Fatal Vision (14 page)

Also, I was gone too much of the time. I worked out at Montauk, managing the building of three hundred houses and I had never been in construction in my life. I was totally faking it. I was superintendent on the job at age eighteen or nineteen, managing hundreds and hundreds of workmen—in way over my head, but making like four hundred dollars a week, which was tremendous money at that time.

But I was out there most of Monday through Friday and then when I came home I spent the weekend over on Fire Island driving a beach taxi. I made about three hundred and fifty or four hundred dollars on the weekends, so I was making over seven hundred for sure and some weeks up to a thousand dollars.

Well, not a thousand. About eight-fifty was the highest week—that was the July 4th weekend as a matter of fact— but it was a hard, long summer, and things were a little tense between Colette and I because I was away so much and when I was home I was too tired to pay good attention.

I would be aggravated. I would, you know, ascribe it to the tiredness of the week—we needed to build up money for the coming school year, that was our rationale—but having the young baby at home, having Colette with my parents,

um, maybe it did seem a little easier to find those weekends of work over at Fire Island.

But I didn't spend much time with Colette. I didn't spend much time with Kimberly. And Colette was a little uptight, I'm sure, about having to live with Mom and Dad. And I think the relationship may have been at a low ebb.

But the nadir—the absolute bottom in our relationship-was the trip to Chicago in September for the start of my four years in medical school. We were driving a 1959 blue Chevy station wagon and we packed it up and got the maps out and found out where Chicago was—we had never been to Chicago—and plotted our course. The Chevy was overloaded and we were towing a trailer and I was full of optimism about a new challenge ahead, but Colette, I think, in all honesty, was a little frightened.

You know, we had Kim so we weren't just two people bumming around and the trip was long and tiring, the car loaded down, hot, the end of summer, me tired, and ah, the relationship with Colette and Kim was, you know, a little brittle.

And if you've ever driven to Chicago it's an awesome experience, because you drive across the Midwest for hours and hours and hours of wheatfields and cornfields, and then finally off in the distance you see this mushroom of ugly, gray-brown smoke and that is the beginning of the industrial complex in Indiana: East Gary, Indiana; East Chicago, Indiana; Gary, Indiana; and the south end of Lake Michigan. And from that point, around the corner of the lake, back up behind the lake to Chicago was, about, oh, thirty-five or forty miles and twenty miles of it leading into Chicago were the slums of Chicago, the South Side.

I can still remember driving through the South Side of Chicago—and I had never in my wildest dreams ever imagined that there would be a city that we would be going to with literally twenty miles of slums, including miles of these high-rise tenement apartments with the laundry hanging out the windows and no windows in a lot of the apartments.

And of course the signs were confusing and we had gotten on the wrong freeway and we got off several times— this is with a heavy trailer and the car overloaded and Kim having a tough trip—and it was raining—and I looked over at Colette and she was crying. That moment was probably the low point, um, in our relationship.

My initial impulse was to be angry: why was she crying, we were starting this great new adventure. But then—I think uncharacteristically for me at the time—I thought better of it and realized that it was the better part of valor to realize that things were a little tense.

And I remember looking over at her, with Kimberly crying, too, and both of us hot and tired from the trip and also hot and tired from the summer, from maybe three months of not having a good relationship—and I remember pulling off and asking for final directions at one of those crummy gas stations on the turnpike or freeway or whatever it's called going into Chicago from Gary, Indiana, and I remember resolving to myself that we would make, you know, a better go of it, and turning to Colette.

And I remember I held her in the front seat of the car, which was not like me. It was not like me to hug her and console her. It was much more like me to be a little more distant and formal, but I held her and talked to her. And she calmed down immediately. In fact, she brightened considerably. Much more so than a few soothing words would make it seem. It was, I think, the fact that I pulled off to the side of the road and held her, talked to her, and said that things would be okay. That we'd make it financially and emotionally and medical school was going to be a snap.

It was really strange, but it was like one of those instances in time: something really flowed between us and we sort of strengthened our resolve. In fifteen or twenty minutes we seemed to really—a lot of the summer fell away, and Colette ended up laughing and saying, "Yes, this is what we want: medical school and your medical degree, and then we go on from there."

Freshman year in medical school was a tough year, there's really no other way to describe it. Scholastically it was very hard. I was working around the clock almost nonstop. I was a medical student, so this was not an uncommon syndrome, and I was Jeff the medical student, so I worked harder than most. It was definitely a year of trials.

In any event, our apartment was tiny—a very small, city-style, one-bedroom apartment, and we set up the playpen for Kim in the living room, and it was the centerpiece, sort of. We had the bedroom to ourselves, but we had a very tiny kitchen. In fact, Colette couldn't buy too many groceries at once because the kitchen was so small, and she was kind of tied up with Kim, you know, pretty well tied down to home, so there was always that normal amount of,
I
think, frustration and small aggravations. My greatest remembrance of the apartment, to be honest, was the uh, the tiny kitchen and Colette working feverishly in there to prepare meals for us.

One thing was, we had the beginnings of the fraternity thing in medical school, which was not a big deal, but—and
I
was never rah-rah fraternity—but we were rushed for these fraternities and I eventually joined Nu Sigma Nu.

Sophomore year was, I think, our most difficult. We lost the apartment we'd had right across from the medical school, and I had to look for one and found one in our price range in a bad area, a poor white area, several miles north.

Chicago has several pockets of poor whites—and I mean from Appalachia, where they walk around barefoot through the streets of Chicago—and a lot of bars and honky-tonks, and it's a very low-rent district.

