A Thousand White Dawns

By Carson C. T. Collins

This is a story about six men who went to a medical college in Texas during the 1970s. It is blackly humorous and often shocking as it examines the hidden side of medical education and its effects on the lives of students and patients in a university hospital. Those who read it may never again feel quite the same about doctors.

The main character has enrolled in order to avoid military service during the Vietnam War; thus, he sees medical school from the unique viewpoint of an insider who as yet has no desire to become part of the system. He soon finds himself locked in a fiercely competitive academic struggle that absorbs and eventually obsesses him.

When the war ends, he is halfway through the program. No longer able to walk away, he decided to stay on. He makes a promise to himself: to retain his individuality and to never become an apologist for the establishment. In spite of this, he is gradually corrupted and becomes involved in some very questionable activities.

Finally, the protagonist reaches his turning point and acts to expose a case of human experimentation whose subjectspatients on a cancer wardhave not given their informed consent. His medical career ends when he is cast out as a result of what has probably been the first moral act of his life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524514761

Carson C. T. Collins

Carson C.T. Collins/About the Author Artist/Author/Scholar (11/25/1953 – 06/19/2015) Carson's true passion was his time spent over 38 years from 1977–2015, working on 260 paintings on the Ocean Series, while living in seven countries. A Thousand White Dawns was written in 1987 and inspired from his experiences while attending medical school in Texas in the early 1970's. Artist's Statement: "The ocean as life: the sea in our blood, the birth of life. The rocking of the waves, the cradle of life. The ocean is the mother of all living things. The ocean as life's journey: adventure, danger, the crossing of the great water. The desire to go beyond, to leave the old world behind and discover something new and exotic; the call of the sea. The eroticism of the ocean: it can be wild, pounding, violent and terrifying, or warm, buoyant, gentle in its swaying and lapping motions; the calm after the storm." Carson C.T. Collins: devoted, passionate, warm and literate. Humorous with his many interesting stories to tell. For more information, readers may visit: www.theoceanseries.com

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Four a.m.

I s that right? Can that be right? Amazing how these hordes of bad ideas attach themselves to such a simple natural thing as the hour of the day. It’s almost never really OK for it to be four o’clock in the morning, which is pretty strange, considering the fact that every single day of your life contains this particular moment. The idea, of course, is to sleep through it. That’s the normal thing to do. Or maybe get rid of it entirely by taking the 4 from the clock face, the way we did with the 13 in the elevators. Like daylight saving time. In that case, it’s already five o’clock, a much more respectable hour. At five, you would just pretend to be getting up for work early. Clean bright hum of razors, dawn hush on granite facades, the elevator chimes a cool blue xylophone. Dial direct if you know the code … it’s like a hall of mirrors, where you can be in two places at once … the white-limbed girls grow like mushrooms in those reception rooms. They never really know where you are … so smooth …

Wait a minute. There’s no girl here. It’s not a mushroom—not even a proper pillow, for that matter. A sofa pillow, that’s what this is, and not very clean. The nose knows; we don’t want to see this thing in the dawn’s early light. And will you stop making lame jokes with your sorry self and try for God’s sake to sit up and see what time it is, you wretch, you turd, you whore! If only this damned watch would stop bouncing around like that little ball you’re supposed to sing along with. Oh dear. I do believe that second hit was a mistake. Because if it really is four in the morning, then I have to be doing surgery just two hours from now, and what we have here is potentially a very shitty situation.

Oh, come, come now, Dr. Conrad. Can’t let a trifling thing like a little nystagmus spoil an otherwise lovely morning. Why, four a.m. is a perfect time to be getting on our way! It’s still dark outside. We’ll just slip out quietly to avoid waking these nice people. Just get up and make it to the door. That’s the hard part. Anyway, the chief is sure to be too hungover to notice. If I can just manage to find the car and drive it, then the rest should be easy. Plenty of methedrine and quaalude back at the apartment, a hot shower, maybe some beer, and vitamins for nourishment. B vitamins! That should work …

Now where did I put that car? How the hell am I supposed to find it among all these others when they keep moving around and changing colors like that? Those green ones over there, weren’t they all red a minute ago?

