April 2009

Meeting Benjamin Button

by Michael Heatherly

If you’ve ever wondered what kind of person watches those cable TV shows about appalling medical conditions — the guy whose skin looks like tree bark, the woman with the 175-pound tumor, etc. — it’s the same kind of person who writes this column. Watching this stuff is a bad idea for me, given that I’m a lifelong hypochondriac who already believes every headache is a brain tumor, every twitchy eyelid the start of Lou Gehrig’s disease. But logic is insufficient to overcome my fascination with medical curiosities.

Watching such programs, I cannot help but remember my personal brush with an extraordinary medical oddity. The episode began with one of the more banal of medical conditions: my own case of tonsillitis. One day, when I was about 10, I mentioned to my mom that my throat hurt. Back then — the mid-1960s — any kid who had a sore throat for more than 15 minutes was whisked to the nearest doctor, who would order the immediate removal of the tonsils and “adenoids” (a Latin word meaning “nonexistent anatomical structures, the imaginary excision of which has proven effective for increasing hospital revenues”).

Thanks to modern techniques, tonsillectomies today are performed painlessly in five minutes at participating Rite-Aid stores. In the ’60s, though, they required 36 hours of imprisonment in a hospital with nurses who wore half-inch-thick white stockings and comical starched hats. I was admitted to such a facility and settled into my bed, where I comfortably contemplated my impending premature death.

Eventually, I was wheeled into an operating room that looked suitable for Civil War amputations, had it been in the South. I remember nothing of the surgery, performed under general anesthesia. Judging by the post-operative condition of my throat, however, I assume my diseased organs were excised with toenail clippers and rusty salad tongs. After an overnight ordeal I have failed to block from memory, the sun rose and I began pleading in croaks and sign language to go home. I was approved for discharge, but my mom and the nurse asked me to do one thing before I left.

Down the hall, they explained, was a boy about my age who had been sick a long time. He had lived much of his life in the hospital and rarely saw other kids. He would be thrilled, they said, if I would visit for a few minutes. I immediately agreed, not from a precocious sense of altruism but because I would have walked over hot coals to get out of that hospital.

The nurse led me to the boy’s room, where I beheld the most disconcerting thing I have ever seen. In a crib lay a child whose body appeared to be that of about a one-year-old. His face, though, resembled that of an elderly man, but miniaturized. When he greeted me with the voice of someone my age, I would have been far less shocked if a Gila monster had jumped through the window and recited the Gettysburg Address.

Had I not been rendered speechless by the tonsillectomy, I might have blurted out the first thought that leapt to mind: Oh my God, a 90-year-old baby is talking to me. My next thought was a 10-year-old’s version of this: What line of reasoning could lead a normally level-headed mother and a presumably rational nurse to conclude that it would be a good idea to introduce a kid who had just endured a night of projectile blood vomiting to a kid suffering one of the most bizarre conditions in medicine?

In retrospect, I realize this boy, whose name I don’t recall but whom I affectionately remember as Mini-Kid, must have been afflicted with progeria or some other rare genetic condition causing premature aging. At the time, I was too flabbergasted to think beyond my own selfish concerns: Why did you drag me in here? Is this contagious? Can I go home now? A year or so later, my mom showed me a newspaper article saying the boy had died. It carried his picture and listed the names of his family members. That was the first time it struck me that Mini-Kid was more than a medical abnormality. There he had been, trapped in a baby’s body, when he should have been out with the rest of us riding bikes, playing catch, and chasing girls around the playground.

Lesson learned: Life is unfair, which is why so many people believe in an afterlife that is better. What happened to Mini-Kid could have happened to anyone. He must have wondered why he was the one in millions to suffer this fate. I have no answer for that, but I like to imagine Mini-Kid in heaven riding bikes, playing catch, and chasing girls around the playground forever. 

Bar News Editor Michael Heatherly practices in Bellingham. He can be reached at 360-312-5156 or barnewseditor@wsba.org.