Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [116]
The Oneida was one of the most spectacular yachts of the Gilded Age. Though not exceptionally large, the boat was fast and luxurious. HISTORIC NEW ENGLAND
On the deck of the yacht, the president met with the doctors who would operate on him the next day. He already knew Bryant and O’Reilly, of course, and he’d almost certainly met Erdmann, Bryant’s assistant, as well. But Cleveland had probably never before been introduced to the other three doctors, Hasbrouck, Janeway, and Keen.
Grover sat in a deck chair, lit a cigar, and chatted with the doctors for about thirty minutes. For the first time all day he seemed relaxed. It was one of those increasingly rare moments when the other Grover emerged, the jovial raconteur. The warm night air was filled with pleasant chatter and the sweet smell of fine cigars. At one point Grover burst out, “Those officeseekers! They haunt me even in my dreams!” Around midnight the group retired to their cabins, except Bryant and Lamont, who returned to their respective homes in Manhattan. (Lamont maintained homes in both Washington and New York.) Dr. Keen later reported that the president needed no sedatives and slept soundly through the night, office-seeker dreams notwithstanding.
One wonders how soundly the doctors slept.
Cleveland was awakened the next morning by a knock on his cabin door. Begging his pardon, Janeway asked the president if he could examine him before he dressed. Grover consented unenthusiastically. His ambivalence toward doctors was well known. To an ailing friend he once wrote, “I hope that either by following your doctor’s directions or defiantly disobeying them (the chances probably being even in both contingencies), you will soon regain your very best estate in the matter of health.”
Janeway found the president to be in surprisingly good shape. He was overweight, but his heart and lungs were healthy. He had little if any hardening of the arteries and no enlarged glands. His pulse was ninety beats per minute.
Janeway washed out the president’s mouth with a disinfectant called Thiersch’s solution and declared him fit for the operation.
Keen also examined the president that morning, personally inspecting the tumor for the first time. It was even larger than he’d expected. The grayish growth covered much of the left side of the palate. The surface was rough and cauliflowerlike. It looked like a giant wart.
When he concluded his examination of the president, Keen was troubled by just one thing: a urinalysis revealed early-stage chronic nephritis, a kidney disease that is often dangerously aggravated by ether. The question of anesthesia vexed the doctors greatly. Keen held out hope that the entire operation could be performed with nitrous oxide, thereby avoiding ether altogether. Nitrous oxide (N2O), or laughing gas, was a popular recreational drug until its anesthetic properties were discovered by a Hartford dentist named Horace Wells in 1844. It was considerably less powerful than ether, which made it difficult to use in long operations, but it was also much safer, since ether frequently triggered pneumonia and other side effects. Ether was also highly combustible, an especially grave concern in a confined, poorly ventilated space—such as the saloon of a yacht. Like Keen, Bryant had hoped to “do this job with the use of laughing gas.” But Hasbrouck, the dentist who was also an experienced anesthetist, didn’t think nitrous oxide would be strong enough for the Cleveland surgery. “In the use of nitrous oxide for the operation about to be made,” he wrote in his case notes, “it is very doubtful in my opinion about keeping him under the