Oh, no wonder. This isn’t the parking lot. This seems to be the middle of, well, some sort of intersection. Aha, yes. I recognize the spot. It’s the corner of, haha, Walk and Don’t Walk, haha. Hoho, good Lord above!

Rather a close scrape with that Cadillac. I love the way these parked cars seem to just leap right out in front of you. It’s not funny, really. Lamentable, that’s what it is. I shouldn’t be doing this. Somebody could get hurt. Me, for example. Christ. I hope there won’t be a whole raft of blood to draw this morning.

Home at last. Not exactly out of the woods yet, but the worst part is over. Better quickly take some amphetamine, which isn’t going to help the shakes any. Take some barbiturates for that. Tuinal looks good, except it makes you puke sometimes. All right, take some Compazine too. Porco, Deo, but I feel awful. I think I’m going to vomit. No, you’re not. Yes, I am. No, you’re not. Breathe slowly … Urk.

OK, the pills are staying down this time. Matter of fact, I’m starting to feel good. Better than good. Fresh. Clear. Omnipotent! That methamphetamine is a miracle, all right.

Five o’clock. Hurry up and get dressed. And those eyes, dammit, they’re dilated. A few cc’s of Demerol will fix that. These new 26-gauge needles are great. They don’t even leave a mark.

On with the white coat and tie now. Nobody will ever know. Except me, I know. I’ve got to get off these drugs. They’re killing me. And what’s worse, they make you weak. It’s something to hide, and when you’ve got something to hide, you’ve got to pretend to be just like everyone else. And pretty soon, you are just like them—only weaker.

Nobody is any more than what they pretend to be, finally. And didn’t I swear that I’d never do that? Didn’t I swear that I’d never be just another sick, hypocritical apologist for their rotten system? And now look at me. Not even three years and I’m already worse than they are. Oh sure, I haven’t killed as many patients as the chief has. Not yet anyway. But Conlon—that crazy, deluded old bastard—actually believes in what he’s doing. He really thinks he’s a good surgeon, for some unknown reason. Whereas I know.

Oh, what’s the use. It’s easy to talk about quitting when you’re full of the stuff and feeling strong. Quitting is easy. I’ve done it a hundred times. Haha. Real funny. And one of these days, I’m going to OD or slip up, and they’ll kick me out. And then what was it all for? Nothing, that’s what. Just the stupid idea that maybe I could have made things a little better than they were. But that’s all over now. I’m only trying to survive along with the rest of them. As good as most, better than many, and worse than some. How the hell did things ever get this far? I never even wanted to be a doctor in the first place. But to really understand any of this, you’d have to know the whole story; and for that, it’s probably better to start at the beginning.

In the beginning, there was a war. It wasn’t a big war or a real war. But people were being killed and maimed, and money was being made nonetheless.

This was a process that you wanted to avoid. For eighteen-year-old males in perfect health, that wasn’t easy to do. In those days, there was something called the draft. What that meant, in practice, was that a great many of your male contemporaries were being put into the army, trained to kill people and sent to foreign nations such as Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia, where they themselves were killed or wounded or went insane or became junkies or some combination thereof.

Although I was not yet entirely sure what my life’s occupation would be, it seemed dead certain that something better than that could be found. Meanwhile, there was the University of West Florida.

UWF is located in an area known for its preponderance of senior citizens. In addition, there are phosphate mines, orange groves, and a brewery.

In one of the orange groves, not far from the brewery, there was a curious installation, a mobile home park maintained by the Southeastern Sunbathing Association. Briefly, it was a nudist trailer camp. It cost thirty-five dollars per month to park your trailer there, and it was ten minutes by car from the university.

