The Lowest Ten Percent (#3)

One out of every ten doctors finished in the lowest ten percent of his or her medical school.  When I was 15, I was unfortunate enough to run into one of them.  Dr. Mitchell, deceased at least a few decades ago, was our “family doctor.”  He did have a diploma from a medical school.  I vaguely remember seeing that framed in his office.  He also had a stethoscope, a prescription pad, a white robe, all the trappings that would convince people he was a real doctor.

Pushing the narrative forward:

When I was 15 years old, I decided to become a jock.  I also continued to live in Texas.  Hormones were at work.  I decided to be a football jock (that’s what you do in Texas).  I was prepared to dumb myself down, to start speaking incorrect English, even to develop my muscles instead of my brain.  This was all, quite possibly, my most conspicuous failure.  The football coach thought the best way to save me from death by high school sports was to make me a field goal and PAT kicker.  I was surprised to learn that you had to wear pads even for that.

After a week, I was able to kick a PAT fairly consistently and had worked my way up to being able to kick a field goal through the uprights from about twenty yards out approximately 50% of the time.  That was, of course, when I was standing at one end of the field practicing and the other high school jocks were at the other end of the practice field.   

One day, though, we had a scrimmage:  11 guys playing offense, 11 guys on defense.  I was, at some point in the game, sent in to kick a meaningless 20-yard field goal.  The center snapped the ball to the third-string quarterback; the quarterback held the ball perfectly; I started moving forward five steps to kick the ball.  Then I noticed eleven guys all trying to kill me.

Okay, they weren’t really trying to kill me, only trying to keep me from kicking the ball.  And only one of them reached me.  He blocked my field goal attempt and then ploughed into me.  In football it is perfectly legal to destroy the kicker as long as you block his kick first.  I was okay except for my left arm.  It hurt…a lot. And I kept having visions of eleven people trying to kill me.

Encounter with the Lowest Ten Percenter

Two days later, the pain not having gone away, my mother took me to see good old Dr. Mitchell.  He examined my arm, feeling it with his fat fingers, making it hurt more, and pronounced it a severe sprain.  “It’ll heal itself,” he said.  He wrote a prescription for a pain killer, gave me a note excusing me from football practice, sent me home.

Two weeks later, the pain not having gone away, my mother took me to see good old Dr. Mitchell.  He examined my arm again, felt a little bump, and told us that it had been broken and had healed incorrectly.

His solution to this was right out of Torquemada:  Rebreak the arm and set it correctly.

That sounds simple.  Here’s what happened:  He gave me a local to kill the pain in my arm, propped my arm against his knee, and pulled on it until it broke again with a loud SNAP.  The painkiller was largely ineffective…it hurt like hell.  Then he maneuvered the bone until the two parts of it fit together.  By the time he finished splinting it and getting a cast on, I would have confessed to anything.

Afterwards

The football dream was gone (and my chances of becoming a Hall of Famer, but that had all been about girls anyway and most of them liked the cast.  Even now, though, some decades afterwards, my left arm is still bowed where the incompetent doctor tried to repair his earlier mistake.

I learned a few lessons from that whole experience:  1) I was not meant to be a football jock and 2) check out doctors before you let them do anything to you.  The first of those I should have known anyway.  Chess team was more my style.

Traveling to New Orleans for Medical Care (#2)

When I was seven years old, my doctor let my parents know that I was going blind in my right eye.  Other things that happened that year have conveniently escaped my memory.  Oh, I do know that I was in Miss Wingate’s third grade class.  She was an amazing teacher, a pianist who had us place notes on musical staffs and then played them (adding chords) in such a way that we all felt like musical geniuses.  I keep digressing (must be the meds).   

Here’s what happened:

My mother, long before there was a Google, found a surgeon in New Orleans, Dr. Robert Wagner, who could do the surgical procedure to repair a busted tear duct.  That’s why I was going blind.  I know “blind” is now an unacceptable term, but back in 1949 that’s what we called it.  I had a friend, back in the mid-90s use the old cliché of “the blind leading the blind” in a conference paper she delivered in Portland.  Someone stood up in the back of the room and shouted “UNSIGHTED! Not blind.”  So, please don’t be offended:  that’s the word I thought of in those days when I was only seven years old and still relatively innocent.

