Reynolds Price and Doctors

p.13  ..." at 5 o'clock on that second day, i was lying on a stretcher in a crowded hallway, wearing only oe of those backless hip=length gowns designed by the standard medical-warehouse sadist.  Like all such wearers I was passed and stared at by the usual throng of stunned pedestrians who swarm hospitals round the world...

...my two original doctors bound up the hallway with a chart in hand...all I recall the two men saying in that instant was "the upper 10 or 12 inches of your spinal cord have swelled and are crowding the available space....we recommend immediate surgery.

i could hear they were betting on a large tumor..they mentioned the name of a surgeon, suggested I go  back to my room and await his visit.  Then they moved on, leaving me and my brother as empty as windsocks, stared at by strangers...What would these two splendidly trained doctors have lost if they'd waited to play their trump till I was back in the private room for which Blue Cross was paying our mutual employer, Duke, a sizable mint in my behalf?


p. 40 - 41 "the presiding oncologist by telling me, with all the visible concern of a steel cheese grater that my tumor was of a size that was likely unprecedented in the annals of Duke Hospital -- some 50 years of annals...he'd ended with the kind of doctor's omen I was now too familiar with.  If a large dose of radiation was given me, I'd bear a small but significant risk of losing the use of both my legs -- say a five percent chance....Don't tell me that; driven as I've always been to stand in the winner's circle, I'll surely land in the five percent.

John Steinbeck

     I just watched the A & E biography of John Steinbeck.  Such a brilliant, sensitive man.  The Grapes of Wrath pretty much made him a household name.  The people back home in Salinas, however, made him a pariah for calling landowners "greedy."  In his later years, when he was nominate for the Nobel Prize, the world rejoiced, everyone, that is, except the critics, who continued to say Steinbeck was sentimental.  After that, Steinbeck never wrote another word of fiction.

     Instead, he turned to Hollywood, writing scripts like East of Eden, after his book of the same name.  By that time, had grown to hate his second wife, who had told him she'd never loved him, and that the son they had together probably wasn't his.  Some of the things she said were untrue, however, Steinbeck was deeply wounded.;

     Steinbeck's son, Thom, said the book mirrored their family life. In the book, the mother shoots her husband, opening up a world of angst for their son.  East of Eden had James Dean in  the starring role.

     Late in life, Steinbeck had the desire to cleanse his soul and decided to write a travelogue called Travels With Charlie.  Charlie was his large black poodle, who became one of the best known dogs in literature.

     After Steinbeck's death in 1968, his hometown decided to build a museum in his honor.  Steinbeck would have preferred a "moderately priced brothal," or a bowling alley named after him.  The Steinbeck museum cost 10 million dollars.   Today, Steinbeck is the most respected American author.

     You can view the documentary here --  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7i2CDqBo9VU  (45 minutes)