I am not, nor was I then, a nudist, although the idea of bathing costumes has never appealed to me. They are a drag in the water, make your ass white, and, if worn for any length of time, become breeding grounds for fungi and the like. Why, after all, should a grown man be obliged to go about in a wet diaper?

Of course, nudists—real ones—go a good deal beyond this. They tend to become enormously fat, have multiple surgeries that leave larded and puckered scars, and parade their yellowed and saggy old carcasses on the sidewalk wearing only leather sandals and white ankle socks.

On the other hand, a precious few of them are buxom young women who like to play volleyball. This also is done in the nude.

I was not a rich kid, and at the time when this story begins, my home was a 1951 model Royal Mansion house trailer, manufactured by the Spartan Aircraft Company. It was a curvilinear affair of riveted aluminum, stainless steel, and Plexiglas, eight feet wide and thirty-one feet long. There were no corners, neither inside nor out. Living in it was like living in a goldfish bowl. One had to go outside from time to time.

There was one other trailer park near the university. It was crowded and noisy and very close to a four-lane highway. It cost fifty dollars per month. I lived in the nudist camp.

On the afternoon when the chain of events leading to my medical education properly began, the sun was pouring down like syrup on the orange groves and sparkling like rhinestones on the little blue lake. A college boy sat at his desk behind the curved Plexiglas windows, trying to study differential calculus, a mathematical method useful to physicists and also to those who wish to weed out the less-determined premeds (of them more lately.)

Alas, how can a heterosexual eighteen-year-old male be expected to read calculus when naked women are playing volleyball outside his windows? The book had become a cover for my voyeurism, to be glanced down at whenever the women caught me staring at them.

Sweating and laughing in the sun, teeth flashing, breasts held high and taut by their arms uplifted—comes the ball, jump, thwack! Thighs flex. Tits jiggle and bounce. Lest you think of him as a pimply little onomastic creep, and in the interest of accuracy, it may be said that the young man was good-looking in a dark mesomorphic sort of way and that he had a cute little eighteen-year-old girlfriend with whom he was doing the dirty deed at least two or three times a week. Which, by the way, wasn’t nearly often enough. But I digress.

Afterward came that unambitious, curiously illogical state of reverie that sometimes follows orgasm or precedes sleep. The drifting mind will eventually run aground on a fact—a worry perhaps or some piece of unfinished business. On this afternoon, I was wrenched back into the mundane by a particularly nasty thought.

Today was the day of the draft lottery.

In fifteen minutes, they would be reading the results on the radio. Three hundred sixty-five slips of paper in a sack, each representing the birth date of several thousand young Americans. Each with an equal chance to win the privilege of going to Southeast Asia and getting his ass shot off. The stubby, grubby little hand of some petty bureaucrat groping and just as likely to come up with my balls.

The army. Shaved heads and drill instructors. Slave wages. Nauseating slop in the mess hall. And then off to the jungle and back home in a bag. Big fun.

I half expected to be one of the lucky ones. Numbers over 200 probably would not be called up. There was hope, the great bitch of all emotions, the most cruel. I rose and turned on the radio.

Far away in Washington DC, the bureaucrat began fishing, fishing. The birth dates of the hapless soon-to-be draftees were read into a microphone and broadcast far across the land of the free.

Let me tell you something: I had never seen war except on television, and it seemed like a surpassingly stupid activity to me. You never know how you will react to difficulties of this magnitude until they actually happen, and all prior speculation is bullshit. Now it can be said that in those days, I was of the opinion that my country was the last great hope of liberty in the world. I cherished the ideal of liberty, and if the United States were invaded, my choice would be to stay and fight for her.

But when it came to little foreign wars to make money for the international bankers and manufacturers of arms, you could count me out. I was rarely so depressed or miserable that the idea of physical danger appealed to me.

By the time the count had reached 20, I was feeling very nervous. And then it happened. Number 25—my birthday. In the normal course of events, I would be cannon fodder within the year.

