So Far, So Good: The Saga of a Broken Neck and the Good Life That Can Follow

By Lee D. Goldstein

Every year, 40,000 Americans suffer spinal cord injuries. Lee Goldstein is one of them. Lee has been living with his injury for 66+ years, making him unofficially the longest living quadriplegic in history. The story of his injury and the reasons for his survival are chronicled in this stunning book. Lee tells of his terrible injury, his fight for life, and the amazing life he has led ever since. He was rescued from drowning by a famous singer. He hob-nobbed with celebrities during his hospitalization, and afterwards. Behind his success, as a young man and an adult, was a loving, caring and supportive family. Lee Goldstein and his late wife Marilyn raised five adopted children, including Tim, who suffers from autism, and whom they raised to successful adulthood. Lee’s present wife Ellen is a rock and has made Lee’s later years close to divine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Untreed Reads
• Release date: Aug 21, 2013
• ISBN: 9781611876055

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So Far, So Good!

The Saga of a Broken Neck, and the Good Life that Can Follow

By Lee D. Goldstein

Copyright 2013 by Lee D. Goldstein

Cover Copyright 2013 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing

The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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So Far, So Good!

The Saga of a Broken Neck, and the Good Life that Can Follow

Lee D. Goldstein

DEDICATION

To my family, all the Goldsteins; my Mother Charlotte, my sister Irene, my sister Dulcy, and particularly to my father Moe, who conducted and orchestrated this unfinished work. And finally, to my wife Ellen, who befriended me, helped me, nursed me and tolerated me for now these many years.

I think I know why I never became demoralized or angry after the injury. Even during the worst of it, when people didn’t think I’d live, when my neck was being stretched by rigorous traction, my limbs in pain, my skin breaking into sores, the raging urinary tract infection; still I always knew I would win. Not once did I become morose or melancholy about what condition I was in or what I could have been. Often I’ve tried to understand why I never fell into the self-defeating depression that most people with critical, lifelong injuries endure for at least a short time.

The only answer I can find is the way I was treated and encouraged by my family. They made my recovery an achievable goal in my eyes, and carefully constructed the recovery to be an enjoyable journey. The pathway to normalcy became a series of agreeable, doable conquests, each conquest or plateau a passage to the next reachable goal. This exceptional family made that very tangible to me. And because they broke the tasks into these palpable, achievable segments, the whole picture of eventual recovery became simplified and visible, rather than complex and unattainable. I will always cherish and hold as a model of family cohesiveness the example established for me by the Goldsteins that summer of 1946 and all the years to follow.

CHAPTER 1

The Incident at Elder Lane Beach

…it was just water, and it didn’t seem any different than breathing air…

Looking back, as I do so often, I find it odd that the huge revolver is my most vivid memory of those first few hours. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the menacing black gun in its holster, inches from the left side of my face. Perhaps it is so vivid in my memory because even though I had shot many guns with my dad, never before had a handgun been that close to my face. I thought how incongruous it was to have that enormous pistol bouncing so near the face of an injured person. Should the gun joggle that much? Was it dangerous?

The only person riding with me in the back of the ambulance speeding through Chicago’s northern suburbs was silent. It was just as well. I couldn’t talk to him. I wanted to, but my mouth wouldn’t move. I wanted to ask a lot of questions of this strange silent man in black. The Winnetka police officer sat next to me and didn’t talk. He had one hand on my body somewhere; I saw his arm extended over the sheet. He was evidently steadying me, but I felt nothing. He sat facing the back of the ambulance, his left hip with the gun on it, next to my stretcher.

Do they have ambulances that don’t bounce? Why was the siren so loud? I suddenly felt guilty that it may be disturbing people. Its shrill screaming was eating at my brain. Had they no consideration for the occupant of the ambulance? Of course they must. They’re helping me. Where the hell are we going? Will the gun hit my cheek as the ambulance lurches around corners? Stop thinking about the pistol! I’ve been injured. Think about what’s going to happen to me. My God, where is my family; do they know about this; what are they thinking; how did this all start from such an innocent day?

