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The day after I finished my residency, my mother had an operation that was supposed to be for a uterine fibroid that turned out to be stage-four ovarian cancer. I hadn’t admitted to myself the possibility of something being seriously wrong till I got the phone call.

Enthusiasm

(Vonnegut family photo)

chapter 9

Crack-up Number Four

It’s important to me that I owned the house they took me out of in a straightjacket.

I loved the rhythm and rank of being a primary-care pediatrician. I started paying down the money I had had to borrow to get through medical school and residency. I’d tried to cut down a few times but still smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. I’d take care of a couple of patients, go out to my car to have a cigarette, and come back and see a few more patients.

I was dealing mostly with self-limited viral illnesses in otherwise well babies and children, but life and death wasn’t the point. I didn’t feel less than neurosurgeons, oncologists, or cardiologists. Someone had to be looking through the haystack to find treatable diseases in salvageable patients. Leukemia or brain tumors would always be trying to sneak through, and I was ready to catch them. Maybe I was the catcher in the rye.

I didn’t want to be rich or famous. I didn’t want to write again. I wanted nothing more than to keep doing pediatrics forever.

——

For a year or so before I went crazy for the last time, an odd feeling of panic would take hold of me almost every night driving home from work. I’d feel sick to my stomach, my heart would race, and I’d have chest pain. I’d imagine getting into accidents or getting dragged out of my car and beaten. I went to a cardiologist, got on a treadmill, and passed my stress test. He reassured me that my heart was fine and joked that it was nice seeing me but that he had to go take care of sick people.

He asked me about alcohol and drugs, and I told him I drank a few beers after work, had half a bottle or less of wine with dinner, maybe a shot of bourbon after dinner, and Xanax as prescribed for insomnia. He said nothing, so it must have been okay. Apparently what I had used to be called “soldier’s heart” because so many soldiers complained of the same thing during World War I. I was a good soldier. Crushing chest pain and nausea were just part of being me.

My wife and I were two cordial, barely connected children of divorce who mostly wanted no drama. The harder I tried to be a good husband, the worse it seemed to get. She was married to a doctor—what more could she want?

My sisters and I were on good terms. I was glad they were married to decent men and having children. We all knew Jane had cancer that wasn’t going to go away, but she was doing remarkably well.

Man Recovers from Mental Illness, Goes to Medical School, and Becomes a Doctor. It was a perfectly good story with a perfectly good ending.

For about ten years running, Kurt had hosted a family fishing trip out of Montauk, near his place on Long Island. It was usually the weekend after Labor Day. It was usually an all-guy thing, though sometimes my father enjoyed inviting Betty Friedan along. We were all fighting our own battles, looking for some time off, and willing to show up for Kurt and see what happened. Bluefish are, pound for pound, the most vicious of God’s creatures, and we caught a lot of them.

Bernie, Kurt’s older and only brother, usually came with two or three of his five sons and sometimes a grandchild. Sometimes my sons came with me, but not on the 1985 trip. Kurt and Bernie would tell the same stories and jokes. I knew most of the punch lines, as did Bernie’s sons.

Bernie was Kurt’s only real peer at that point in his life. Eight years Kurt’s senior, he was a scientist who did things that hadn’t been done before, like seeding clouds to make it rain. My favorite experiment of his was the release of several tons of chicken feathers into thunderclouds to see where the air currents were going. Kurt and Bernie’s sister, Allie, the mother of the four cousins who came to live with us, had been a gifted