Honest Jack Health; or, Six Months in a Johnny

Note: The following post is a personal essay rather than a discussion of a book. I put it here because I don’t have any other place to put it. If it makes a literary point of any sort, I assume it would be that a straightforward description of intense personal experience can make surprisingly dull reading,

But right Jack Health—honest Jack Health, true Jack Health—Banish health and banish all the world. — John Keats

In October 2024 I was hospitalized with chills, fever, and a rubbery weakness in all my limbs. Sickness in different forms had sometimes made me more miserable than I felt on this occasion. The flu, in particular, had made me question whether existence is the privilege that it is commonly supposed to be. This weakness was something that I had never experienced before. It made me helpless — unable to walk, to lift things, or to resolve on even the most ordinary courses of action, such as standing up. I had — what I would not know for sure until several days later — a urinary tract infection (UTI).

It was an illness that would almost kill me. That it didn’t kill me is owing to the efforts of a group of people of different backgrounds, training, and experience, all of whom had chosen at decisive moments in their lives to pursue careers in healing. They were spread across three hospitals and two rehabilitation centers, but they worked as a team. Our health care system is controversial; no one is happy with it as it is; everyone has a different solution of its problems. But I can witness that this system, with all its Rube Goldberg indirection, and all its wastefulness, works. And I hope that anyone who undertakes to reform it will be aware that they are operating on a living being.

To return to my story, I had fallen against our piano, holding a cup of coffee, which I spilled down my front. My wife Lorraine made phone calls, and then burly young men were strapping me onto a gurney and then lowering me perilously down our front steps, which had never before seemed so steep. Then I was abruptly lifted up and inserted into an ambulance. An ambulance ride in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts makes you aware of potholes and speed bumps in a way that you have never been before.

I felt relieved when the ambulance arrived at the hospital — I don’t know which one it was but that didn’t make any difference. I was getting rid of the responsibility of taking care of myself. Hospitals are filled with people who have undergone years of rigorous training and practice in order to be able to take care of aging men with urinary tract infections.

I was wheeled into a space demarcated by a curtain that created a little privacy. I was yanked off the gurney and dragged onto a bed. This yank and drag maneuvre — which I was going to be the star of many times in the months ahead — never ceased to frighten me; I could too easily imagine myself falling to the floor in the space between the gurney and the bed. Then I was stripped of my clothing and given a johnny to put on. I would wear nothing but johnies for the next six months.

Lorraine appeared by my bedside. This was a second great relief to me. She understands what goes on in hospitals, having put herself through college working as a unit secretary at several different teaching hospitals in Boston. She had won awards for her work there and was even nicknamed “RADAR” by her hospital’s staff. She asked me whether it was a compliment to be nicknamed “RADAR. I assured her that it was. When I am bewildered by events in the hospital, she interprets them to me. When something strikes me as ominous, she tells me whether it truly is, or isn’t.

So I turned to her and said, “Where am I? What is going on?”

She explained to me that I was in the Emergency Room of the Winchester Hospital, and that I was waiting to have some blood drawn so that it can be determined what sort of infection I had — for it was assumed that I had some sort of infection.

Then nurses and nurses aids came in and asked me questions about how I felt and then someone came in to draw blood. I am what is called a “tough stick”; my veins go into hiding when a phlebotomist enters the room. The person drawing my blood this time had no trouble filling the little glass tubes with blood.

The result of this blood test determined by fate for the next six months. I had an infection that could be treated best by intravenous antibiotics. I was admitted to the hospital.

Then the doctors came in. I like doctors because they are smart. The software engineers I worked with for forty years were also smart, but in a different way; if they weren’t exactly absent minded, they were “present minded somewhere else.” Doctors are present minded where they are. They have to be. They are responsible for the well being of the patients entrusted to their care. I never wanted to be a doctor. I make mistakes. I forget things and when I do I make things up to fill in for what I forgot. You can’t be like that and be a doctor.

When I first meet a doctor, I crack jokes. It’s a technique – and a not very effectve one – for stifling anxiety. The doctors always smiled a certain recognizable smile to acknowledge that I had made a joke and then proceeded with business. I extrapolated from this many-times-repeated ritual that medical schools teach their students how to deal with The Patient Who Cracks Jokes. If they don’t teach this, they should.

I couldn’t help thinking about the sacrifices that doctors make to become doctors — the years of study and training, the hard work of developing an accurate and capacious memory, the struggle to subdue one’s thinking to a severe problem-solving discipline, the persistence to make all these mental gains part of one’s second nature, the drain on one’s energy and the hijacking of one’s time. Of course, for people with a real bent for this way of life, all the acrifices are worth it. But one young doctor — a sensitive and thoughtful one — saw a copy of Leon Edel’s biography of Henry James on my bed and asked me, “Who is Henry James?” I said “He was a novelist who wrote about rich and naive Americans who get entangled emotionally with impoverished and cynical Europeans.” “Is he any good?” ‘I like him.” “I’ll have to read him some time,” he said wistfully. He had just completed his years of schooling and training, when the medical student and fledgling doctor have little time for extra-curricular reading. Doctors do eventually find time to read books; I know a well read doctor who can recite from the works of Wendell Berry chapter and verse.

