5432852385743

CHAPTER 26
During the next eleven weeks I once more lived two lives. There was the one I hardly knew about—
the outside life—and the one I knew all too well. That was the one inside, where I often dreamed of
the Yellow Card Man.
In the outside life, the walker-lady (Alberta Hitchinson; Sadie sought her out and brought her a
bouquet of flowers) stood over me on the sidewalk and hollered until a neighbor came out, saw the
situation, and called the ambulance that took me to Parkland. The doctor who treated me there was
Malcolm Perry, who would later treat both John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald as they lay dying.
With me he had better luck, although it was a close thing.
I had sustained broken teeth, a broken nose, a broken cheekbone, a fractured left knee, a broken left
arm, dislocated fingers, and abdominal injuries. I had also suffered a brain injury, which was what
concerned Perry the most.
I was told I woke up and howled when my belly was palpated, but I have no memory of it. I was
catheterized and immediately began pissing what boxing announcers would have called “the claret.”
My vitals were at first stable, then began sliding. I was typed, cross-matched, and given four units of
whole blood . . . which, Sadie told me later, the residents of Jodie made up a hundred times over at a
community blood drive in late September. She had to tell me several times, because I kept forgetting.
I was prepped for abdominal surgery, but first a neurology consult and a spinal tap—there’s no such
thing as CT scans or MRIs in the Land of Ago.
I’m also told I had a conversation with two of the nurses prepping me for the tap. I told them that
my wife had a drinking problem. One of them said that was too bad and asked me what her name was.
I told them she was a fish called Wanda and laughed quite heartily. Then I passed out again.
My spleen was trashed. They removed it.
While I was still conked out and my spleen was going wherever no longer useful but not absolutely
vital organs go, I was turned over to Orthopedics. There my broken arm was put in a splint and my
broken leg in a plaster cast. Many people signed it over the following weeks. Sometimes I knew the
names; usually I didn’t.
I was kept sedated with my head stabilized and my bed raised to exactly thirty degrees. The
phenobarbital wasn’t because I was conscious (although sometimes I muttered, Sadie said) but because
they were afraid I might suddenly come around and damage myself further. Basically, Perry and the
other docs (Ellerton also came in regularly to monitor my progress) were treating my battered chump
like an unexploded bomb.
To this day I’m not entirely sure what hematocrit and hemoglobin are, but mine started to come
back up and that pleased everybody. I had another spinal tap three days later. This one showed signs of
old blood, and when it comes to spinal taps, old is better than new. It indicated that I had sustained
significant brain trauma, but they could forgo drilling a burr-hole in my skull, a risky procedure
given all the battles my body was fighting on other fronts.
But the past is obdurate and protects itself against change. Five days after I was admitted, the flesh
around the splenectomy incision began to turn red and warm. The following day the incision reopened
and I spiked a fever. My condition, which had been downgraded from critical to serious after the
second spinal tap, zipped back up to critical. According to my chart, I was “sedated as per Dr. Perry
and neurologically minimally responsive.”
On September seventh, I woke up briefly. Or so I’m told. A woman, pretty despite her scarred face,
and an old man with a cowboy hat in his lap were sitting by my bed.
“Do you know your name?” the woman asked.