I switched off the radio and began to think. With the passing of time, the problem of how to get through the afternoon came to overshadow the problem of how to avoid the draft. At length, I rose, dressed, got into my car, and sped off in the direction of the brewery. They gave away free beer at the brewery.

CHAPTER TWO

I awoke the next morning in a blaze of light that stabbed my optic nerves like a rusty ice pick. The harsh glare of the sun entered Linda’s bedroom through a plate glass window, the draperies of which she had just opened. Placidly, she regarded her reflection in the mirror. She was trying on a new dress that she would wear to the outdoor wedding of a friend. This was her explanation. In my opinion, she had done it on purpose. She knew that it would wake me up. She was the kind of girl who couldn’t stand to be ignored.

Not that she got ignored very often. She had thick blonde hair that reached her ass, enormous blue eyes, and full pink lips. Her figure could be described as voluptuous, but to be honest, she was a bit plump. Nevertheless, her breasts were magnificent; and at that age, even the fat was still firm. She was in fact quite desirable. I had fucked her for the better part of an hour the night before until she complained bitterly of pudendal contusions. She, alas, like so many young women, had orgasms only via cunnilingus; and even that took so long that one’s jaw was virtually dislocated and one’s lips numb and distended by the time she finally let go. She wasn’t really all that crazy about fucking, and she had been pounded mercilessly. I couldn’t come because I’d been drinking.

Good morning, she chirruped. How do you like my new dress?

Could you please close the curtains? I asked. I feel rather unwell.

But I have to see how this color looks in the sunlight. She fiddled with the shoulder straps and tugged at the beltline.

Couldn’t you do it in the other room? I was beginning to feel, if possible, even worse.

Silly, there’s no mirror in there. A pause. Don’t you like the way it looks on me? She heaved at the bosom.

If you closed the curtains, I could open my eyes and look at it.

I’m afraid it’s not big enough, you know, in front.

I groaned pathetically and buried my head under the pillow. But she persisted.

You don’t think the top is too tight?

It looks—I growled through my teeth—like thirty pounds of tits in a twenty-pound sack.

What? She slid the straps down over her shoulders, relieving the compression and allowing her breasts to assume their usual torpedolike configuration. The dangling straps emphasized the perfect roundness of her arms.

I decided to use a different tactic. It would look a lot better lying on the floor beside this bed. Our eyes met for the first time; her perfect big blue ones appraised my puffed and glassy red ones.

My God! Is that all you ever think about? She spun and flounced out of the room, slamming the door. A great agony filled my skull.

Shakily, I rose and closed the curtains; gingerly, in the blessed cool darkness, I laid down my head. But it was no good. I couldn’t sleep.

Later, she made breakfast. Eggs and aspirin improved my attitude, and by the time we had cleared off the kitchen table, I had her laughing. We sucked face like good healthy kids at the door, and I set off to walk the few blocks to the campus. There was a lecture in physics at noon. Physics was my favorite subject. I loved the way it seemed to explain everything.

The campus of the University of West Florida was surpassingly ugly. No mossy redbrick or ivy-covered walls here. Just good old Bauhaus beige bricks set off by cunning little slabs of prestressed ferro-cement. Big square windows that didn’t open. And the whole thing baking, broiling atop a pile of sand that wouldn’t even grow grass. Somehow the effect was that of an architect’s model—not constructed, but monstrously magnified; the buildings looked like they were made of cardboard and india ink, and the pathetic little stunted shrubs were cut from bath sponges and sprayed with green paint. You couldn’t possibly imagine F. Scott Fitzgerald strolling there arm in arm with young Amory Blaine, moonlight or no. In the moonlight, the place looked like an airport.

Walking, I considered my options, which seemed to be the following:

A. Get drafted (and die)

B. Get a deferment … (Yes. Yes! But how?)

1. Conscientious objector (no way they’d ever believe I was a Quaker)

2. Flunk the physical exam (Who was I kidding? I was as healthy as a racehorse. Self-mutilation is against my principles, and if you do drugs, they just lock you up in isolation for a few days, then repeat the tests.)