* * *

And it was an innocent day. A hot, normal day in the small Chicago suburb of Winnetka, Illinois. Such a day in the area feels 20 degrees hotter, because these suburbs lie along Lake Michigan. While the lake keeps the temperature a little lower, it produces humidity in the form of soft, hot wet vapors that drench Chicago and its shoreline suburbs and the shirt on your back. Everywhere the heat was oppressive—on the beaches, in the palatial homes along Sheridan Road, around the well-kept lawns and patios just inland, in the North Shore shopping villages that looked like Currier and Ives prints, with perfect peaked roofs, expensive goods in the windows, and each with its hardware store, malt shop, and Abe Fell’s Clothiers.

I was 14 years old. I had just celebrated my bar mitzvah a few months before in my prickly Abe Fell suit that I think was made of horsehair. I called it my crown of thorns suit, and couldn’t wait to tear it off each time I had to wear it.

Indeed, that day was so hot that I picked up my bag of newspapers early for delivery. The sun and heat were already settling heavily on my shoulders like a hot bag of sand. I knew I would lose energy peddling the loaded bike. The giant bag of newspapers swung pendulously from my handlebars each time I pumped the peddles, causing my steering to be unsteady. The last part of the route was an uphill climb toward the shopping village of Winnetka. The mile-long hill was always a killer in the heat. And worse, on Cherry Street the Doberman pinscher would be waiting for me. The damn Doberman lay concealed until I got even with the bushes next to the front gate of his house. Then, as I threw the paper to the front yard, he streaked out to the street from his hiding place, his fangs bared, his shrill shrieking bark sparking cold shivers up my spine. I hit the pedals hard in a last burst of power, knowing I had to put my feet high on the handlebars until he gave up the chase. That Doberman taught me how to ride a bike with my legs mostly in the air. I still have marks on my thighs where he twice caught me with his teeth.

I knew my parents were well off. They always gave me enough money for snacks and all other needs. But I wanted a paper route of my own. I wanted to show my folks that their bar mitzvah boy could hold a job, even though it was a small, tough one. My father had silently taught me the ethics and pleasures of work. We never discussed it; it just felt right to me when I became 14 that May. I wanted to have a job, and my parents smiled and said yes when I told them I knew whom to call to get the paper route.

On Elm Street I threw the last paper from my now almost weightless bag, and headed straight for Elder Lane beach, less than a mile away, and gratefully mostly downhill. I knew my friends were meeting me there in a little while, and the sweet cool relief of the Lake Michigan water waited. My bathing suit was under my shorts. After parking my bike on the bluff overlooking the lake, I ran down the 75 or 80 railroad tie stairs that twisted through the willow trees down to the beach. Finally on the sand, I dropped my outer clothes in a small pile at the base of the wooden pier and ran to its end, where I dove off into the deep, refreshing water.

It felt wonderful! It’s amazing how water totally revives and refreshes, no matter how hot you were moments ago. I remember feeling completely revitalized after swimming alone near the end of the pier for perhaps half an hour, until some of my friends appeared.

We then began our typical summer beach day, laughing, socializing, diving graceful swan dives and clownish show-off dives into that deep water at the pier’s end. We swam far out into the lake until the lifeguard picked up his megaphone and yelled the traditional HEY YOU! Then we knew we had to swim in quickly, or be kicked off the beach, possibly for the rest of the summer for not responding at once.

After hours of swimming and diving and showing off for our girlfriends, we boys ambled away from the deep end of the pier toward the shallow end where it met the shore. I stood there at one side of the pier, with my towel around my shoulders to keep off the oppressive sun, and looked over the water near the sand beach. I reflected about what had already been a long day for me, though it was still morning.

It was important to keep the sun off my shoulders. The year before, I had gotten such a severe sunburn that when I reached home, I fainted on the tile floor of the bathroom when my mother started to apply lotion to my beet-red back and shoulders.

Behind me I heard the pounding of bare feet running on the wooden pier. Without warning, a pair of hands firmly hit my shoulders from behind, propelling me forward off the pier. I vividly remember flinging my towel backward so that it wouldn’t come into the water with me. I instantly knew that one of my friends had shoved me off the pier, and in a reflex response I fell into one of the dives we had been performing all morning.

Where I was standing near the shoreline, the walkway on the pier was perhaps 20 feet from the top of the water. I didn’t know it, but there were only two feet of water below. The roiled, sandy water caused by the waves was not clear enough to see the bottom. It wasn’t enough water to absorb the momentum of a six-foot teenager plunging head first. My head hit the sand at the bottom of those two feet of water. There was a dull, clubbed feeling as I hit bottom. My neck had snapped. I tried to pull myself to the surface, but nothing worked! My arms, as in a nightmare, refused to move to my commands.

