The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [163]
The press was told that young Jack had suffered a temporary relapse of the malaria that he picked up at the end of his service in the Pacific. It was a war hero suffering from his war injuries who was carried from a London hospital in pajamas to an ambulance and through the streets of London to the hospital on the Queen Elizabeth, where a private nurse ministered to him. It was a war hero who was carried by ambulance from the New York docks to a private plane to fly him to another ambulance that took him to a private room at the New England Baptist Hospital.
Although the family attempted to minimize the seriousness of the matter, saying that Jack’s condition was only temporary and that he would spend only a few days in Boston for “observation,” the photos of Jack entering the hospital belied all this. He was dressed in a suit and tie, as if these clothes would mask the seriousness of his condition. But the man lying under a blanket on the stretcher wore a death mask, his face haunted and bony, his chin slumped against his chest.
Addison’s disease turns its victims into medical Dorian Grays. Jack often had gloriously tanned skin that seemed to exude a sailor’s health. He had thick brown hair that probably would never turn gray. This was all due to Addison’s disease. The malady is so insidious that at first it seems not like a disease but like a slow draining of the spirit. Its victims lose weight, muscular strength, and their appetite, slowly declining toward death.
At the Lahey Clinic, Jack had a series of appointments with the prominent endocrinologist Dr. Elmer C. Bartels, who would treat him for the next thirteen years. By then Jack was already injecting himself with cortisone. “He had to take medicine,” Bartels said. “He’d forget to take it, or not take it with him on trips.”
Jack needed these injections to live. Patients were advised to increase the dose during periods of high stress, not as a medical crutch but as a physiological necessity, since in crises and danger healthy adrenal glands produce more of the essential steroids. Jack thus acquired the capability of manipulating his own health, or at least manipulating his psyche. If he took too high a cortisone dosage, however, he risked worsening such potential side effects of longtime use as muscular weakness, high blood pressure, and “agitation, euphoria, insomnia and, rarely, psychosis.” As it was, many of the illnesses and physical problems Jack had had over the years, from his back pain to his stomach troubles, may have been either caused by or exacerbated by his Addison’s disease.
Jack had been brought up to believe that a man was a vibrant physical being who had the strength to flick off adversity. A man’s whole sense of himself, and everything he did, felt, and thought, was based on good health. Women were not attracted to whiners or weakness. Neither were men.
Jack’s great creation, then, was not some piece of legislation but himself, a man of apparently endless vigor and health. He let no one stand close enough to his pain to betray his illusion. He let no one know what he felt when he jabbed the needle into his leg for the umpteenth time. On one occasion, though, Red Fay was standing there when Jack was injecting himself. Red was adept at playing the amiable buffoon, and Jack called him into his presence for moments of diversion.
“Jack, the way you take that jab, it looks like it doesn’t even hurt,” Red opined as he stood over his friend. Red’s insensitivity was usually one of his charms, but on this occasion Jack plunged the needle into Red’s leg. He yelled in pain. “It feels the same way to me,” Jack told his