for living quarters and other needs. We would then come back home and in a few days return on admission day.

Leon, who had been my roommate before the war and had received a BS degree as part of the navy V12 program, started our journey in his nearly antique Model A Ford, whose maintenance was a challenge he enjoyed. He drove. I sat between him and the right door. The Model A had run out of gas early in the trip and we had to walk a mile to get gasoline. We were running late. It seemed we would not get to Cambridge until nightfall. For amusement as we walked I made a case that our being late would not make any difference. “Tomorrow morning, Leon, we will start our day and doubtless accomplish what we need to, just the same as if we had arrived much earlier. We’ll forget about being late.” Leon in a perfunctory way differed with my conclusion. When we got the Model A running again, we had to work our way through the streets of New Haven and then northward. Superhighways had not yet been built. It was raining very hard.

Suddenly the car ahead of us stopped. The way I saw it, when Leon could not stop on time he made a quick left turn into traffic coming the other way. Leon later claimed that the car skidded into the oncoming lane. It hardly mattered who was right. As soon as I saw through the right window that a car was going to hit our right door head on, in the second or so before collision, I had time for one thought, “Don’t die.” I stayed awake through the collision and until we were rescued. The first thing I did after the impact was feel and look around my body for broken bones and bleeding. There was none. Though I had pain around my pelvis, I thought once I got out of the car, I might be able to walk away.

People started to gather around the car. Immediately knocked out by the collision, Leon was becoming conscious. He groaned and half awake asked, “What happened?” Believing his turning the car had put me into the “line of fire,” I was angry. A few people were deciding how to get us out of the car, which had not overturned but wrinkled itself into a V—with maximum damage just behind me. One guy said to the bystanders, “Get a blowtorch and we’ll pull the door off.” I yelled, “NO! Any flame against the door would torch me.” Within maybe twenty minutes an ambulance and the police arrived. They pried the door on my side open. I realized I was totally unable to stand. I was carried on a stretcher into the ambulance. Leon was pulled out the right door too, and suffered great pain while we wended our way to the nearest hospital. I had little pain, but found I could not urinate. That night a nurse put a catheter in my penis that allowed me, by control of the sphincter, to empty my bladder. The next morning neither she nor any of the doctors could get the catheter in again until after I was taken into an operating room and anesthetized.

Leon was in a bed next to mine. He had suffered thirteen broken ribs, mostly on his right side, hit by my body. We had round-the-clock nurse service in a private room. In the morning I saw that Leon’s lower back was hanging on a sling suspended from a frame above his bed that also held up his legs. I enjoy gallows humor. A common phrase, when desiring to threaten or dominate, one soldier in the military says to another, “I’ll put your ass in a sling.” That was exactly what I had done to Leon. Maybe I could claim that achievement in the Guinness book of world records. Leon did not seem to notice the humor.

The real irony was that the joke was on me. Leon was out of the hospital in less than two weeks, while I spent the entire next year in and out of hospitals and missed more than one semester. It is worth recounting how several different developments of the next year or two changed completely the course of my life in ways unimaginable to me.

My mother came up to New Haven to spend the next few months largely at my bedside. She determined that the hospital I was in was not as good for unusual problems like mine as the Grace New Haven hospital where Dr. Deming, considered one of the country’s best urologists, practiced. Mom arranged for me to switch hospitals by ambulance. Dr. Deming took a new set of X-rays and found that there was a small crack in my pelvis that had not been noticed before and might have severed the urethra. He scheduled me for an operation that when it worked was called “anastomosis of the prostatic urethra.” It worked and, of all things, on my twenty-first birthday. The night before, my mom and one of her friends had given me a little birthday party. I had finally come of voting age. I had no idea I was not going to feel like voting or much else when I woke from surgery.

As the anesthetic quickly wore off, I felt an excruciating pain in my penis. I looked down and saw the problem. There was a hole in my mid abdomen and a fat catheter plugged into it directly from the bladder to a gallon glass container on the floor next to my bed. The catheter had a bulbous termination inside the bladder so that it could not be readily removed. None of that was painful. There was another smaller catheter that fed into the urethra that was kept in place by two sutures into the head of the penis. I yelled for a nurse to come take the damn things out of my penis. While waiting for her I found no way to arrange my penis, my body, or the catheter to curtail the pain. She made it clear that the sutures would remain till the urethra was firmly reattached just below the prostate. The catheters would have to stay in there for two weeks. Two weeks. My God, how many seconds are there in two weeks? I envisaged myself trying to get my mind off the pain by a second-after-second count. Somehow, with a certain amount of morphine, which was never as frequent or as much as I would have liked, I survived. Perhaps the cuts got a little less painful as they started to heal. And my recovery was aided by humorous events. My Aunt Carolyn, Uncle Eddie, and their son, Don, who was about seven years old, were visiting. Don was taken aback by the unique manmade and human plumbing attached to his cousin. Somehow by accident, he kicked over the gallon container, spilling the day’s collection of urine over the floor. He seemed to fear that somehow his accident would have a negative effect on my recovery. Cleanup was a tough job for an orderly, but I hardly noticed and, confined by the plumbing always to be faceup, couldn’t see what Don had done. Of course, his parents let him know that they were angry with his clumsiness, thus reinforcing the fear that he must have done a terrible thing. The scene was like a humorous vaudeville act to me. You know what, I had forgotten the pain. Thanks, Cousin Don.

From time to time I could feel the bladder fluttering, not painful but weird. The nurse called them bladder spasms and explained that my poor body was trying to get the catheter out of my bladder but did not have the strength to push the bulbous end out. One morning Dr. Deming came up to my bedside, with other doctors on rounds around us and, unexpected by me, very quickly pulled the catheter out of bladder. It sounded and felt very much like popping the cork out of a wine bottle, only I was the bottle. Not painful, but the strangest feeling I ever had. Later the hole left in my abdomen was sutured and the sutures in the penis were cut out. That was like paradise.

By mid December I was healed and ready to go home. Deming wasn’t there for my checkout and that supposed routine was handled by his associate, Dr. Goetch, who should have told me to do nothing strenuous—no heavy lifting or athletics—for another month or two. Dr. Goetch told me not one word about cutting back on exercise. I expected to be going up to MIT to catch the beginning of the new semester. Once more I did not make the trip—déjà vu all over again.