Like I said before, we moved to Michigan in 1951, and my brother and I obligingly didn’t bleed for almost a year. Then I fell while playing tag (or something; it was almost 60 years ago, for Pete’s sake) and cracked a molar in half, which earned me a ride to the dentist’s office.
My memory of the day picks up as my mother and I are walking through the lobby from my dentist’s office to my doctor’s office. Dr. P, the dentist, had decided the cracked tooth must be pulled, but I have hemophilia, which tended to complicate things a little. I had already waited for more than an hour while the two doctors discussed the options, and this little trip over to Dr. D’s side of the building seemed like just one more way to delay things. I had a feeling they were building up their courage, like when I would stand on the edge of the diving platform trying to get my legs to jump. I wished Dad was there to tell them to “do it or come down, one or the other.”
It was around two in the afternoon, and the venetian blinds were throwing dark and bright stripes across the carpet. Leaving the lobby, we went down a hallway to one of the examining rooms. The room smelled like the hall: a combination of alcohol, floor wax and just a dash of vitamin. It wasn’t an added-on smell, like perfume, and as I got up on the table I wondered how you nailed a smell into a wall.
‘You Won’t Feel a Thing’
Dr. D came in and, while he was talking to my mother, took off his long, white coat and rolled up his shirt sleeves. He continued talking while he prepared an injection, and, as always, his voice was soft, confident and confidential. I liked listening to his voice. It reminded me of Dad using sandpaper very carefully on an old chair.
He made jokes about having teeth pulled and asked me who my teacher was that year. His voice was so much like a background noise that it was hard for me to follow him, and I didn’t hear some of his questions. I guess he thought I was scared, because he stopped what he was doing and came over to stand next to me.
“Now, don’t worry, Guy, this won’t take long, and you won’t feel a thing when Dr. P pulls that tooth.”
I said I knew, and he said I was a brave young man and went back to his syringes. I had had the medicine he was preparing once before, and I knew I didn’t have to worry about the shot, but I also knew that when a doctor told you something wouldn’t hurt, he meant it wouldn’t hurt as much if you didn’t fuss. For a second or two, I wondered what it would feel like when the tooth was pulled, and then I watched two squirrels arguing outside the window while I waited for the shot.
Mom said something about my grandfather and how he would bleed for three weeks or more when he had a tooth pulled. The doctor would move into their house and Grandpa would sit in a kitchen chair with newspapers over him. Every once in awhile the doctor would take blood from Mom or one of her brothers or sister and inject it right in the empty socket. Sometimes they would put a plug of chewing tobacco in it. Dr. D listened to her as he put a tourniquet around my arm and patted the inside of my elbow.
“Well, let’s hope this new anti-hemophiliac globulin will be a little more effective. I’ll give Guy a dose now, we’ll wait a few minutes to give it time to be distributed, and then Dr. P can pull the tooth. After that, we’ll keep Guy in Dr. P’s office for an hour or so to make sure—a little stick now—to make sure he’s not going to hemorrhage. If he does, we can give him another dose of AHG. There! That should take care of things. Don’t worry, kiddo, we’ll have you home before your brother gets home from school.”
I looked up at Mom, and she looked concerned, but she didn’t have that look she got when things were really bad so I decided I didn’t have to worry yet. I looked at Dr. D and watched while he changed syringes and blood came out of the needle. Mom and the doctor talked about something else while he finished up, and finally he was pressing a cotton ball over the hole in my arm.
“Now, Mrs. Boss, if you would just press on this while I get some tape.”
“Like this?”
“That’s fine.” He put the tape on, and I sat up on the edge of the table. “OK, young man, let’s go see Dr. P.”
Say Goodbye to the Tooth
We went back to Dr. P’s side of the building, and I sat in the chair watching the drill hover over me while the two doctors and my mother whispered in the corner. They were arguing about giving me a shot of Novocain. Dr. P was afraid I’d bleed even more from the holes the needle made, and Dr. D felt the AHG would prevent any extra bleeding. Mom was torn between wanting to make the whole thing as painless as possible and wanting to limit the number of places for me to bleed from. But, in general, she felt the needle holes would be minor compared to the one the tooth would leave. I was too young to say anything that would affect the outcome, but I wished they would get it over with. I don’t remember who won.
The tooth was pulled at 2:30. That evening at 7:30 there was another conference in the corner. This time Dad was there, and I remember starting to be afraid. Dad worked as a handyman around town during the day and then worked the night shift at another job. Except for holidays and when he was laid off, he always slept from just after supper until ten. If he was skipping his sleep time, things must not have been going as well as Dr. D had promised. The whispers were too soft for me to hear any words, but there was a tenseness that hadn’t been there before.
Dr. D had just given me a third shot of AHG, the last of his supply, about an hour before, but it hadn’t seemed to do much. I spent my time biting down on pieces of cotton and spitting blood into the basin next to the chair. I wondered if they should try putting some chewing tobacco in it, and I remember being glad the basin had a drain in it.
‘What About Dinner?’
They made their decision and everybody left. I was wondering if I was going to spend the night in the dentist’s chair when Mom came back in.
“Your dad’s gone to get gas in the car and make sure Merton can stay overnight at Uncle Kermit’s. When he gets back, we’re going to take you to a hospital in Ann Arbor where they can stop your bleeding.”
