The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [224]
In April, Jack was ready to fly back to Washington when his crutch collapsed, and he reinjured himself. Five weeks later, on May 24, 1955, Jack walked back into the Senate chamber and received a hearty round of applause. He appeared to be fully recuperated, yet his back and neck troubled him so much that he could not turn to one side without moving his entire body. He looked tanned and fit, although he was severely anemic. His cholesterol level was about 350. His left leg was supposedly slightly shorter than the right, another potential source of back pain. He had set aside his crutches for these public moments, but they were never far from him. He had used them so long that he had developed calluses under his armpits.
For two decades now, Jack had been prodded and probed by an endless series of doctors, some of whom had made faulty diagnoses while others had prescribed treatments that only exacerbated his problems. Jack was like many chronic pain sufferers, wandering from one specialist to the next, one promise to the next, his pain traveling with him. Like the rest of his family, Jack was a believer in credentials, always asking who was best and going to them for counsel.
In this instance, Dr. Ephraim Shorr, a leading expert on adrenal insufficiency, felt that he could contribute no more to Jack’s treatment. So the doctor introduced Jack to Dr. Janet Travell, a well-known expert in pain management. Only three days after his return to the Senate, he flew up to New York to meet with her.
Dr. Travell thought his condition was serious enough that she had him admitted immediately to New York Hospital, where his weeklong stay was publicly described as “routine therapy.” One of his first directives to Travell was to keep his condition from his young bride. “I don’t want her to think she married either an old man or a cripple,” Jack told the doctor. Jack had found some momentary respite from his pain sitting in an old-fashioned cane-bottomed rocking chair in the doctor’s office. Travell wrestled the chair into her big sedan and delivered it to her new patient in the hospital.
Jack had less than sanguine opinions of women who entered what he considered manly professions, but the New York physician inordinately impressed him. She combined a woman’s gentle touch with an authoritative voice backed by ample credentials, and Jack felt that finally he had found a doctor who could help him. Travell was no miracle worker. In July, Jack was back in the hospital twice, for a week at New England Baptist Hospital, and later in the month for five days in New York at the Hospital for Special Surgery.
Jack became so dependent on Dr. Travell that he sometimes flew up weekly to see her. The specialist measured Jack, and when she diagnosed that one leg was shorter than the other, she prescribed lifts for his left shoes. She firmed up the seating on the upholstered chairs in Palm Beach and did what she could to make the rest of the furniture tolerable for the Massachusetts senator. Most important, though, Dr. Travell was a militant proponent of the wide efficacy of procaine injections, known more commonly as novocaine or Novocain (its trade name), a drug Jack had first used in 1944.
Novocaine is used primarily as an anesthetic in minor surgeries and dental procedures. For a person of Jack’s medical history, especially with his periodic asthma attacks, the drug could cause drowsiness or tremors. Dr. Travell injected novocaine in what she called “trigger areas.” It was a technique that Jack could learn to do by himself, shooting the painkiller into areas that troubled him.
“She began to really fix me up by this business of novocaine,” Jack said in 1959, when he was still her patient. “I think it’s so outrageous these doctors—if I had met her fifteen years ago, I probably wouldn’t have any trouble…. She’s been this pioneer in this business of muscular spasms, and of putting novocaine in, which relaxes the spasm, which eases and permits blood to flow and, therefore, she does that enough and then the muscle relaxes. Otherwise,