I lay on my back under the water looking up through a layer of Lake Michigan. I saw a lot of people up on the pier high above my head. They were talking, and some were pointing at me. I was breathing, but what I was breathing was water. It didn’t hurt, it was just water, and it didn’t seem any different than breathing air. There was no pain.

I wanted someone to do something about this sudden bad dream.

Through the water, I could see that one man seemed to be more animated than the others who were watching me from high on the pier.

He was gesticulating and pointing, and finally he yelled, Hey kid, are you okay?

Again he yelled, Are you kidding around?

I heard his voice faintly through the water.

Then I remember nothing.

I learned much later that the animated man was Jack Owens, the singer on Chicago’s popular radio show Don MacNeil’s Breakfast Club. He had jumped into the water, and, with the assistance of his friend, a songwriter named Paul Flynn, pulled me to the shore when he realized I was not coming up for air.

I remembered nothing more until I woke up on the beach. A crowd was around me, and people shouted to each other that a doctor had been called. I felt numb and couldn’t move. Frightened faces peered down at me. Finally, Dr. Peters arrived. Dr. Peters was our only local doctor. His office was in the little sub-village of Indian Hill, five blocks from the beach. He examined me quickly, and I heard him tell people not to touch or move me. In a short time the ambulance came. Men placed me on a hard board and carried me up the stairs of the bluff. The waiting police officer climbed into the ambulance with me and sat next to my head, his shiny black holster with its protruding revolver inches from my eye.

*

Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans.

—John Lennon

CHAPTER 2

Cockroaches and Nuns

…Don’t tell Mom…

The ambulance pulled into the hospital in Evanston, the only hospital on the north shore of Chicago. The hospital’s neon sign glared at me through the ambulance window as we pulled in. I don’t remember being transported into the X-ray room, but I do remember waking up to see two nuns working around me, and X-ray equipment hanging over my body.

The nuns wore full black habits with large white, stiff stand-up hoods around their faces. One nun was trying to rub off the tiny round, flat sand pebbles that had adhered to my skin. I heard the pebbles clicking as they fell to the hard surface of the X-ray table. They had stuck, as if by glue, to my body.

The nun told me, The pebbles have to be removed, because they may obscure the X-ray films.

First she used a cloth, but the pebbles didn’t come loose. She left the room for a short time, and then showed up with a bristle brush like the ones used to scrub floors, and started briskly scrubbing the pebbles off my skin. For some reason it was terribly painful to my upper body.

Please stop, I begged. But she wouldn’t. Please, can you be more gentle. She only got irritated. It seemed like an hour before she stopped the painful brushing, and the two women began taking X-rays.

Lie still, they ordered as they took each shot.

I couldn’t do anything else, because I couldn’t move any part of my body. The hard table hurt my shoulders and head terribly as they put me in one position after another. Long afterward, doctors told me that the constant movement as the nuns repositioned my body irritated the already swollen, ruptured spinal column within its cracked neck vertebrae. Their rough handling may well have exacerbated the already inflamed breaks, which probably added to my later paralysis.

I have no sustained memory after the X-ray ordeal, but evidently I spent the first night in that hospital. My mother later tearfully told my sister Irene, I spent the night brushing cockroaches from his bed! She had sat next to me throughout the night. The hospital was the closest to the beach where I was injured, but evidently not the cleanest.

I next remember seeing my father in a hospital room. Through my cloudy mind I was able to ask, Where am I?

It’s another hospital, Passavant Hospital, he told me. You’ll be all right, and good care is being given to you. I knew his face so well, and for the first time in my life, I saw it was filled with pain and fear.

I was confused and fearful and unable to move anything except my eyes and my mouth, but I didn’t tell him. I was afraid of alarming both of us even further.

I remember lying on a gurney cart in the hall. Someone was moving my cart. Why? The cart stopped. We were still in the hall. From the corner of my eye, I could see nurses scurrying by quickly, as though on urgent missions.

From somewhere close by, I could hear a woman crying softly.

My sister Irene was there, constantly leaning over my cart, reassuring me that all would be okay.

Watch my toes, I asked her. Are they moving? I’m trying to move them. Are they moving now?

No.

Don’t tell Mom, I said.

