Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [168]
Flannery had begun working on a story again, but more of her downtime was now given over to listening to records and watching television than her friends ever expected. TV satisfied a taste for the vulgarities of popular culture that used to be filled for her solely by newspaper coverage — of Roy Rogers’s horse, Trigger, attending church in Pasadena, or a local beauty contest for “Miss North Georgia Chick.” Now she was up on “Geritol, Pepto-Bismol, Anacin, Bufferin, any kind of soap or floor wax, etc. etc.” A sports fan, her aperçu on the Kennedy assassination was that “all commercial television is stopped until after the funeral and even the football games called off, which is about the extremest sign of grief possible.” She and Tom Stritch communicated about their mutual televised passions, stock-car races and track events. She even “postponed my work an hour” to catch W. C. Fields’s 1941 comedy, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break.
In the third week of February, she received a verdict from her doctors that she would need to have a hysterectomy to remove an enlarged fibroid tumor, the cause of her severe anemia and fainting spells. Dr. Merrill was hesitant to allow any sort of surgery for fear of triggering a lupus flare and wished to have the operation take place in Atlanta. But Flannery refused to leave Milledgeville. Mary Cline had just been released from the hospital, and Regina, recovering from a week in bed with the flu, was caring for her. She did not want to impose the extra strain of an Atlanta hospitalization on her family, or herself. In preparation, she canceled readings scheduled that April for Boston College and Brown University, where John Hawkes was teaching, as well as for the University of Texas. In order to safeguard against reactivating the lupus, she was “loaded with cortisone.”
Admitted to Baldwin County Hospital on Monday, February 24, 1964, Flannery spent the night before her operation correcting the galleys of “Revelation,” which had just come in the mail from the Sewanee Review. As she reread the pages in the hospital light, the story suddenly “didn’t seem so hot.” For the operation the next day the local surgeon, Dr. Walker, enlisted five blood donors and briefly considered an artificial kidney. Over the three days following, she was kept on glucose and cortisone drips. While she shared such surgical details with Maryat, everyone else was treated to a lighter version of events. “One of my nurses was a dead ringer for Mrs. Turpin,” she wrote Betty in a typical dispatch. “Her Claud was named Otis. . . . She didn’t know she was funny and it was agony to laugh and I reckon she increased my pain about 100%.”
The outcome of this operation, from which she returned home on March 5, was at first deemed positive. “It was all a howling success from their point of view,” she wrote Robert Fitzgerald, “and one of them is going to write it up for a doctor magazine as you usually don’t cut folks with lupus.” Within two weeks, though, she was back in bed, “not doing any brain work but reading,” while subject to postoperative infections and cystitis. Her physical reaction was dramatic enough that by the time of her thirty-ninth birthday, on March 25, she was no longer concealing her inkling that something was gravely wrong. “I suspect it has kicked up the lupus again,” she wrote Betty three days later. “Anyway, I am full of kidney pus and am back on the steroids.” She described for Betty a visit to the doctor’s office the day before: “same scene as in ‘Revelation.’”
A new friend and correspondent was Cudden Ward Dorrance, a sixty-year-old short story writer, and friend of Allen Tate’s, whom she had met at a breakfast at Georgetown. Dorrance, himself dying of emphysema from smoking, sent her the