Minor Incident

By Elaine Todd Koren

The eighty-eight year old author chose this period of time in her life to write a memoir that necessitated her going back sixty-eight years to an event in 1944, a happening that burned a hole in her consciousness. In doing so, a fantastic host of memories were uncovered, memories long forgotten. The author had a nearly fatal accident where she broke her back among other injuries, in Woodstock, NY during July of 1944 at the very height of the horrific battles of World War II.

There was a significant lack of doctors, nurses and medical equipment, all of which were sent by the hospitals to aid the soldiers at the front. To be a patient in a hospital, during that time, was akin to falling into hell. And hell it was! Whatever the pain was, it had caused her to behave in ways not typical of her, and in retrospect she at times grew ashamed or incredulous at her own actions. She learned the full extent of what one suffered in a full body cast when urine seeped into it renting one’s skin, and what caused her to verge on wrapping a cord around her neck in exasperation of nurses not responding to her buzzer.

Anchored by an early forceful chapter describing her lying unbelievably perched on four mattresses with her head hanging down at a sharp angle so the blood was rushing dangerously into it; this was to take the place of the Bradford Frame, a device which had been sent to the hospitals for serious injuries of the spinal column. There is the humor of The Taming of the Shrew with the veritable witch who occupied her hospital room. This book plays against the odds of a dangerous edema; a dreaded spinal fusion; which the author fights and then accepts, and the general ignorance of a medically and psychologically deficient environment of 1944. There is the shock value of lying for months surrounded by the plaster world of the cast. The author sees a marvelous humor in all this frightening tragedy concocting a desperate hopeless romance with a Dr. MacNeil, who believes the twenty year old to be sixteen. She also envisions mind dancing, a marvelous device to escape from the hell! There is a fascinating interaction between the progress of World War II and its battles and the progress of her illness.

Read this absorbing memoir of the coming of age of a 20-year-old college student whose world suddenly changes in the summer of 1944. The work has pathos and humor and has an optimistic note. In reading it you will find it jolting and difficult to forget. In fact the author has never forgotten it for sixty-eight years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elaine Todd Koren
• Release date: Oct 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311686978

Elaine Todd Koren

As a “woman of a certain age” like her heroine, Suzanne, Elaine Todd Koren has defied time by consistently bucking the tide. A renaissance woman who modeled, acted and studied art with Moses Soyer, she is both an accomplished painter and a writer. A divorced single mother of two, she worked in the New York inner- city school system both as a teacher and guidance counselor, and at night she wrote. Her mystical short stories of the children she met won first prize in both the Educational Press and International Labor Press Association awards. Her guidance book for the elementary school teacher (Prentice-Hall) was successful, well reviewed and widely used in colleges. She left the educational field to write full time and has published articles, contributed to anthologies and then worked on the biographical novel, Suzanne. For many years she researched, in the United States and in France, the life of Suzanne Valadon, the French painter and the people she touched. Ms. Koren presently resides in New York City with her husband where she is working on a memoir.

Book preview

The Awakening

It seems all so strange after I doze and awaken because Woodstock disappears. Where is it? And it’s as though none of this ever happened to me. When I open my eyes again I’m still in my bed. I’m back in my room in Kingston Hospital and the nurse lifts me and slides the bedpan out from under me. I feel as though I had awakened from a very bad dream and yet I know that it is all very real. This awakening which forces me to face the truth of my witless injuries makes the trauma all the more terrifying; it forces me to face this illusory mishap as though to study and learn how to avoid the perilous.

What did the doctor tell your mother? I saw her talking to him after you were X-rayed, the nurse, Karen says shattering the wonderful spell which had taken hold of me from the unknown drug administered.

He said that I’d probably never walk again.

Oh really, what a thing to say! And what did your mother say? She must have been shocked.

I hesitate feeling a mounting annoyance.

Well, what did your mother answer?

She said, she said, oh no! That’s what she said, oh no!

That’s all? My mother would have screamed. That really is awful but if the truth be known you did a pretty stupid thing. You seem very calm about the whole thing; aren’t you afraid? Suppose you can’t walk again, what would you do?

I don’t know, I whisper hoarsely. "I really don’t know. What would you do?" I ask.

I would kill myself. I know this is the wrong thing to say and I rely upon you not to repeat anything. I could lose my job by saying it to a patient but that is what I would do.

