Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [304]
When it worsened the next day, he called Dr. Nick, who flew in with Dr. David Meyer, an ophthalmologist. Dr. Meyer first treated Elvis at his hotel and then admitted him to Nashville’s Baptist Memorial Hospital. His diagnosis: iritis, probably a constancy from the dye he used to color his eyelashes, Dr. Nick thought, and secondary glaucoma.
Barbara Leigh came to visit him, flying in from California and staying in the doctors’ quarters when she wasn’t lying right in the hospital bed with him. “I held his hand while they shot him in the eyeball, but I looked the other way. He was brave and didn’t make a peep.” The very word glaucoma made him think he was going blind, so Barbara understood when he flew in girlfriends one at a time to stay with him. Later that spring, he invited her to Graceland.
She loved sharing that world with him, seeing all his old Memphis hangouts, and walking the Graceland grounds, though he scared her playing chicken on the go-karts with the guys. Like Minnie Mae, who swore she heard noises coming from Gladys’s ghost, and Priscilla, who had sensed Gladys’s spirit when she found racks of her clothing in the attic, Barbara perceived Gladys around her, first in the dining room, but even more so upstairs in Elvis’s rooms where her picture stood on a table.
“I felt her. Her presence was always there. Elvis spoke mostly of her when we were alone in his bedroom.” It was there, under the Naugahyde ceiling with the TVs built in above his bed that he shared most everything with his girlfriends, in his private time away from the boys. “He said Gladys had told him he would marry a brown-eyed girl, and that he knew she would have liked me.”
He handed out Placydils to her for sleep, but she didn’t want them and hid some of them in the sofa. One time when they were together, he’d given her a gray pill for a headache, and it made her intensely ill.
Joyce, too, visited Graceland that spring. The same day that Barbara went back to California after Elvis’s glaucoma scare in Nashville, Joyce came from the opposite end of the country and then flew with him to Memphis. With all the medical equipment now set up in Lisa Marie’s room, it was Joyce who held his hand and flinched while Dr. Meyer put the needle in his eye.
He was incoherent nearly her whole visit, but the only part that really scared her was the oxygen tank in the room. “I couldn’t understand why there was an oxygen tank for an eye problem. The doctor showed it to me and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I hope I don’t have to use this thing.’ ”
Elvis wore a black patch for a while, smoking marijuana to alleviate the pressure in his eye, and canceled his immediate touring plans. Joyce came back to Tennessee to see him on May 21, flying again into Nashville, where he was completing a weeklong recording session. But he awakened in pain the next day in their hotel room, complaining of stomach cramps, and insisted on flying home to Memphis. They drove straight to Dr. Nick’s office from the airport, and suddenly, to Joyce, “He was like brand-new.”
At the time, Elvis seemed to be suffering only from irritable bowel syndrome, an uncomfortable intestinal dysfunction that can largely be managed through diet, exercise, and supplements. But it was just the first presentation of a far more serious problem: He had a premorbid condition, a congenital megacolon, or an abnormal enlargement that would soon be revealed as “tremendous in size,” in Dr. Nick’s words, three to four times normal in diameter. Eventually, the organ would lose much of its nerve enervation and ability to function.
He had been an outpatient in Palm Springs earlier that month for his fourth wedding anniversary, and more