I have written about this before in an essay that was originally published in Ascent magazine when that was still a print magazine.  I’m not reproducing that here because its focus is somewhat different, but you can see it at my website in an essay called “Thinking About Poetry.”  As I said, my mother found a doctor in New Orleans who had done the kind of surgery on other children necessary for repairing my tear duct.  We were fortunate that my Aunt Lou and Uncle Eddie lived in New Orleans, on Alamanaster Avenue, and that we could stay with them.  My father’s health insurance, courtesy of the Masters, Mates, and Pilots Union, paid the medical and surgical expenses but did not cover things like transportation from Beaumont to New Orleans once a month for a year or for lodging and meals. As I wrote in the first entry for this blog, “It Takes a Family.”  I suspect I would have lost sight in my right eye had I not had relatives living in New Orleans.

At first, it was all just an adventure:  a train ride to New Orleans on The Sunset Limited, visiting my aunt and uncle, seeing the street cars running down the middle of the avenue, eating soft shell crab po-boys from the corner store, reading comics my aunt had graciously provided.  But then came the trip to the hospital and my examination.  I do not remember much about Dr. Wagner and that initial examination nor do I remember much about the hospital itself.  Here’s what I do remember:

I am lying on a narrow bed in a surgical room.  I look up.  A black rubbery mask descends.  I hold my breath until I am forced to breathe in.  I fall asleep.  That’s it.  That’s all.  When I wake up in what I now know is the recovery room, I have a string running through my tear duct and down through my nose.  It is a circular string.  I am told that I must pull on the string once every two hours to keep the passage open.  I have no idea of what this means, but my mother is taking notes.  I am to return for another examination in one week and then once a month for six months.  When I get back to the house on Alamanaster Avenue, I have 25 individual letters waiting for me:  one from each of my classmates at Junker Elementary.  I have grown cynical enough to realize that this was a class assignment:  Miss Wingate never missed what later teachers would call a “teachable moment.” Still, it was nice to get the letters.  My mother kept them for decades but they are now lost, probably forever.

The next week, my mother could not get off work.  She arranged for my Aunt Lou to meet me at the New Orleans Greyhound Bus Station and take me back to her home and then to make my doctor’s appointment the next day.  The whole thing was great fun:  traveling through most of Louisiana with the bus stopping at each town, first stop was in Orange, Texas, along what people still called the Old Spanish Trail.

This was before Interstate 10 and U.S.-90, my favorite highway, was the preferred route, the route my family took every summer when going to visit my grandmother.  Years later, when I was 17, I would hitchhike down that highway to New Orleans (see “Hitching to Somewhere” in James Duncan’s Hobo Camp Review) for a very different purpose:  to lose myself in what Philip Slater called The Lonely Crowd and perhaps find myself instead of restoring my vision.  Dr. Wagner said everything looked okay but to be sure to pull the string every two hours—advice I mostly took, but was too young to be religious about.  Fortunately, my mother was much more stringent about such things than I was.

As the months passed, the bus drivers got to know me.  I confess that I much preferred the train but that was much too expensive.  They called me by my name and kind of adopted me:  the young kid who traveled alone from Beaumont to New Orleans on a regular basis.  I was famous all over the southern Greyhound network.  Today, airline flight attendants take care of children traveling from one city to another but that was not common in the early fifties on the buses that were the primary movers of travelers without cars from one place to another.  We were all more innocent in those days.

Next:  A less difficult operation but a much worse doctor

1. I manage, somehow, to get started and birthed

Early Days

            For my nieces, Dana and Shari, and for their children

I’ll start at the beginning:  World War II.  In December, 1941, my father, a First Lieutenant in the U.S. Merchant Marine, was away on a run of supplies from Norfolk to Liverpool.  I do not remember this but was told about it much later.  I’ve always like that particular datum because I have a great love for the fiction and poetry of Herman Melville and his first sea voyage was from New York to that same Liverpool my father voyaged to a hundred years later.  I’ve written a lot about my father but not a lot in detail.  I’ll not do that here either except to say that he was a maverick, a victim of a severe case of wanderlust and that, when he finally was able to settle down and live in one place, he could not totally kick the habit.