But I spent more times with nurses than with doctors. If I overcame the illnesses that kept me in johnnies for six months, it is owing in the first place to nurses, who delivered the medical care that made recovery possible. Their responsibilities are sobering, too. They can kill a patient by misplacing a decimal point, for example. My wife almost died this way. Once when she was in the hospital — one of the renowned teaching hospitals in Boston — she noticed that she was getting ten times the amount of intravenous Heparin than she was supposed to be getting. She rang for the nurse who, realizing his mistake, looked like it would have been OK with him if the Earth had opened up and swallowed him. My wife had almost died like a rat who had gorged itself on rat poison.

I spent the most time of all with nurses’ aides and orderlies. It is owing to their efforts that bed ridden old men stay clean and dry and get a change of bed sheets and johnnies every day. A very large majority of the nurses aides and orderlies who kept me clean dry and reasonably comfortable were from Haiti. Whenever I was attended by aide whom I had not known before, I started an exchange that went like this:

“Bonjour. Ça va?

The startled aide would say,

“Oui, Ça va. Parlez-vous français?”

“Un petit peu. D’où venez-vous? d’Haiti?”

“Oui, je viens d’Haiti. Mais comment se fait-il que vous parlez français?”

And then the aide would go on a tear doling out the loveliest Haitian French that ever blessed my uncomprehending ears. I could always bring the conversation back to my level by interrupting the aide with the question:

“Quelle heure est-il?”

I can understand the answers to that question. “Trois heures et demie” I thoroughly get. I can read “Un Coeur Simple” by Flaubert, too. But I haven’t the faintest idea how to say, in French, “The vending machine on the second floor has shrink-wrapped egg salad sandwiches that really aren’t half bad.”

My infection was serious. I was given large doses of powerful antibiotics intravenously and still developed sepsis — twice. I did not talk sense during these episodes of infection; this was hard on Lorraine, who had no way to tell whether I would ever recover my wits. Once I went on a long harangue about methadone, a subject that had never interested me. I have no memories of Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Years Day — Lorraine celebrated tnese holidays alone. On Valentine’s Day I was in the ICU. A slum lord from Queens became president for tbe second time without my noticing. A friend of mine — a tall guy with a fine mane, native American DNA, and a personality that fills a room — visited me once or twice. I have no memories of his visits.

And then began a confused period — from October through January — when I was moved around among hospitals and rehabs and ICUs as my case required. Once I woke up at 2:00 a.m. feeling the worst pain I had ever felt, in every limb: it was the flu. I rolled my self out into the dimly lit hall and called for help; quietly, because I didn’t want to awaken the other residents. I don’t remember what happened next. In memory I’m there in the dimly lit hall, hoping to be discovered by someone. Another time I was brisked away to a room where I found myself surrounded by cardiologists, who were arguing about something. A cardiologist older than the rest appeared, assessed my condition, and voiced his opinion, which settled the argument. One of the younger doctors produced a paddle. This I recognized from the movies. My chest was bared and the young doctor placed the paddle on it. He nodded and then WHUMP my back arched and my body rose an inch or two above the mattress and then fell back. The young doctor looked at a monitor and nodded again. Again I went WHUMP. I caught my breath and looked at the doctors and said “That was interesting but let’s not do it again, shall we?” No one smiled, from which I gathered that my heart had been misbehaving in some serious way. In fact, I have AFIB.

Eventually the doctors got ahead of all my infections and I was ready to be dischaged, but not to go home. I was heading to a rehabilitation facility.

Rehabilitation facilities are, in my experience, more depressing than hospitals. Your stay in a hospital is short; either you are cured or you leave under a blanket feet first. Rehabilitation facilities keep you until you are rehabilitated, and that term is the ignis fatuus of medical care. For example, there was a gap of about eight weeks between the date when I believed myself to be rehabilitated and the later date when I was rehabilitated officially and allowed to go home.

Granted, I needed rehabilitation because the long weeks of lying in hospital beds had so weakened my legs that I could no longer walk. My arms were strong from getting around in wheelchairs, but my legs were incapable of bearing weight. And the rehab facility was understaffed, so that I got less physical therapy than what I needed to get stronger. Even so, I got strong enough to be allowed to roam the halls with a walker, which helped.

I was inspired by a friend that I made in the rehabilitation facility — a man from East Boston, in his eighties, who came every day to see his wife — who was never going to go home. He always came a little before the start of visiting hours to have a cup of coffee in the cafeteria, where I was always having my first cup of the day. He talked about friends in East Boston, and his time in the army, and other things. His life had been hard; he had never done more than scrape by. But he had no complaints. He had learned not to expect too much. I praised him for his faithfulness to his wedding vows but he brushed it off. He was good and decent without giving it a thought.

Almost six months to the day after I was first admitted to the hospital, I exchanged my johnny for my regular clothes and Lorraine took me to the entrance of the facility in a wheelchair and helped me get into our car.