3. Student deferment (Only one type was available that year: 2-M, medical student)

If I could somehow manage to get into med school … I had received forty-five quarter hours, the equivalent of the freshman year, by examination. At eighteen, I’d been at college for only a year and was already a junior. If two years of college work could be packed into one year, there might be a chance.

Suddenly, I knew what to do. The college was an anthill, the town a morgue. Why hang around? My parents had encouraged me to go to art school and had been surprised by my choice of premed. Nevertheless, I hadn’t felt particularly committed to it. I came from a poor family and was disinclined to business. A profession was a way out of poverty. I was curious and liked science, and the body fascinated me. I had no idea whatsoever what a doctor’s life was like but imagined vaguely that they made lots of money and drove Porsches. It was time to pay a visit to the premed advisor.

Dr. Karvonik was out. His secretary, a sour old bitch, expressed surprise and no small amount of disdain that a long-haired, scruffy, red-eyed creep like me would presume to waste the time of the good doctor. She was shocked and appalled to learn that I had never so much as gone to an orientation lecture, and she icily suggested that one should do so before taking up the doctor’s time. As it happened, he was giving such a lecture that very afternoon in the biological sciences auditorium.

The auditorium was modern. It was huge, dim, and air-conditioned. It smelled of books and hushed, expectant young bodies, and its interior reflected neither light nor sound. There were three hundred seats in rows of thirty, and half of them were full. Every single student in those seats was cleaner-cut, more conservatively dressed, and wore a more serious face than I did. I took a seat in the middle; the rows continued to fill up.

Karvonik was a big man with a big nose and a big, loud voice. He wasn’t a medical doctor; he was a PhD and taught comparative vertebrate anatomy. He was sarcastic of style and probably thought of himself as tough but fair. I don’t remember much about his lecture; mostly, it was boring stuff about rules, application procedures, and entrance requirements. But I do remember one thing very clearly. The purpose of the lecture was to discourage us from trying to get into med school. At one point, he paused and told all of us to look to our right and then to our left:

If one other student in your row gets accepted, he said, you won’t.

It was a sobering thought.

Later, I went to see Karvonik in his office. He looked at my transcript. It showed difficult courses and excellent grades. I had a good memory and the kind of mind that does well on examinations. Karvonik was not impressed. When told of my desire to avoid the draft, he wrinkled that massive nose in disgust. He had been a marine in WWII and pointed out to me that if I weren’t such a pussy, I could sign up right away, and the army would pay for my medical education. I assured him that this was out of the question.

He dutifully helped to plan the heavy course load that would get me ready for med school by the end of the year. Then he fixed me with a beady stare. I’ll help you any way I can, he said. That’s my job. But I want to tell you something right now. I’ve seen them come, and I’ve seen them go, and you are definitely not going to get into medical school. You just don’t have what it takes.

You mean my hair and my clothes?

Your appearance and attitude are all wrong.

I’m going to prove that you’re mistaken.

You do that.

CHAPTER THREE

T he rest of the year passed quickly. When not in class, I was in the library or at home studying. Apart from that, you could find me down in the basement of the Behavioral Sciences Building running rats. I had submitted a research proposal to my experimental design professor, a boozy old ruin of a man who had a good-sized laboratory at his disposal but preferred to spend his time banging the young coeds. He needed for things to look busy down there in the basement, though. He happily gave me his lab, sixty white rats, and a roomful of equipment. The experiment was boring and inconsequential, although the design of it was rather clever. It was eventually published in Worm Runners’ Digest under the title Rats Don’t Count, in case you’re interested. No?

Publication might improve my chances, and the twelve quarter hours of A credit couldn’t hurt my GPR.

