Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [53]
Dr. Perry didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with me physically, so he focused more on the issues of emotional and mental stress. Then he surprised me by turning to Joan, probing into her thoughts and feelings about our marriage. Joan answered the doctor’s questions so straightforwardly, I turned to look at her, and when I did, I noticed the tears trickling down her cheeks. For the first time it hit me just how much of a toll my emotional struggles had taken on Joan. “For some time now, I have been considering a divorce,” she admitted to the doctor and me at the same time, “for the sake of the children.” Dr. Perry didn’t seem nearly as surprised as I was. Joan continued, “But I don’t want to even think about a divorce right now. I want Buzz to get well. We can decide what to do about our marriage later, but right now I just want my husband well.”
I didn’t say a word to Joan or to the doctor the entire time Joan spoke. I simply sat there, staring at my hands. Dr. Perry quickly concluded our session and promised that he would be in touch with us within a week or so. I urged him to get me in sooner if possible.
Joan and I spoke very little as we returned to Edwards, but we had a glimmer of hope that something good might come from our attempt to get help. Two days later I went to see Dr. Slarve again, insisting that I needed help immediately, not a few days from now as Dr. Perry had promised. Dick informed me that he had been in contact with Dr. Don Flinn, the Air Force psychiatrist who just a few years earlier had examined me and declared me mentally and emotionally fit to be an astronaut. Dr. Flinn was no longer working directly with NASA, but was nearby on the staff of UCLA’s neuropsychiatric institute. Dick let me know that Dr. Flinn wanted to see me. I hadn’t seen Flinn in eight years, but I figured I had nothing to lose. More than anyone, he probably had some insight into what goes on inside an astronaut’s head. Maybe he could help.
Dick called Flinn back and set up an appointment for that same afternoon. Dick had no sooner hung up the phone when the analytical part of me kicked into gear. Wait a minute! Flinn was the doctor who had certified me as competent to be an astronaut; it might not look too good on his record for me to be anything less than one of the supermen NASA projected us to be.
But my meeting with Dr. Flinn proved uneventful and of little consequence, other than speeding up the process of getting me back to see Dr. Perry in San Antonio. He talked with me for less than an hour, then walked me to the staff driver and instructed him to stay with me until I boarded my plane.
It was late when I got off the plane in Texas, but Dr. Perry was waiting for me at the airport. The doctor took me directly to Wilford Hall, the hospital adjoining Brooks Air Force Base. Ostensibly I was there to be examined for the pain in my shoulder and neck, so I was given a private room on the second floor in the section with patients who had suffered neck injuries. Two floors up was the psychiatric ward, where I might just happen to stop by.
The nurse gave me a sleeping pill, which I gladly accepted. I awakened the following morning, half expecting to find myself in a strait-jacket in some sort of mental hospital, but I quickly discovered that Wilford Hall looked and functioned much like any other military hospital. Nurses bustled in and out of rooms, doctors passed while staring at their clipboards, and recovering patients waved to each other as they hobbled up and down the sun-drenched halls.
That morning the doctors gave me a complete physical examination, and took extensive X-rays of my neck and shoulder areas. The neck scans proved inconclusive; the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong. Years later I underwent several neck operations, so