That’s encouraging!

By the way, she continues, I’ll bet that snotnose Grace Henley won the beauty contest. You definitely should have won! I went to high school with her, that witch. She’s so full of herself she makes me nauseous. And she’s not that good looking if you ask me. She has a long nose and is as flat as a board. My friend saw her stuff her bosoms, the cheat! You should have won, too bad. You must have been really pretty before you got so banged up I mean. You don’t see yourself but you have a long scab that runs from the corner of your eye to your chin. Too bad you did this to yourself! I’m sorry to say you won’t be so pretty when you’re finally through with all this. Don’t be surprised if you have quite a few scars on you. Don’t be so idiotic next time. Did Grace win?

I never answered but she is relentless. Just heard that the actress Susan Peters, you know the one in the movie, Random Harvest, the one with Greer Garson, got shot, by mistake of course, by her husband on their honeymoon, can you believe that on their honeymoon, and now she’s a paraplegic and can’t move her arms or legs and sits in a wheelchair. You can’t tell me that she’ll do any acting after this. This could be you. You had better pray.

Thanks for the warning.

Don’t mention it. Well if you need anything let me know. I always like to help the unfortunate. I really hope you’ll walk again but frankly . . . we’ll hope for the best I always say.

You’re very uplifting, thank you. Don’t say more, please don’t say more. And go away, just go away.

It’s true, she continues. Everyone tells me that. I was born with the gift to help the needy. Not everyone has it I must say. Think of me as your best friend the one who told you about spinal shock, not everyone knows about it you know.

I certainly will. By the way I may leave here.

Really? Where are you going?

To another hospital in New York City. I’m not sure of the name.

How gruesome. How utterly gruesome this all is!

I hope not. They say it’s a new place and wounded soldiers go there from the Normandy invasion.

Weren’t they all killed? You mean some soldiers are left? Well good luck is all I can say. You’ll certainly need it.

She smiles broadly, waves and sweeps out of the room. I hope I never see you again, anywhere, I pray fervently.

My God I have to pee again! And there doesn’t seem to be anyone around. Oh there’s a candy striper, what luck! She certainly should know how to give a bedpan.

Are you here every day to help? I make an effort to smile.

I come after school. The nurses say that they would go crazy if they didn’t have me and I baby the patients so they love me, and do you know something, I’m just graduating from high school but I wouldn’t become a nurse for anything . I’m going to college and I’ll decide what to do and anyway I’m pitching in because of the war . . . can you raise yourself in the cast sweetie so I can slide this pan under your backside . . . just try a little, just try . . . oh you’re a good girl . . . that’s perfect. You know the couples are all getting engaged now and they don’t even know each other and my friend confided in me that if she does it she feels like a piece of wood . . . ain’t that a hoot? I thought you’d enjoy hearing that, now be a good girl for me and let me slide the pan out, oh you’re a sweetie.

She holds the bedpan disdainfully away from her striped pinafore as she flushes the contents down a toilet. Miss candy striper then makes her way down a corridor to a nurse’s station.

3

Stagecoach

One thinks of the Scully Walton ambulance so vividly, of its highly polished dark green doors. It signals the menacing, the dread, the purposeful transport of bodies mutilated in injury like my own. But today there is the lugubrious cloud encircling the ambulance. The vehicle has finally arrived to transport me to a New York hospital, the Reconstruction Hospital on 100th Street and Central Park West in Manhattan; Reconstruction Hospital its name, a joyless fabrication of masonry, steel, concrete and plaster,

The movie Stagecoach had come out with Claire Trevor years before. My resemblance to this actress fourteen years older is noticeable, and becomes more so as I hit twenty. I think of this as I am carried out of my room on this newly patented device, this wheeled stretcher called a gurney on this hot humid day. I am laid on it, actually anchored to it in the blazing sun. As I lay on the gurney being transferred into the Scully Walton, in my mind I imagine I am being transported into a romantic stagecoach. I reconstruct Claire Trevor lifting her skirts to step into it, remembering her as a woman of ill repute in the film. It is easy in my condition to become part of a movie but resurrecting a romantic nineteen hundred vehicle in my thoughts as an escape from my ambulance does not wipe out the heat. But today the heat just oppresses. It envelops with its dampness; cloying and it saturates my plaster cast, with a blanket of burning. Is the burning radiating from my broken back or from the dank air surrounding the