Death Be Not Proud Read Online Free PDF Page B

suggested by the fact that immediately after the operation, he became tolerably well, even though half the tumor was still there. Part of the brain is nonsensitive tissue, and Johnny’s tumor lay in a comparatively inactive region.
    There was a bustle at the elevator and Johnny’s bed was wheeled in. Frances, who was magnificently composed, took a brief walk. I was sick with fright when I saw the oxygen and all the paraphernalia for transfusion. Already Johnny had had a couple of pints of blood, we were told. But this was routine, more or less. The doctors said that he would be unconscious at least till the next morning, and that we might as well go home. I elected to stay. Soon I got my first look at Johnny’s face, sideways on the pillow with a huge turban of bandage marked THIS SIDE UP. I retreated in dumb shock. Both his eyes were stuck closed and he looked as if he had two enormous shiners; his whole face was the size and almost the color of a football. But this was nothing to worry about, since it was the result of edema, swelling, following the shock of operation—so I was told. Then I noticed the emergency instruments on the bed table and learned that a needle (it stayed there for some days) was actually taped into the vein in his arm, in case an emergency transfusion should be necessary. This, too, was routine—or so I heard. Putnam, in a rain-coat, just preparing to leave the hospital, came up at a run, after a nurse called him. An injection of some stimulant was necessary. Johnny was still in shock. Another doctor said airily, “Oh, he’ll last the night all right.”
    At about nine that evening, only a few hours after the operation, Johnny gasped and stirred, making a weak groping gesture with his enormously swollen mouth.
    “Spit it out,” the nurse said.
    He replied in perfectly understandable words, “You know perfectly well I can’t spit. I’m completely dehydrated.”
    The nurse stared at him dumbfounded.
    He asked then for Dr. Miller, one of Putnam’s assistants, with whom he had been talking about chemistry just before the operation. I told Miller that Johnny had asked for him, and Miller could scarcely believe that a child who had just gone through such an ordeal could be capable of speech.
    Johnny recognized me after a while and whispered, “Hello, Pop.” Pause. “Are there going to be any more tests?”
    “Good Lord, no! You’re all through with tests. Don’ t you realize you’ve had quite a serious operation?”
    “Of course,” Johnny answered. “ I heard them drilling three holes through my skull, also the sound of my brains sloshing around. From the sound, one of the drills must have had a three-eighths of an inch bit.”
    I slept sitting up in the visitors’ room. I kept remembering the way he had looked when we hoisted him into the ambulance at Deerfield, with the gray blanket across his face.
     
    Johnny made a very brisk recovery. Six days after the operation he ate a beefsteak sitting up; on the eighth day he was busy drawing a series of parabolas and on the eleventh day he walked the length of the corridor alone. But do not think he didn’t suffer.
    His eyes were stuck absolutely shut the first day or two; and he spent forty-eight hours fearing that he was blind. The very day after the operation he asked me to bring his physics text to the hospital, and then demanded that we read him the questions at the chapter ends. Thank goodness, he knew the answers! He thought, since something drastic had happened to his brain, that he might have lost his memory. Then he announced suddenly that he knew what he had—schizophrenia! He thought he was crazy. This was because he had once read in a medical book that electroencephalograms and similar tests were used to treat schizophrenia. We brought Traeger in right away, who showed him that although he was dead right in associating this test with schizophrenia, he had nothing at all to fear inasmuch as this disease is never treated by