He was born in northern Florida and grew up on Wakulla Bay, that small bay that was a part of Appalachee Bay which was, in turn, a part of Appalachicola Bay.  He had four brothers and five sisters.  I’ve written about a few of my uncles and aunts on my father’s side, most, I suppose about my Aunt Clifton Hall, that woman I met when she was in her sixties and still had the mind of a six-year old.  After this brief introduction, I’ll include a copy of that short essay which also appears in  Coming to Terms (Plain View Press, 2007).

Introduction

My grandmother died at age 96, nineteen years bedridden, and my Aunt Effie took over the sole care of her younger sister.  When Clifton died, the house was sold and my Aunt moved to Fort Pierce to live with her own daughter.  I still own property there on the beach and, some day, hope to build my own house, one of the few that can legally go up on that part of the St. Marks National Wildlife Preserve.  I confess to finding it quite odd that I grew up summering in one game preserve and living the res of the year on the edge of another: The Big Thicket National Preserve, the first American part of UNESCO’s “Man and the Biosphere” sites (see Hall, Big Thicket: Requiem and Redemption San Antonio: PGP, 2011).  Here’s the short essay:

It takes a family,

with the help of a village

I have been reading Terry Tempest Williams’s “The Village Watchman.” a fine tribute to her Uncle Allen, who was born with oxygen deprivation and spent many years institutionalized.  It’s a fine essay, well worth reading, and reminded me of my Aunt Clifton.  Clifton Hall was one of my father’s five sisters, most of whom lived on the beach at Wakulla Bay some miles south of Tallahassee in what is now the St. Marks Wildlife Preserve.  My grandmother had no problems with Clifton’s (we called her ‘Clippie”)  birth, but at six years old that youngest of her daughters contracted scarlet fever and remained, mentally, at that age until her death at age 86.

She was a fixture of our visits to my grandmother every summer and would wade with us through the tidal flats and estuaries made by East Goose Creek to search for blue crabs or just to wander in the clear salt water and look at sting rays, sea horses, star fish and occasional horseshoe crabs and minnows.   We would take turns pulling the dark green wooden boat along the shore, through sea weed and around oyster bars.  Clifton would sit in the boat when we had to swim out into the bay to get to one of the shell bars and would hold the croaker sacks open as we emptied the crab nets after successful scoops.

Frequently, she would go with us down to the flats at low tide to round up hundreds of fiddler crabs for bait for the older people, my grandmother, my father and the others who would fish all afternoon and late into the evenings and who would use them as bait for red fish and speckled trout.  To get a good supply of fiddler crabs, we went down to the flats at low tide where you could see them in the hundreds and chase after them, circling them like cattle until they formed a pile of shell, giant pincher claws waving in the air.  When we had them in a tight enough cluster, Clifton would hold a bucket out and we would reach down and pick up hands full of them and dump them in.

Back at my grandmother’s house a hundred yards or so up from the shore, we played countless games of Fish and Battle or stacked dominoes into towers with her.  If we stopped to read or rest, she would take a fly swatter and walk around the screened-in porch killing dirt daubers that managed to get in when we left the screen door open. 

When my grandmother fell and shattered her hip at age 77, my Aunt Effie Bankston moved back into the house and cared for both her and Clifton.  It was a primitive house with electricity from a generator and enough power to light only a couple of lamps.  Such fresh water as there was we hauled in each week; the well could be trusted for washing salt water from our bodies, but not for drinking.  The only heat in the house in winter came from the fireplaces in each bedroom.  Until I was well into my teens, we had to chop wood for the stove and for the fireplaces and we used an outhouse for a bathroom.