*

You don’t really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around—and why his parents will always wave back.

—William D. Tammeus

CHAPTER 3

Try Not to Go to Sleep

…We suddenly saw Dad in his car…

The next days were blurred. One night, probably the first night in this new hospital, Dad came into the room to say goodnight to me. He leaned over my head and almost whispered, Try not to go to sleep tonight.

Evidently, a doctor had told him that if I slept, or slept too long, I might never again wake up. Perhaps it was the day that they told him the fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae of my neck were broken, and that death often usually resulted from an injury so high in the spinal column.

I understood the weight of what he said, and suddenly realized the torment that he must be going through. I tried to tell him not to worry, that I would be all right, but words didn’t form in my blurry mind. This I did know: that I would be all right that night, and every other night thereafter. In my innocence, I somehow believed it without any doubt. But I couldn’t form the proper words to tell him. I wished I could. I’m sure he needed comforting that night, and for the many nights in the years that followed.

My sister Irene spent her every waking hour with me. She hovered by my bed night and day. She often refused to leave my side when doctors or staff asked her to temporarily leave the room. And they must have sensed her resolve to protect me, because they stopped asking her. I was in and out of consciousness those first few days, and my mind raged with nightmarish terrors and questions. On one of my first nights, Irene, who realized my loss of understanding of the events, tried to gently and quietly answer the many feverish, desperate questions I asked.

"You were injured a few days ago on the beach. There is temporary damage to your neck. Dad received a phone call at his business from someone who knew you and who had witnessed the incident at the beach. Mom and I knew nothing of the events, and were driving home along the lake on Sheridan Road. We had been shopping in Chicago. Suddenly we saw Dad in his car crazily overtake us and zoom past our car, weaving in and out of traffic and quickly disappearing ahead. We knew something was wrong, and so I sped the car the next few miles to home. A crowd of friends stood outside the house, and in a tumultuous few moments, they told us what happened. Dad rushed us into his car, and we sped to that first hospital in Evanston where we were told you had been taken."

I later realized that Irene had softened the story as much as she could, in her quiet, comforting voice. Looking back in the years that followed, I can’t imagine the state of mind of my family that day. Of course, there were no cell phones then, so all communications were person to person between friends and relatives in frantic efforts to reach out and comfort and understand the sequence of events, and to explain what they knew to family and to each other. The corridor outside my hospital room immediately became a communications center for a myriad of friends and family. I can still vaguely remember that hushed buzz of voices into each night.

My father, in his usual take-charge fashion, had already begun his quest for excellence in medical care for me. The day I was injured, he called one of his dearest friends, Dr. Theodore Stone, seeking a recommendation for a primary doctor for my case. Ted Stone was a distant cousin of my mother’s. When we were growing up, we had spent uncountable weekends on Dr. Stone’s enormous farm in Woodstock, Illinois. It was one of our favorite places to go. It had a small stream, hundreds of acres to explore, a cemetery, animals, and a giant old barn and loft in which we spent hours roughhousing in the hay with our cousins, Dr. Stone’s adopted children.

Ted Stone was a leading neurologist in Chicago. Earlier, he had been a neurosurgeon, but an auto accident and the resulting shaky hands caused him to give up surgery. He became a consulting neurologist and psychologist, referring his most important and difficult surgical cases to Dr. Loyal Davis. He told my father that Loyal Davis was the most knowledgeable and renowned neurosurgeon in the Midwest, and perhaps all of the United States.

Dad contacted Davis that first day of my injury. The surgeon agreed over the phone to take the case.

*

If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience.

—Robert Fulghum

CHAPTER 4

Passavant

…snakes in the bed…

Loyal Davis practiced primarily out of Passavant Hospital, which was located in Chicago on the lakefront. An ambulance had removed me from the cockroach hospital in Evanston, and transported me to Passavant. Loyal Davis indeed looked in on me that first day I was in Passavant, but I didn’t know it.

By the second day, my family felt the imposing presence of Dr. Davis in that hospital room. Davis was respected and feared by the hospital staff and patients alike. As Chief of Surgery, he was followed at all times by a coterie of interns, residents, and fellows listening to his pronouncements and his interviews with patients. He had authored countless papers and several books on spinal cord surgery, trauma to the cord, and rehabilitation of spinal cord injuries. He ran the enormous Hines Veterans Administration Hospital Department of Rehabilitation and Spinal Surgery in Chicago. Dr. Davis began by telling my family how many medical organizations he ran, and how many hospital programs for rehabilitation and surgery he was in charge of. He was outspoken about his accomplishments and capability, just as he was outspoken about and immediately critical of any care or personnel that did not meet his expectations.

