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.
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