HERE’S TO YOUR HEALTH
This week’s Here’s To Your Health is a continuation of Bud’s story: The worst thing that can happen to a young lieutenant is to get caught making out with an old Colonel’s young wife. I was 22, she was 32 and the more trips I made to the bar the more I became convinced that she needed a young guy like me more than an old geezer like him?
If the power structure in the military was different and lieutenants had power over colonels those thoughts would have been OK but unfortunately for me an irrate colonel can make a lieutenants life hell if he wants to, and he did.
This was the first time I ever got drunk and already I was in serious trouble. I failed to see that drinking and thinking was my real problem instead of the lousy military power structure that empowered colonels over lieutenants.
There’s a part of Alabama Sue story where she talks about instant love and that’s what happened to me and the colonel’s wife. She was in trouble and needed me; only I could rescue her.
After several appointments with the base dentist, I got past my instant love for the colonel’s wife and was transferred. I was the kind of alcoholic who never felt on top or successful even though I was in the top 15 percent of my classes, my gut feeling was that of a failure; something was missing?
After finishing my military obligation, I moved to Southern California and enrolled in UCLA as a pre-medical student and stayed there for three semesters until I had to take a physical. I was stripped naked and the doctor was checking me out with this stethoscope when he asked me, “Has anybody told you that you have a murmur?”
I said, “Hell, no. What do you mean I have a murmur?”
The doctor said, “Don’t get excited.”
I said, “Who’s excited?”
I said, “You’ve got to be kidding me, I spent three years in the military. I work two jobs, I’m a journeyman in two trades and if you want to run a foot race I’d be willing to bet that I’ll win. How could I possibly have anything wrong with my heart?”
He said, “Settle down!”
This was in the mid 1950s and what that doctor said was this, “You have a hole between the two chambers of your heart that shouldn’t be there and after a certain period of time, perhaps by age 45 you’ll be what we call a cardiac cripple. Your lips and fingers will become blue, you’ll suffer pulmonary failure and probably be dead by the age of fifty.”
I thought to myself, “What the hell, fifty is old anyway so what’s the difference?”
But the doctor went on to say that surgeons have been experimenting with laboratory animals and cooling them down to a very low temperature and then cutting a hole between the two chambers of their hearts and then bringing them back to a normal temperature and after a period of time repeating the process and sewing up the hole they made and to a certain extent they had been successful at fixing the problem. So far we’ve done this procedure on 100 people and the ones who were successful can expect to live a normal life with full expectancy.
Alcoholic’s are usually in denial, and so I denied that I had a heart problem. For the next three years I told anybody who would listen, “There’s nothing wrong with me.” Three years later, I was still in denial, but said, “What the hell I’m going to die one way or the other so why not let them go ahead and try and fix me?” When I was sober it was easy to check my heart rate, but when I drank alcohol it was impossible to keep count because my heart seemed like it was going to jump out of my chest. Whenever I drank alcohol for 12-18 hours I nearly died and it took me 30-40 hours to recover. My hangovers were the worst anybody could imagine and it puzzled me how anything that made me feel that good the night before could make me feel so bad the next day? But anyway I finally consented to the doctor’s suggestion and let them freeze me. To be continued…
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