More than once during my stay there, when he was displeased with someone’s performance, he forbade certain nurses or technicians from ever entering my room again. He ordered personnel around like a sergeant-major, and they all snapped to attend to his every wish and command. He was tall and well built, as though he might have been a football player at one time, and had a head full of white-gray hair that gave him the air of a commander-in-chief. He was regal in bearing, and his imperial demeanor and reputation caused a flurry of activity wherever he went. My nurses made the room into a showcase of medical cleanliness and care in the expectation of any surprise visits by Davis.

My family tried to be in the room when he came, so that they could bombard him with questions about my care and immediate future. Also, medical specialists, such as therapists and nurses working on my case, tried to be present to ask him their professional care questions. Therefore, it was often a frantic circus of bustling humanity when Loyal Davis walked into the room. To add to this scene, Davis’s staff and training interns followed him in like a line of white ducks. It often seemed like a scene I remembered in the Groucho Marx movie where the whole ship’s crew crowds into Marx’s stateroom at one time. I never got a word in edgewise, but I learned that the care I got was immaculate and state-of-the-art for the time. The majority of it is still state-of-the-art, well over sixty years later!

Perhaps the second day, dazed, I awoke for the first time in my hospital room. My weakened hands were lying on my abdomen. As I began to move my hands over the sheets, I felt a maze of tubes and clamps. It felt as though they were under the skin of my abdomen, and I panicked at the thought. My private nurse rushed to my side as she saw me stirring.

Why is all this stuff in my body?

She smiled and explained, The tubes are simply under the sheet and not under your skin. The tubes are running from your bladder and an intravenous in your arm, and are just part of your care. Don’t be concerned.

Suddenly I was living in a world that was frighteningly unfamiliar.

A few days after my entry into Passavant, I woke up for a few minutes in an operating room. I heard the doctors talking about whether or not to operate. They were wearing masks and surgical gowns. I understood from their conversation that at least one of them wanted to operate on my neck.

For that moment I was awake, I assembled my thoughts, and was able to say, Please, you guys, don’t be scissors happy. Thinking back, I suppose I had heard the term on radio medical dramas.

Weeks later, an intern who was in that room told me, You were taken to surgery for an exploratory operation on your neck, to try to determine if bone chips should be removed or the neck fused. An argument took place in surgery over the efficacy of performing that dangerous procedure; a procedure that sometimes does more harm than good.

Evidently my words, emerging out of the blue, swung the argument in favor of the men who thought the procedure was not indicated. Surgery did not take place. It was later shown that indeed surgery was not called for. There were no bone chips, and the condition of the already swollen and damaged column would have been exacerbated by a surgical procedure.

A day later, this time in my room, another disagreement broke out between two young doctors. They wanted to install traction to my neck by fastening heavy pins into my skull so that cables could then be attached to the pins and run through the steel headboard on pulleys. Weights would be hung from the cables to pull my head from the shoulders toward the headboard, thus stretching the neck for a prolonged period while the neck bones healed and the swelling subsided.

I asked them, How is this accomplished?

They told me, We’ll drill holes in your skull, insert large pins, and then attach the cables for the pulleys to the pins.

Is there an alternative? I asked.

We can make a harness around your chin and head and attach that to the cables.

The pin-in-skull method sounded barbarous. I want the harness method.

They said, These days the clamps through the scalp and skull are the usual method, because it doesn’t interfere with eating. I had no idea what they meant.

Use the harness method anyway. At 14, I was terribly afraid of pins inserted into my skull, and I told them that.

Evidently they listened to me, as they had in the operating room. A brace maker came immediately, and fitted me with a head harness. It went into use that day. Heavy weights that looked like grandfather clock weights hung on cables and pulleys in back of my bed. My neck was being stretched. The harness around my jaw and the back of my head was uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable, I thought, as the concept of pins through my skull. Nowadays, the pins through the skull method is normally used. It is euphemistically called the halo method, and I’m told that after the initial shock of seeing yourself in a mirror, the pain quickly diminishes, and the method is quite successful.

