Dr. Reynolds' Diagnosis

“The courtroom correspondent is the closest of all to human misery and its absurdity and, in the nature of things, can endure the experience only for a short time, and certainly not for his whole life, without going crazy. The probable, the improbable, even the unbelievable, the most unbelievable are paraded before him every day in the courtroom, and because he has to earn his daily bread by reporting on actual or alleged but in any case, in the nature of things, shameful crimes, he is soon no longer surprised by anything at all.”

Thomas Bernhard

A story in The Tall City Times dated July 19, 1921, describes a conversation between an unnamed newspaperman and Dr. Morris Reynolds on the train from downtown during which Dr. Reynolds said he was innocent of the charges brought against him by his wife and that his young woman companion on the trip into the Canadian wilderness was equally innocent. “But what can I do in the face of this evidence against me?”

The unnamed newspaperman was my grandfather and I, like my grandfather before me, am a courtroom reporter.

Dr. Reynolds was a doctor of great repute in his time, a scientist and pioneer of sorts, confident in his wide learning and unique mental abilities. Yet this man of tall thoughts and hefty opinions had eyes that grew weak, an expression that wavered, he felt uncertain and helpless or so it seemed to my grandfather as he questioned him that day on the train.

Didn't he see all of this coming? Didn't he predict his wife's behavior in his books? He admitted he wrote of his wife when in one of his books, A Surgeon's Philosophy, he described the characteristics of a woman with the jealous type of mental disorder. He explains that such a wife demands “extreme and exaggerated” attention from her husband, and that this symptom sometimes amounts to a well-defined mania as she attempts to exercise control over his every movement. “I knew one very beautiful and talented woman,” he writes, “a most charming conversationalist, who drove her husband to distraction so that she finally obliged him to desert her completely.” How does he explain such behavior? It's not all due to gender mechanics. Often it has to do with the stomach.

--

I’m always most productive in my work when constipated, or when I overreact and assume I am. I think I feed off the burst of nervous mental energy provided when I grow paranoid fearing the re-occurrence of a past stomach disorder that caused me pain which only morphine could soothe but whose origin and official identification remains a mystery. Since then my stomach's been a dark place where uncertain things happen for unknowable reasons but which I've convinced myself are likely devious. And it is Dr. Morris Reynolds whose researches confirm my paranoia.

While I lay across a couple of chairs in the hospital's crowded waiting room, actually moaning audibly, shamelessly I glanced at the television installed between the wall and the ceiling. The news was on and it was being announced that Michael Jackson had just recently been found dead. My pain however momentarily blunted the trauma of this news, intercepted it. Or I just willfully tossed the memory of what I saw aside assuming it was some delusion brought on by some toxic effect initiated in my gut and that now had already begun fiddling with my brain.

Meanwhile I couldn't sit still and paced the room and circled the seats where everyone else waited their turn patiently, watching me. No one else appeared to be in anywhere near as much pain as I was in so I hoped the representative at the registration desk would take special notice and let the nurses inside triage know that here was an especially serious case requiring immediate attention who should probably be able to bypass the triage process altogether to be admitted for an express dose of morphine because that is exactly I was intending to ask for as soon as I spoke to someone who was licensed to dispense it.

What if they absolutely insisted first on that obnoxious battery of tests, the X-rays, the MRIs, the CAT scans, all of these rudimentary, useful tools but obstructions to fast pain relief? In that case I'd make it all as difficult for them as possible, I'd refuse to halt my wiggling as they attempted to thrust me through the imaging tube, no restraints would hold me. This display would brutishly hint at the extent of my innards' turmoil. To make me behave I'd leave them no alternative but to sedate me, which would be ideal.

Where does it hurt? they asked endlessly. I said it hurt here, it hurt there, but no, maybe here instead. They asked how much it hurt. On a scale of 1 to 10 they asked me to rate my pain, 1 being a smiley face, 10 being a monstrous grimace. Numbers don't satisfy me, I enjoy the flexibility of adjectives. But this pain was so abstract, so fathomless and unnatural to me my words were flimsy, every one of them unhelpful. So I obeyed and used the number system as directed. I chose to rate my pain a 7. I suspected the staff had trouble trusting my judgment. They might be thinking I'd inflate the number to get a quick fix and that really my pain only warranted a 5 or 6 rating. I panicked and changed the number to 6, a number choice of a more reasonable mind, that of a patient being modest about pain that surely deserves a more severe rating. But this was also a risky and possibly idiotic thing to have done as it may indicate that the pain was actually abating, and soon enough I'd be undeserving of major painkillers. Switching back to a 7 now would undermine my credibility all together.

