Travels (13 page)

“Does that mean I have it or not?” I asked. I couldn’t bring myself to say the words.

“You mean, do you have multiple sclerosis?”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “you have had a single attack, yes.”

I felt as if a great powerful wave washed over me, knocked me down, spun me around in boiling surf. I felt as if I were drowning in this man’s office, sitting in a chair facing his desk.

The neurologist started speaking very quickly. “But let me tell you how to think about this,” he said. “I assume you have been reading up on it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, the books are wrong. Listen to me, and forget the books.”

Sure, I thought. Try and cheer me up.

“The books are based on old and inadequate data. I’ll tell you how to look at this disease—or, really, this syndrome, because it’s more a syndrome than a disease.”

He spoke fast and loud, realizing that my attention was wandering, that I was withdrawing into myself in panic. He said that a large percentage of people had a single episode like mine sometime during their lives. Most people would never consult a doctor about it, and so doctors had no idea how common a single episode might be. But he thought they were very common, perhaps occurring in as much as ninety percent of people. He told me that several of my classmates had had such single episodes. Only one had had subsequent episodes.

So the question in my case was whether I would have no further attacks at all, or whether I would have occasional attacks and experience some loss of function, or whether I would have frequent and severe attacks and serious difficulty in my life.

“Think of this as a heart murmur,” he said. “It’s a warning of a possible problem, but you can’t say now whether a heart murmur will remain asymptomatic all your life, whether it will give you some trouble, or whether you’ll die of it. You’ll simply have to wait and see.”

“How long do I have to wait to find out what sort of case I have?” I said.

“Two to five years,” he said. “If you have no further attacks for two years, I think you can relax. And if you have no symptoms for five years, I think you can forget about it completely.”

He then discussed what I could do in the meantime. The answer was, basically, nothing. Multiple sclerosis was a disease of unknown cause. There were some helpful treatments during acute episodes, but no cures. Since there wasn’t anything to do, he said I should take care of my general health and avoid stress and mental upset, but otherwise try not to think about it.

This neurologist was so straightforward, so matter-of-fact, that I was able to leave his office and go back to the wards to work. Despite the bad news, I was okay.

Two days later the internist called me in. He said he had gotten the report from the neurologist. He asked me how I felt. I abruptly started to cry. I was embarrassed to be crying in this man’s office, but I couldn’t help myself. The internist said he wanted a second opinion and sent me to Dr. Derek Denny-Brown, who was the most famous neurologist at
Harvard at that time. I had had lectures from Dr. Denny-Brown. I was not happy to be seeing him now as a patient.

He told me the same thing. Yes, I had probably had an episode. Yes, I would have to wait and see what would happen in my case. Yes, it would be two to five years of waiting. Yes, I had the disease. Yes.

I cracked completely. I couldn’t go back to the wards; I just went AWOL for a few days. I cried constantly. I was terrified and sad and angry. I had just celebrated my twenty-sixth birthday, I was just beginning to be successful as a writer, I was starting to look forward to leaving medicine and beginning a career as a writer, and now … 
this
. This dreadful shadow.

Each morning I woke up tense, wondering if I was blind, or numb in another part of my body, or paralyzed. And I was going to have to wait years to find out for sure. I could hardly bear to wait a week. How could I wait two to five years? The suspense was intolerable.

But, since there was nothing I could do, eventually I had to go back to work, to resume some normalcy in my life. My internist said I should see a psychiatrist. Had I ever met Dr. Corman?

Yes, I said. I was well acquainted with Dr. Corman.

Dr. Corman listened to my story and sniffed. “Actually,” he said, “there is a third possibility besides spinal-cord tumor and multiple sclerosis.”

“What’s that?”

“Conversion hysteria.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. Conversion hysteria was an old psychiatric concept. Back in the nineteenth century, people—usually women—developed all sorts of bizarre symptoms, including seizures, blindness, and paralyses, that had no organic cause. These were considered hysterical symptoms, in which the patient converted some psychological problem into a physical manifestation.

I certainly knew such things happened. In the clinic I had treated a young woman with hysterical blindness. She would just become blind from time to time, then regain her sight. She was obviously screwed up. I had also seen one case of pseudocyesis—hysterical pregnancy. This woman developed all the signs of pregnancy and actually went into labor, though of course she didn’t deliver a baby, since she wasn’t pregnant.

“That’s not me,” I said. “I’m not hysterical.”

“Really?”

“Of course not,” I said, insulted. I pointed out that hysterics were mostly women.

“We’re seeing more hysterical men,” Dr. Corman said.

I pointed out that in cases of conversion hysteria patients showed a characteristic indifference to their diseases. They weren’t really worried. My woman who went blind from time to time complained about it, but she wasn’t as upset as you might expect. Whereas I was extremely upset about my case.

“Really?” Dr. Corman said.

He was annoying me. I said so.

“Well,” Dr. Corman said, “if I were you, I’d consider the fact that, of all your possible diagnoses, conversion hysteria is actually the most favorable.”

I didn’t believe that I was hysterical. Later on, other doctors who followed my case mentioned this possibility, too. Although the numbness continued for several years, I never developed further symptoms. And I learned that it was indeed common to have a single neurological episode. Fortunately, I have never had another. I have learned to knock on wood, and to take good care of my general health.