The problem with my own choice of the harness method immediately became apparent. It had to do with my adenoids. I had always been plagued with adenoids, which were swollen, and which prevented me from breathing through my nose when I was lying down. I was forced to breathe through my mouth when I slept. The pull on the harness under my chin clamped my mouth closed. Therefore, in order for me to eat, they had to force an opening in my mouth with a spoon handle. A young intern solved the breathing problem. He placed a tongue depressor between my teeth, sideways across my mouth. It allowed a small opening through the front of my teeth so I could breathe. When necessary, the depressor was removed by the nurses so that I could eat and drink. For 10 years after the hospital episode, I had a gap in the shape of a tongue depressor in my back teeth. The heavy traction weights pulling against my chin had pushed my teeth into the gums.

From the moment I was brought into the hospital, my head was also held firmly in place with sandbags to prevent my neck from moving and therefore doing additional damage to the bone and tissue during the healing process. The sandbags prevented me from seeing to the sides while talking to people. Visitors and staff had to stand over me and look straight down at me to talk if they wanted to look at my eyes. The sandbags remained for weeks, and the traction stayed with me for months. I felt like The Man in the Iron Mask, a novel I had read as a kid.

In addition, the sandbags pushed hard against my ears. The odd thing during that time was that despite a broken neck and myriad complications, I suffered most from aching ears caused by the constant pressure of those sandbags. My father and family kept apologizing for the necessary pain, and were obviously miserable for me. But they couldn’t touch the sandbags or give me relief in any way. What a day of celebration it was when the bags were removed. It was as though my head was released from prison, though Loyal Davis cautioned me not to move my head for several more weeks.

One day in the early weeks of my initial hospitalization, I woke up with a raging infection. The symptoms were new to me, but weren’t new to the staff or to Loyal Davis. It was the first time the consequences of urinary infection and the term urinary tract management came into my thinking. Thereafter, early in those weeks of my hospitalization, urinary infection became the focus of all our thoughts and of the activities of the entire staff attending my injury.

The onset of a urinary infection threw the staff into a frenzy of activity, which immediately changed the makeup of the room.

Dr. Davis came in and briskly ordered to the staff, Have him drink three gallons of liquid in the next 24 hours.

I’m positive that few people know what that’s like. There are two eight-ounce glasses in a pint, and two pints in a quart. There are four quarts to a gallon. That’s 16 glasses. Multiply 16 glasses times the three gallons, and you have 48 glasses of fluid to be taken in a 24-hour period.

That meant that every few minutes a nurse or one of my family members woke me up from the feverish stupor caused by the urinary infection, and forced a glass of anything liquid down me—anything that didn’t look like water. Water was the problem. At first they were feeding me nothing but water, and the sight of it made me gag after just a few rapid glasses in a row that day. I hated the sight of anyone entering the door with a glass or pitcher in their hand. I had the sweetest nurses in the world. One of them was especially lovely to me—kind, caring, young, and gentle. Her concern for me to drink enough during that day caused her to push fluids, perhaps to an excess, maybe so that my chart would look good, because, believe it or not, they charted every ounce. That way neither of us would incur the wrath of the feared Loyal Davis.

At one point this lovely young girl wouldn’t believe me that I couldn’t take one more sip of water, and asked me to drink it anyway, just for her. I don’t know why I lost control; I had never done anything like it in my life. But somehow, even with my almost useless arms, I knocked the glass from her hand and it shattered on the floor. She was so taken aback that at first she looked startled and started to cry. Then she quietly cleaned up the broken glass and promised me more time to absorb each drink.

After that, word got around that my tolerance was wearing down, and people became more concerned with making the intake easier. Fruit juices appeared, as well as milk shakes and soft drinks. Anything that didn’t look like water. Perhaps Davis changed his mind about the necessity of water, and agreed to other kinds of fluids. Everyone began cajoling me and begging me to drink, and making games of each drink. That actually helped. Anything was better than just a lot of water gulped down too fast.

To this day, I can’t figure why it was so damned important to pour three gallons down me that day, but they did it. After all, wasn’t this a medieval and Asian method of torture in past times? However, my pee, seen through the plastic tubing, began to look like purified spring water. I’m convinced you could have drunk it safely. You could have used it as aquarium water for exotic fish. You could have washed down operating rooms with it.