I had a partner, an older student who was a Vietnam vet. He had survived two years as a helicopter door gunner, of which the normal combat life expectancy was on the order of three weeks. He had seen dozens of his buddies killed. He never laughed, he never cried, and he damn near never moved his face at all except to blink or eat. He sympathized wholeheartedly with my desire to avoid going to ’Nam.

We fixed the lab up with a fridge, a cot, and a poster of a certain actor as the Wild One. You know, before he discovered carbohydrates and Filipino peg boys.

The Behavioral Sciences Building was immense, and there was a hallway that made a circuit of the basement. This hallway was so long that you could put on sneakers, strip to your short pants, and run laps down there while the rats were tapping away in their Skinner boxes. Sometimes I would meet coeds in the hall and invite them into my lab for a beer or a joint. Occasionally, they were impressed by the fact that I had my own lab. The door could be locked, and the room was soundproof. The girl and I would end up on the cot. Not much data would get collected on these occasions, but we cheerfully faked it.

I did a lot of faking in my organic chemistry lab too. Somehow the white crystalline powders that you were required to produce invariably became tarry brown lumps that couldn’t even be gotten out of the test tube. Besides which, organic chemistry lab was from two to five o’clock on Friday afternoon. There are things in life that are more important than organic chemistry.

Friday was an important night because I had some hippy friends who lived near the campus, and they had orgies on Friday night. No kidding, these people really worked at it. Their house was full of things like juicers and bean sprouters, a black light, and a poster of Frank Zappa taking a shit. There was a sofa covered with an American flag and an old hollowed-out television set with an aquarium inside of it. Rock and roll played from speakers the size of telephone booths, and there was almost enough light in there to see your hand in front of your face. Sol and his old lady, Tracey, were graduate students and ran a natural foods co-op. They were hipper than hip.

On Friday night, their place would be swarming with assorted drifters, hipsters, college kids, and lots and lots of very young girls high on illegal drugs. The orgy itself would take place on an enormous water bed in an almost pitch-dark room. On and around this bed would be some twenty or so naked people, with both sexes equally represented. The rule was that the room could only be entered by a man and a woman together or by a single person when someone of the same sex exited.

Once in the room, you quickly stripped and hung your clothes on the wall. The smell in that room was incredible, to say nothing of the sounds produced by twenty people moaning, gasping, panting, and hollering things like harder, now, fuck me, I’m coming, etc., as they bounced, slapped, slurped, kicked, writhed, and devoured one another like cannibals in hell. Most of them were reasonably good-looking or at least young. It was of course by invitation only.

I went to a few of these orgies. My favorite thing was to lie on my back and have two girls sit on top of me, one on my face and the other on my cock. After all, I reasoned, a doctor owes it to himself and his patients to be unshockable when it comes to sexual behavior. All in the interest of a good education. There were other less-pleasant things to be learned in the course of these experiences. Such as what it’s like to want someone, burn with jealousy night and day, and never dare to say a word about it because jealousy and possessiveness are so uncool. Like what are the symptoms of gonorrhea (it feels like pissing rusty nails, broken razor blades, and sulfuric acid). And how it is to have a nice dry Q-tip cotton swab shoved four centimeters up your dick (not very nice at all). I caught various forms of urethritis no less than seven times that year, and my prostate gland just about killed me. We called this free love.

During the week, I studied like a madman. It was necessary to ace almost every exam in physics, biochemistry, calculus, Latin, psychology, anatomy, and so on. My GPR stabilized around 3.8. It began to look like I was going to make it.

Then one day, disaster arrived in the mail: a letter from my local draft board. My number was up; they ordered me to a preinduction physical exam the following month.

I wrote to the draft board pleading inconvenience and was rescheduled for a month later. Meanwhile, I frantically sent off applications to medical universities all over the country and tinkered with my old car to get her ready for that long drive to Canada.

Three months went by, and I received nothing but rejections. I was interviewed by a university in Florida and turned down. They