A Tubeful of Birthday Cake

A recent post by Gdad about the elevators at his office brought back some memories I haven't thought about in awhile. One summer evening after dinner, I was hanging out with some neighborhood kids down the street. I was about thirteen. I rapidly started feeling lousy and returned home, complaining of nausea and abdominal pains. My parents took me to Boone Clinic on the nearby Navy base, and they sent me to Portsmouth Naval Hospital.

By this time, I was in a great deal of pain, and could feel every bump in the road on the way to the hospital. Outside the emergency room, an eager orderly grabbed me around the waist to hoist me onto a gurney, and I rewarded him by throwing up all over him. I was having an appendicitis attack, and I was in the operating room by midnight. A corpsman prepped me for the operation, and I remember feeling sad as he shaved my pubic hair, which I had waited to grow with such impatience. He assured me that it would grow back in no time.

I came to after surgery in a men's ward, and a friendly corpsman named Powell told me that they would want me to get up and move around sometime soon. The ward occupied one wing of an upper floor, and was a long rectangular room with a communal bathroom at the midpoint. As the night sky began to brighten, I needed to go to the bathroom, so I swung my legs over the edge of the bed. Wow, was I sore! I was a little shaky, but I had my IV on wheels to hang onto as I shuffled toward the bathroom. Suddenly Powell was at my side. He was alarmed, and asked me what I was doing. I told him I had to pee, and that he had told me that I needed to get up and move around. "Not without help, little man. You call me or whoever's on duty next time."

I was in the first bed, just outside the nurse's station, and I was the only kid on the ward. There were probably 24 to 30 beds, some empty, but most occupied. The more serious cases were near the nurse's station, but I think I was placed there because of my age. In the bed beside me was a guy named Karl Savage. When the ward came to life for the day, he introduced himself. He was in the final stages of cancer, and had all sorts of tubes and monitors hooked to his frail body. When breakfast came, he didn't get a tray, and he explained that he could no longer eat. He was a very nice fellow; he kept an eye on me and would call the corpsmen when he thought I was in pain and needed medication. He also kept the other men on the ward from pestering me, and made sure they behaved when they were within earshot.

I recovered steadily and rapidly, and soon was allowed to roam the hospital in a wheelchair. Portsmouth Naval Hospital, officially known as Naval Medical Center Portsmouth, Virginia, is the oldest continuously operating Navy hospital in the country. The original building's construction was started in 1827, and was an imposing but impractical structure. In June of 1855, yellow fever came to Tidewater via the ship Ben Franklin. By mid-July, the epidemic had swept the area. Within three months, Portsmouth's civilian population of 5000 had suffered 1000 casualties, and the Naval hospital admitted afflicted local residents. Ten percent of the total area's population was killed by the yellow fever epidemic. The hospital was praised for its service to the community.

I was in a modern high-rise building that was completed in 1960. Fifteen stories high, it was like a city under one roof. It had a post office, a library, shops, and a movie theater. The elevators were often problematic for my wheelchair, because sometimes they would stop several inches above or below the selected floor. Powell was stern with a warning about the elevators: Don't just roll in when the doors open. Be sure the elevator is really there. It seems a distracted nurse fell to her death when she stepped into an empty elevator shaft. I'm not sure if that's true, but it may have been, considering how untrustworthy the elevators could be. A lot of times they had their own ideas about which floors to visit.

One morning I woke up and there was a new guy directly across from me. He moaned, screamed, and cried a lot. He was a typical brash sailor, and he had been in an accident with his motorcycle. Riding shirtless, he had wiped out on his bike, and skidded about a hundred feet down the pavement on his bare back. He was in a lot of pain. He was also teased by the other fellows for being an idiot.

One unexpected outcome of my surgery was the discovery of a little something extra called a Meckel's diverticulum, an extra appendage in the intestinal tract that, at the time, could only be detected during surgery. This was also removed, and was the likely cause of previous unexplainable pain and discomfort. Only 2% of the population has these weird things.

My parents took advantage of my confinement, and sold the house, changed their names, and moved to an undisclosed location. Naw, of course they didn't; there wasn't time. They visited every day, and usually brought one of my friends to ease my boredom. One visitor was a schoolchum named Karen, who brought me a huge hunk of her birthday cake since I had missed her party. That evening, after everything was quiet, I unwrapped the cake and showed it to Karl. It was one of those store-bought sheet cakes with lots of pink & white icing. He said he loved birthday cake, and I asked him if he wanted to share it. He said he couldn't because he wasn't allowed any food. I asked him what would happen if he had some. He said it would get sucked back out through the tube that went in his nose and down to his stomach.

We grinned at each other. I cut the cake in half, and we both ate quickly. He said it tasted so good. A few minutes later, we giggled hysterically when the pink and white goop started coming up through the tube in his nose. I'm glad he got to taste birthday cake again.