“What about dinner?” The words came out soggy from around the cotton.
“You can’t be hungry.”
I said I was.
“Well, if you can think of something you can eat we’ll pick it up on the way.”
I was still trying to think of something that would taste good with blood and wouldn’t require any chewing when Dr. D came in and handed Mom an envelope.
“You’re to go straight to the University Hospital emergency room. Drive into Ann Arbor on Main Street. When you get to Ann Street, turn right and just go straight. You can’t miss it. I’ll call ahead and tell them you’re on your way, and this will explain what’s happened so far.”
“Is there anything else we’ll need? Something from Dr. P?”
“He’s included a note with mine, and our home phone numbers are there in case they have any questions.” He left the room and Mom began fussing around getting ready to leave. I remember she borrowed a funny-shaped bowl for me to spit in on the way.
Like I said before, I really don’t remember the ride to the hospital. All that I have now is a few images of dark streets and buildings that were much larger than any of the ones in the little town we lived in. The time we must have spent in the emergency room has also faded away. I do remember riding on a stretcher through long dark halls with the sound of Mom’s shoes on the granite floors echoing in the silence. I hoped Mom and Dad would call Dr. D when they got home and tell him he was wrong. I wasn’t home by bedtime.
The First Night in the Hospital
After riding in an elevator, we went through some doors and I guessed this was the hallway that had the kids’ rooms. On either side were rooms with four or five cribs in them. At least they looked like cribs. Some of them were, and some were regular beds with side rails. You could see into the rooms because the walls were glass from about the level of the stretcher up to the ceiling. All the kids I saw were sleeping, but I could hear someone crying, and every few seconds someone shouted for a nurse. The dim lighting made the glass reflect like see-through mirrors and made it hard to tell what was really in the rooms. As we went along I watched myself roll by the beds on my stretcher, and then we came to the one that still had its lights on.
There was only one bed in the room, and it was a real bed, not a crib.
“Oh, my God.” That was Dad talking, and he said it flat and tight, the way he talked the time I accidentally kicked him in the stomach when I was swinging. He had seen her, too.
In the bed was a girl and she had been burned. Except for a couple places about the size of my dad’s hand, she looked like a hot dog you’ve cooked until it’s hard and black and has cracked open to show red in places. Her face wasn’t burned, but that only made it worse, because where you wanted to see contortions there was nothing. I guess the pain had passed the point where screaming was even possible.
After a few minutes Mom and Dad left, and I was alone listening to the night sounds of the hospital. Someone was still crying, and someone was still yelling for a nurse. Its rhythm reminded me of the foghorns they sometimes had in television shows and was to become one of the constants of my life. In later years, the crying would sometimes be replaced with swearing or snoring, but the wavelike pattern remained.
I was vaguely angry because the side rails made the bed seem like a crib. And I was still hungry, but the doctors said I couldn’t eat until my mouth stopped bleeding. Across the hall was the burned girl’s room. The nurses went into her room a lot to take her pulse and do things with the tubes taped to her arms.
Eventually I went to sleep. Some time later I woke up. I don’t know if it was the strangeness of the place or if a noise woke me, or I simply had to go to the bathroom. They had taped my arm to a board so I couldn’t bend it and break the needle, and I was surprised by how hard it was to move around because of it. My mouth had bled while I was asleep, and the right side of my face was stuck to the pillow. My blood might not clot, but it is still a liquid and will evaporate. The drying blood then forms a very tenacious glue, and for the next several years, as I lost my baby teeth, I was to wake up many times with my face stuck fast to my pillow.
This, however, was my first experience. Before I could finally sit up, I had to pull the pillow off with my left hand while using the armboard on my right arm as a lever to push myself up. After several attempts I finally succeeded
Once I was sitting up, it felt like someone had smeared pudding all over the right side of my head. For a while I sat there looking out the window at the street in front of the hospital. It is the first time I remember being awake that late at night. The world looked calm and cool. Across the street an old observatory had opened its dome, and the telescope pointed up into the night like a giant cannon. I wondered if it was a secret weapon to protect us from the Reds. As I sat there, I could feel the blood drying on my face.
One of the nurses noticed I was sitting up and came in to see if I was all right. When I turned to face her I heard her gasp and then she got very businesslike and started cleaning me up. A lady in a yellow dress came in to help her (later on I found out that the yellow dress meant she was a nurse’s aide), and they talked about how my blood wasn’t supposed to clot. The nurse said she didn’t think it had; it had just dried up. It took them almost an hour to wash me and change the sheets and find me a pillow that had a rubber cover under the pillowcase.
Just when I was beginning to get sleepy again, one of the other nurses ran out of the girl’s room, made a phone call, and ran back. A little bit later a bunch of doctors ran in and did a lot of things that I couldn’t figure out. When they left, the girl looked the same as she did before except for her face. Now it was relaxed.
Just before I finally went to sleep some men took a stretcher into her room. I don’t know why, but when they brought her out I waved good-bye. She couldn’t see me, though, because now she was all covered up, even her face.
Eventually my mouth stopped bleeding and I could eat, and a few days later they said I could go home. I remember being a little proud, in a strange kind of way, because I had beat Grandpa’s three weeks by several days. Like I said, for me that’s where everything starts. I was seven.
Read more Guy Boss at the Missing Factor.