I had finally come of voting age.It worked and, of all things, on my twenty-first birthday. He groaned and half awake asked, What happened? Believing his turning the car had put me into the line of fire, I was angry. Not painful, but the strangest feeling I ever had.Within maybe twenty minutes an ambulance and the police arrived. 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. One morning Dr. It seemed we would not get to Cambridge until Ratchet Straps Suppliers nightfall. My Aunt Carolyn, Uncle Eddie, and their son, Don, who was about seven years old, were visiting. I expected to be going up to MIT to catch the beginning of the new semester. Leon was pulled out the right door too, and suffered great pain while we wended our way to the nearest hospital. Don was taken aback by the unique manmade and human plumbing attached to his cousin. 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. When we got the Model A running again, we had to work our way through the streets of New Haven and then northward..
The Model A had run out of gas early in the trip and we had to walk a mile to get gasoline. Cleanup was a tough job for an orderly, but I hardly noticed and, confined by the plumbing always to be faceup, couldnt see what Don had done. Maybe I could claim that achievement in the Guinness book of world records.As the anesthetic quickly wore off, I felt an excruciating pain in my penis. That night a nurse put a catheter in my penis that allowed me, by control of the sphincter, to empty my bladder. While waiting for her I found no way to arrange my penis, my body, or the catheter to curtail the pain. Goetch told me not one word about cutting back on exercise.By mid December I was healed and ready to go home.I stayed awake through the collision and until we were rescued.Leon was in a bed next to mine. Goetch, who should have told me to do nothing strenuous no heavy lifting or athleticsfor another month or two. Two weeks. I felt embarrassed, so leaving quickly was the best thing to do. I had little pain, but found I could not urinate.
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. Somehow, with a certain amount of morphine, which was never as frequent or as much as I would have liked, I survived. I dont really recall but perhaps we had not mentioned that we were returning veterans.In September of 1946, I arrived home almost three weeks before the next semester started at MIT. 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, Dont die. Somehow by accident, he kicked over the gallon container, spilling the days collection of urine over the floor. He had suffered thirteen broken ribs, mostly on his right side, hit by my body. That was like paradise. And my recovery was aided by humorous events. Thanks, Cousin Don. Superhighways had not yet been built. 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. The catheter had a bulbous termination inside the bladder so that it could not be readily removed. I had no idea I was not going to feel like voting or much else when I woke from surgery. He scheduled me for an operation that when it worked was called anastomosis of the prostatic urethra. Immediately knocked out by the collision, Leon was becoming conscious. 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. You know what, I had forgotten the pain. A few people were deciding how to get us out of the car, which had not overturned but wrinkled itself into a Vwith maximum damage just behind me. The scene was like a humorous vaudeville act to me. One guy said to the bystanders, Get a blowtorch and well pull the door off. For amusement as we walked I made a case that our being late would not make any difference. Though I had pain around my pelvis, I thought once I got out of the car, I might be able to walk away. Leon and I decided to take another quick trip up to Cambridge to make some arrangements for living quarters and other needs.In Shermans home darkroom, we enjoyed cropping, enlarging, and replicating photos of our trip. 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 later claimed that the car skidded into the oncoming lane. The first thing I did after the impact was feel and look around my body for broken bones and bleeding. None of that was painful. I sat between him and the right door. I enjoy gallows humor. Well forget about being late. Before settling down to serious study and after two-plus years in the military, I longed to enjoy civilian freedom. We were running late.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.Suddenly the car ahead of us stopped. She made it clear that the sutures would remain till the urethra was firmly reattached just below the prostate. It sounded and felt very much like popping the cork out of a wine bottle, only I was the bottle. He drove. It was a year after the end of the war so being a veteran would no longer have carried much weight. The night before, my mom and one of her friends had given me a little birthday party. 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. Dr. I realized I was totally unable to stand. Leon did not seem to notice the humor. They pried the door on my side open. Deming wasnt there for my checkout and that supposed routine was handled by his associate, Dr. Perhaps the cuts got a little less painful as they started to heal. 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. Later the hole left in my abdomen was sutured and the sutures in the penis were cut out. It hardly mattered who was right.People started to gather around the car. Leon in a perfunctory way differed with my conclusion. I looked down and saw the problem. He seemed to fear that somehow his accident would have a negative effect on my recovery. It was raining very hard.The real irony was that the joke was on me. We were on his property. The way I saw it, when Leon could not stop on time he made a quick left turn into traffic coming the other way. A common phrase, when desiring to threaten or dominate, one soldier in the military says to another put your ass in a sling. There was none. 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.From time to time I could feel the bladder fluttering, not painful but weird. 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. The catheters would have to stay in there for two weeks.
That was exactly what I had done to Leon.My mother came up to New Haven to spend the next few months largely at my bedside. Deming, considered one of the countrys best urologists, practiced. I yelled, NO! Any flame against the door would torch me. 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. Dr. I was carried on a stretcher into the ambulance. 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. Once more I did not make the trip vu all over again. I yelled for a nurse to come take the damn things out of my penis. We would then come back home and in a few days return on admission day. There was another smaller catheter that fed into the urethra that was kept in place by two sutures into the head of the penis. As a returned veteran, I was given readmission preference and expected to continue toward the BS degree in Course 10, Chemical Engineering. We had round-the-clock nurse service in a private room. Mom arranged for me to switch hospitals by ambulance. 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. In the morning I saw that Leons lower back was hanging on a sling suspended from a frame above his bed that also held up his legs.
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