What could have been the cause of my stomach ache? Nothing I'd eaten had ever made me feel this way. My mother was pretty certain it was because I was nervous.

We were in the middle of something like a family reunion. Everything was going smoothly until just yesterday when my brother's friend and her son surprised us. She was married but the husband didn't seem to pay much attention to either his wife or his son. My brother appeared to perform these roles in his stead, and before our eyes. Things went awkwardly, but became bizarre when my brother's adopted wife decided she needed to stay with us indefinitely because she had nowhere else to go admitting to us now that her husband had kicked her out. This made my mother nervous, this was visible. My dad was concerned but was obliging. This was all curious to me, but I don't think it made me ill.

Instead Dr. Reynolds attributes my problems to the existence of the colon bacillus in me, which he calls the “microbe of negation”. Anxiety psychoses belong to the colon bacillus group he says. Conversation of the colon bacillus victim is generally negative in character. The high percentage of negatives the victims use such as “don't”, “oughtn't”, “can't”, “shouldn't”, etc. obviously indicates this.

In order to officially prove whether or not you've been infected with by the colon bacillus, Dr. Reynolds suggests carrying around a little notebook in your pocket to use to record your speech habits on a given day. When the notebook shows the negative predominating in our conversation it is a sign that one should consult a gastroenterologist. After receiving an official explanation for your aberrant behavior, Dr. Reynolds is certain it'll be easier to place yourself in “social adjustment”. He put it bluntly, “The perfectly healthy mind is normally positive in man and in the red squirrel.”

My reputation as a curmudgeon and something of a naysayer proceeds me. I'd always known this was to a degree true but could never admit. I used whatever negative necessary to negate such accusations. Now I understand it is part of my nature, I no longer deny it, but do deny that I can be anything else. What's driven me to this? Is it merely Dr. Reynolds' microbes? I believe part of it could be blamed on the nature of my profession:

“Man Admits Toilet Paper Theft, Police Say”

Police said a Tall City man has admitted to stealing cases of unused toilet paper from City Hall. He was arrested after a police officer spotted him walking out with a case of about 20 rolls. Police said he admitted stealing toilet paper from City Hall “five or six times,” along with other supplies. The thief faces a charge of larceny over $250.

“Woman Arrested in Baseball Beaning”

A woman is facing assault charges after police said she threw a baseball and hit her boyfriend in the head during a heated argument. Tall City police said she was arrested when she told officers that she got angry with her boyfriend and beaned him. The 26-year-old is facing a charge of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. The man, whom police did not identify, was found with a fresh bruise on the left top of his forehead. When asked what happened, he told police his girlfriend got angry and threw something at him, then refused to speak further about the beaning.

When it is your job to chronicle events like these, expose lives like these, daily, incessantly, you inevitably develop a tendency to negate and doubt first before wondering if in your world it's possible to do anything else.

After all the tests, after the morphine, I was made to lie on a gurney in one of the ER's hallways as all of its rooms were occupied, but even the hallways were crowded. I was waiting for the dye I'd swallowed a few hours ago to pass through my stomach into my intestine, a long wait. Periodically during my morphine-induced haze I'd remember what I saw on TV, the news of MJ's passing, still wondering whether it was reality. I watched people as they passed by, looking closely at their faces trying to see in their expressions some indication of . . . but what was I looking for? Should there be something in the air, a general mood, behavior, tone of voice, gestures? I got up off the gurney to investigate but could not stand without first nearly stumbling to the ground, woozy from the effects of the morphine and not having moved my body for an untold number of hours. When I was steady enough to move forward, if not straight, I entered the ER's central gallery and examined people's interactions, listened for words maybe related to this incident which I imagined would reverberate massively, but gathered no evidence. Then it seemed all at once everyone in the room turned their eyes on me, and there was a complete hush, as though before the silence they were talking about something I wasn't allowed to hear.

My case was shuffled from doctor to doctor as shifts switched. A young eager doctor walked up to me with a nervous gleam in his eye. Looking through my file, examining all the readouts and results he perceptibly grew more and more confused, even panicky. Finally he admitted to me frankly that I had an incredibly rare stomach disorder normally only seen in patients older than eighty and that in fact he'd never even read about anyone even near my age with such symptoms. If he was correct in his assessment, I'd need immediate surgery because further delay might result in a painful death. After he left me, I did not see this doctor again. When the next shift began and brought with it a new doctor she told me I was in fact in next to normal health and should be feeling better as soon this new medicine she was giving me in a tiny paper cup began to take effect. I still wonder if the young doctor who threatened me with surgery was merely morphine-induced. Or a creation brought about by the effects of one of Dr. Reynolds' nefarious microbes.