Almost ten years passed before I could look back and wonder whether the decision to leave medicine was so difficult, so traumatic, that I needed the added boost of a serious illness—or at least a possible illness. Because the immediate effect of the terrifying diagnosis was bracing: I was forced to ask myself what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, how I wanted to spend it.

And it was clear to me that if in fact I had only a few years of unencumbered activity, then I wanted to spend those years writing and not doing medicine, or any of the things that colleagues, friends, parents, or society in general expected me to do. The illness helped me to stand on my own, to make a difficult transition.

In quitting, I was following my instincts; I was doing what I really wanted to do. But most people saw only that I was giving up a lot of prestige. In those days, the prestige of physicians was high. Polls ranked doctors just below justices of the Supreme Court. To quit medicine to become a writer struck most people like quitting the Supreme Court to become a bail bondsman. They admired my determination, but they thought I was pretty unrealistic.

Then, in my last year of school, it became publicized that I had written a book called
The Andromeda Strain
and sold it to the movies for a lot of money. Overnight, I was identified as a successful writer, and it changed
everything in my life. All the doctors and residents who had shunned me became suddenly interested in me. I had been eating lunch alone; now I was never alone—everybody wanted to sit with me. I was a celebrity.

The blatant insincerity of the way I was treated troubled me very much. I didn’t yet understand that people used celebrities as figures of fantasy; they didn’t want to know who you really were, any more than kids at Disneyland want Mickey Mouse to pull off his rubber head and reveal that he’s just a local teenager. The kids want to see Mickey. And the doctors in the cafeteria wanted to see Young Dr. Hollywood. And that was what they saw.

I just sat around and watched them do it.

The difficulties I experienced adjusting to my new position barely hinted at the kinds of experiences I would later have. Many of those experiences have been painful and difficult, but most have been, on balance, exciting. I often think back to medicine, and my life as a student. I wouldn’t have had to change if I had remained a doctor. Quitting medicine assured me that I would be forced into all sorts of changes I might not otherwise have made.

TRAVELS
 
 
1971–1986

Sex and Death in L.A
.
 

In 1971 I was living in Los Angeles and my wife was in La Jolla. We had separated, because, after five years together as students, she wanted to start a family and I wanted to pursue my career in books and movies. That was why I had gone to Los Angeles, to try to work in movies. Los Angeles was a strange city; I didn’t know anyone there, and I was lonely and unhappy much of the time.

I moved into an apartment building in West Hollywood that was well known as a place where people went when they got divorced, because you could rent a furnished apartment for only six months. My apartment was furnished in green crushed-velvet couches and chairs with a vaguely Mexican look. The carpet was green with gold flecks. The kitchen was yellow. The view overlooked the Sunset Strip. It was Hollywood, all right, and it was exciting!

In the afternoons I would sit by the swimming pool. The same group of tenants could always be found at the pool. There was a Rams football star and his actress girlfriend (they were always fighting); there was a model who had been Miss Arizona and was extremely beautiful in a bikini (she was always shy and insecure); there was an accountant with a portable radio and a big cigar who read the New York papers (he never spoke); there was a woman in her thirties reputed to be a madam (she always swam laps, and then read the
Hollywood Reporter
).

I had imagined that living in a Hollywood apartment would be more exciting than it was. The football player and his girlfriend made an attractive couple, but since they were always glaring at each other, I tended to stay away from them. And the lovely Miss Arizona was recuperating from an unhappy marriage to a rock-and-roll star; she never went out at all; she stayed home and watched television and worried about her car payments. There were some movie stars in the building, too, but they always wore dark glasses and never talked to ordinary people.

Later the accountant with the cigar stopped coming to the pool. I asked Miss Arizona if he had moved out. She showed me a newspaper clipping. The man had been found in the trunk of a Cadillac at Kennedy Airport with a bullet in his head.

You never knew what to expect. One night I was getting dressed for dinner when the front doorman knocked on my door.

“Dr. Crichton?”

“Yes?”

“It’s Miss Jenkins.”

“Miss Jenkins?” An unfamiliar name.

“In the building. You know Miss Jenkins?”

“I don’t think I do.”

“Well, she lives in the building; I thought you might have seen her.”

“What about her?”

“She fell off the commode.”

I couldn’t see why that was any business of mine, and I said so.

“I think you should see her.”

“Why?”

“She fell off the commode.”

“Well, did she hurt herself?”

“It is only one floor up, on the eighth floor.…”

“But why should I see her?”

“Because she fell off the commode.”

This conversation could go on forever. In the end, he led me upstairs and with a grave dignity unlocked the door to Miss Jenkins’s room.

Her apartment also contained green crushed-velvet furniture in a Mexican style. I recognized Miss Jenkins as a bespectacled woman of about forty with short blond hair, the younger of a pair of lesbians who had lived together in the building at least as long as I had. Miss Jenkins was now fully dressed, lying on her back on the living-room couch, one arm dangling limply on the floor. Her skin was pale blue. She did not seem to be breathing. Her lover, the other woman, was not there.