Truth Serum for Mr. Tommy

Often, during my several stays at Children’s Hospital on Downing Street in Denver, I would be taken downstairs to “P.T.”

“P.T.” stood for “physio-therapy.” Physio, from the Greek, “physis,” or nature, is a combining form meaning natural, as in physiography.

Children’s Hospital featured nothing but the best in hardware, equipment and facilities for P.T. High quality stainless steel, ceramic tile and polished hardwood were everywhere.

There was the ramp, a device of hardwood flooring much like a stile, where children were being taught to walk. (Children who had already learned to walk once were being taught to walk again.)

There was a banister on one side, to which a disabled child could cling. The idea was to mount the ramp from one side, pause for a rest at a small landing, then walk down the other side. The idea was for the child to learn to ascend and descend.

There was a line of stainless steel “Jacuzzi” tubs, child-sized, nothing like the hot tubs we know today. Each tub was oblong; forceful jets of hot water entered from invisible pumps.

Water therapy was quite useful. It helped rebuild damaged muscles and even bones, with minimal pain and effort from the tiny patients.

But to really gain strength back, the kid had to expend some energy of his own.

This is where my longtime involvement with swimming began. Swimming is the best form of recreational therapy because it produces little impact at the joints and offers the most friendly resistance to muscles being rebuilt.

Oh Ruby

Water was also the starting point for something else.

An aide named Ruby was assigned to take me from Ward 6, Second South, down to P.T. for a swimming lesson.

Down at the pool, Ruby excused herself to change into a swimming suit, and I was placed behind a curtain to do the same.

Ruby picked me up in her sumptuous brown arms and waded down into the tiled pool, step by step. I was immediately warm and became drowsy.

The idea was that Ruby was going to teach me to float on my back, an elementary lesson in swimming.

But she simply held me like a baby, supine, close up to her creamy brown breasts, which seemed to have a life of their own, floating an appreciable distance above her black Catalina swim suit.

I did not care if I ever learned to float on my back, or if I ever returned to Second South. Oh Ruby. That was one memorable beginning.

Reading lesson

I must have been 12 when I met my friend the “Candy Striper.”

For the uninitiated, a Candy Striper is a young female who volunteers at hospitals or in other situations. She has discerned a potential vocation in health care, and a first step is a volunteer position.

Here she comes into Ward 6, Second South, a large book in her arms. She was perhaps 16, wearing a red and white peppermint-striped dress and a similar nurse’s hat.

She approached my elevated bed and asked if I would like for her to read a story to me.

I was so dumbfounded by her red-haired beauty that all I could manage was a weak affirmative nod.

This gorgeous hunk of volunteer quickly hoisted herself up to sit on the side of my bed, her shapely legs dangling. She read something about a tiger that glowed in the dark.

Whew. My pre-pubescent libido had gone unaffected by infantile paralysis. Whew. Candy Stripers forever!

Hospital stays aren’t all bad.

The anesthesiologist

The first few times I was rendered unconscious by anesthesia so that I could undergo surgery, “ether” was the agent used to put me under.

You’d know. There was a buzz. There was the blackout. Then you’d wake up with a vomit pan beside your head. Then you’d throw up in it.

Obviously, I lived.

In later surgeries, sodium pentothal was substituted for ether as the chemical of choice. It was a marked improvement, both for my safety and for a more gentle recovery with far less nausea.

Readers may recall that a more notable use for sodium pentothal was as a “truth serum.”

Injected with this substance, individuals tend to speak their minds, the inhibitions against frank speech having been reduced or eliminated.

For my first post-ether surgery, this particular anesthesiologist, a woman, placed the needle of a hypodermic syringe in a vein in my left arm, taping it in place.

While waiting for the “go” signal from the surgeon, the masked woman asked if there was anything she could do on my behalf.

One thing that would help, I said, would be if she would warn me when the procedure was about to begin. She said yes, she would inform me.

When I felt woozy and heard that ether-like buzz in my ears, I knew she would not keep her word. Momentarily, I lost consciousness.

She had underestimated her patient. She did not know my history, or the provenance of the speech I was about to deliver to her.

She didn’t know that when I wasn’t in the hospital getting cut on, I would likely be in the slaughter house in Fort Lupton, watching my Dad and Grandpa butcher hogs and cows.

I would be listening to their speech, memorizing the words and practicing them in my head for a time when I might need strong language.

I was told later that during the surgery the anesthesiologist went out into the waiting room to find my parents. She reportedly told them something like: “I have never heard such foul language from a child so young.”

Why, she asked, do you think the child would speak to me like that? I was told that Mother answered, “You must have pissed him off.”

Hooray sodium pentothal.

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Word of the week: Ether. It’s from the Greek, aither, and the Latin, aether, to kindle or burn. Its primary meaning is, an imaginary substance regarded by the ancients as filling all space beyond the sphere of the moon, and making up the stars and planets, the upper regions of space, or clear sky.

In chemistry, it will be any of a class of organic compounds that are oxides of hydrocarbon radicals. It will be a volatile, colorless, highly inflammable liquid.

Yes, I did get burned by ether during one surgical procedure. It doesn’t have to explode or catch fire to burn – it’s volatile without flame. It was like having a sunburn – inside the throat and lungs. It probably causes unconsciousness by displacing oxygen. Oh just wonderful.

The patient is fitted with a mask, and “ether” is inhaled, as opposed to sodium pentothal, which is injected into the bloodstream.

From “ether” we derive “ethereal,” which we use to mean “heavenly.” I prefer the sodium pentothal, which allows me to say what I think. I’ve always had such a problem speaking my mind.