The apartment was decent inside, and seemed very secure, but to be honest, Colette, I'm sure, was very uncomfortable. Home alone with Kim in a bad neighborhood when I was down at school so much, and, you know,
I
also had some part-time jobs.

Then that was the year when we went home for Christmas and found my father was getting sicker. It was not emphysema and it did not seem to be cancer of the lung, and no one could figure out why he was getting so radically ill. It turned out he had Hammond-Rich Syndrome, or pulmonary fibrosis of unknown etiology, which is mildly familial and always gives us cause for thought.

In any case, Dad was home sick, and I remember that that Christmas vacation was a time when we sat and talked a lot. I did some work in the bedroom to make it more comfortable for him, put up some bookshelves and a shelf for a radio, and better lighting, and made his bedroom a little more comfortable and felt that we sort of made our peace with each other.

I am forever thankful for that Christmas vacation because
I
think my Dad and I got to know each other better then than we ever had our whole life. I think we really sealed our love and friendship, as late as it was, on that vacation. He had an incredible grasp of people, intuitively, and I think he knew me and knew me well and loved me, but, still, I didn't have enough communication with him, and to this day believe—I wish I had told him one more time, a little more clearly, how much I loved him, maybe allowing him then to tell me that he also loved me. Who knows? In any event, he died shortly thereafter—March 5, 1966.

Junior year was the start of the better years for us. We moved to a real nice house in the suburbs, a two-family house in a middle-class area and we lived on the second floor, and we had trees in the front yard and backyard. We were living in a much better lifestyle, and it was a much nicer area of town. Also I became the sports chairman for Nu Sigma Nu, this fraternity that I had joined. We had teams in football, softball, and basketball and I was very active in that.

The people that lived below us was a Thai couple—you know, a Thai from Thailand. He was a surgical resident, a super guy, very good surgeon. As a matter of fact, I did my first appendectomy because of him.

I had scrubbed with him on several cases. Of course, the medical student is low on the totem pole, but he liked my answers to some questions and also liked my aggressiveness, and I remember specifically one evening about 8 o'clock I was walking through the hall, this was at Wesley Memorial Hospital, and we were supposed to be through with our work around 5:30 or 6 during a surgical clerkship, and this was not my night on call, and this resident from Thailand saw me and said he thought I was off for the evening, and I said, well, I was just finishing an interesting workup, and getting ready for rounds the next morning, and he said, "Well, have you ever done an appendectomy?"

It turned out he had a patient in the emergency room, so I said, "Sure, I've done appendectomies," and he kind of looked at me and smiled a little bit and said, "Okay, let's go then. I want you to be my first assistant, and maybe you'll do it."

Well, you know, this is a big thing for a junior in medical school: This is a big thing for an
intern.
So I jumped for it, I said, "Sure, no problem," and we went upstairs, changed into scrub suits, and scrubbed in, and then we went into the operating suite and it was, like a teenage boy, as I remember, I would say, like fourteen or something, um, fourteen or about sixteen, I think he was.

And we did an appendectomy—actually, I did it. I was on the right side and I had the scalpel and it took [laugh] it seemed like it took forever. The nurse was going crazy because the scrub nurses like to think they run the rooms, and when this resident said, "Dr. MacDonald is going to be doing this appendectomy," the nurses sort of smiled at each other and groaned and said, "Oh, no, here we go: a first."

I assured them that it wasn't the first, but an hour and a half later, in what should have been twenty or thirty minutes, they knew it had been a first and so did the surgical resident and so did I. But the patient did fine. He in fact did have a hot appendix, and we took it out, and he did very well with no complications.

In any case, as I was going into surgery I remember calling Colette and telling her that I was going in to do an appendectomy and would be late for dinner, and she said, "What dinner? You were supposed to be here at six." And it was now 8:30 or 9 and I was telling her I wouldn't be home until midnight, and the following night, of course, was the night I was on call, so to make a long story short, I got home real late and Colette was sitting up waiting and we had a little glass of liqueur together, and she, I remember, was very pleased by how excited I was after my first experience as an operating surgeon. And we talked about it for 45 minutes or so and went to bed.

"Now this was the year that we [laugh] found out that Colette was pregnant with Kristy. This was exciting to both of us. I remember, we thought about it for about five minutes after we found out and then we were overjoyed. We never had any hesitation at all about the happiness about having Kristy.

Kimmy, of course, had been conceived out of wedlock, so to speak. And that was, you know, threatening to us both. It did—it was a big thing, it was a big step, and it meant we were getting married and living together and having a child, and so—and there was the haste of getting ready for a wedding and everything, you know, while going back to Princeton—so that was a more difficult conceptual thing to get through, no pun intended.

Kristy was a much more joyous occasion. In fact, that Colette was pregnant, neither of us felt that this was any major catastrophe at all. We kind of looked forward to it. And the closer we got to the delivery, you know, Colette slowed down. I tried to pitch in a little more with Kim and the home, and we got ready. Kristy was born in May, and although this was a happy event, it was the time of the near-tragedy with Colette.

Colette had had a very difficult time with Kimmy, had gone into a long, difficult labor and eventually Cesarean section, and with Kristy what happened was she was going into normal labor and then, very precipitiously, the fetal heart tones dropped and the doctor had to operate in a hurry-up fashion.

I was in the room while she was in labor but I left for the surgery. I—I felt very uncomfortable. My normal aggressiveness was all gone in the face of Colette's surgery and she seemed to be well and Kristy was fine so I went home.