Such fresh water as there was we hauled in each week; the well could be trusted for washing salt water from our bodies, but not for drinking.  The only heat in the house in winter came from the fireplaces in each bedroom.  Until I was well into my teens, we had to chop wood for the stove and for the fireplaces and we used an outhouse for a bathroom.

My grandmother died at age 96, nineteen years bedridden, and my Aunt Effie took over the sole care of her younger sister.  When Clifton died, the house was sold and my Aunt moved to Fort Pierce to live with her own daughter.  I still own property there on the beach and, some day, hope to build my own house, one of the few that can legally go up on that part of the St. Marks National Wildlife Preserve.

I have not visited that stretch of beach in several years.  When I do, it will not be the same.  So much will have changed.  My father and his ten brothers and sisters, his father, and his father’s father grew up there in that same house that was so weathered by the constant wind that blew in from the bay.  When I grew older and went fishing with my father, the first sign of civilization we could see from out in the bay was the green roof of my grandmother’s house.  The first person to rush out and greet us was always my Aunt Clifton. 

The house has undoubtedly been modernized, people who do not know about my father, about Clifton, must live there now.  But when I do go back, what I will see in my mind’s eye is a six-year old girl in the body of an 80-year old woman.  She’ll wave and run for the cards or for the crab nets.

Main Blog Line

Back to my own even earlier days.

Sometime in early February, 1941, my father had enough shore leave to visit mom and my brother and sister.  His visits were fairly quick because he believed he would be drafted into the Navy if he were discovered ashore.  For whatever reason, he did visit and, nine months later, I was among the results.  I saw very little of him until the war was over.  I do know that when I was barely a year old, the whole family moved to Tallahassee, Florida, and that that did not last long.

It is not the purpose of this little blog to be a true detailed, full-length biography.  Its purpose is, really, to detail my personal recollections of my adventures in the medical trade.  But, I did want to affirm my familial distinctions.  For a poor person brought up primarily in Beaumont, Texas, that’s important.

We Do Not Belong to the DAR or to the Sons of the Confederacy

My earliest known male ancestor left England in the very early 17^th century and settled in Jamestown, Virginia, before the Mayflower had  landed on that absurd little rock.  Another of my ancestors was a captain in the Revolutionary Army (captured by the Brits, he was released in a prisoner exchange).  He continued to fight for liberty and, after the war, he and his two brothers migrated southward to wiregrass Georgia.  A generation later, the family was in north Florida, on the coastal bend.  That’s enough.  We are sons and daughters of the Revolution and of the Confederacy, but we have never been joiners, have always been Democrats (even when that meant being conservative) and have always been pro-union.  Between them, my mother (Retail Clerks) and father (Masters, Mates and Pilots and Boilermakers and Pipefitters, belonged to three unions that helped them raise a family.

At any rate, I was born.  I had always thought I was born on U.S. Highway 90 at Baptist Hospital, but my friend Ruth Willard informs me that I couldn’t have been since that hospital wasn’t put up until about 1945.  I checked this and found out that I was actually born at Hotel Dieu.  Whatever, the building doesn’t matter.

I did not see my father very often for more than a decade.  He remained a sailor, a Merchant Marine (for great information and superb writing on the Merchant Marine, see John McPhee’s Waiting for a Ship).  And, yes, my father drank and smoked too much.  He became sort of a living threat to us:  “Wait until your daddy comes home!” was a cry of retribution for some deed my brother or I had done.  We had a day of peace after he got home and then came the belt of punishment.  As I grew older, I realized he hated those moments as much as we did, probably more.  I don't consider any of that to be child abuse; it's just how things were done in most families then.  Every year or two, we would move from rental house to rental house until I was fifteen years old and ready to start high school.

When I was four years old, I went to a private school across the street from Junker Elementary in the refinery city of Beaumont, Texas.  Miss Carroll, our teacher, principal, counselor, gave me a hardback “chapter book” called The Little Lame Prince when I finished my year there and before I started elementary school in the second grade at Junker.  The only classmate I remember clearly from that first little school is my friend Helen Sample (her last name at the time).

Subsequent postings to this blog will detail my encounters with the medical profession.