Left for Dead (14 page)

Being a pathologist also means you don’t see trivial stuff. No colds or sniffles or well-baby physicals, only diseases of consequence. And you see all the diseases in all different parts of the body. You see everything that is common, and you see everything that is rare. And you never learn it all.

The stereotype of the pathologist is the weird duck. Some people go into pathology because they cannot handle human contact. They retreat into pathology, as opposed to choosing it. A lot of them are nerdy. However, the ones I trained with were fairly normal.

Our guiding light was Dr. Fallis, a tremendous teacher whom we all held in the greatest awe, me more than most. Fallis was a no-nonsense guy. He looked like a marine corps drill sergeant, and browbeat his students in the finest boot-camp tradition.

Each of us was held to uncompromising standards. His only acceptable level of performance was perfect. You could not
not
know everything about a case. I had never before encountered an instructor such as him.

After my second year I did a summer rotation on the autopsy service at Parkland. My classmate Charlie Cramer, now my partner in practice, shared the job with me. We were given some instruction in how to conduct an autopsy and get all your body parts in different piles. After completing an autopsy one morning, you had until seven the next morning, when you presented the case to your professor. That meant that once you thought you’d figured out what had happened to the deceased, you went to the medical library and worked nearly nonstop for almost twenty-four hours trying to learn as much as you could about what you
thought
had gone on. We all knew that Fallis would grill us to the point of humiliation if we weren’t prepared.

My very first case was a young man who’d died while cleaning a petroleum tank. The vessel had not been properly ventilated, and he’d been overwhelmed. He died in the ICU on oxygen therapy.

Now, I had practically memorized Dr. Fallis’s textbook; I had read it four or five times. But damn my luck, the disease I had seen in the autopsy room was not described there. So now I had to present a full medical history, which I’d never seen done, about a disease I couldn’t identify.

Next morning at seven, my knees knocking, I suggested bilobar pneumococcal pneumonia.

“In twenty years of medicine,” Fallis sardonically observed when I finished, “I’ve never heard a more inept, ill-prepared presentation.

I’m extremely disappointed. Maybe we can go through this and clarify it.”

That was the high point of the morning. Over the next three and a half hours, I would be asked every question a human can ask. When Fallis was done, and I sat whimpering in the corner, he explained that my cadaver had died of oxygen toxicity pneumonitis, which means the level of pure oxygen needed to keep him alive in the ICU had killed him. Since I’d never heard of such a condition, it was tough to read up on it.

The women in my family are well accustomed to domestic catastrophes.

Both my grandmothers lost their husbands to sudden deaths. My father died of radiation sickness.

My mother, Edna Howard of Griffin, Georgia, met Lawrence Olson in the late 1930s at a state experimental farm not far from Griffin (the postmark was, and is, Experiment, Georgia). Edna was a library assistant; Lawrence was an agronomist down from Illinois. During this period, he did research in several labs, including the government’s atomic energy facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

I hardly recall my father. He had suffered radiation exposure at Oak Ridge, and would die a lingering death in 1951. Mother, then forty-one, had me to support, along with my two older brothers: Howard, who was born in 1941, and Wayne, who
came along in 1944. She continued working as a librarian, taught classes and attended night school at Emory, where she received her master’s degree. There was zero money in the house, but I didn’t once hear her complain.

Ever practical, she suggested that my recently widowed Grandmother Olson come to live with us. Alice Olson would tell me on repeated occasions that when her husband, Carl, died, she had no will to go on living. Coming to help out her daughter-in-law, however, had given Alice a second life, a reason to go on. Still, hardly a day passed until her death in 1980 when she didn’t say, “I sure miss that old Swede of mine.”

Mother saw her role as our provider. She worked extremely hard and was always gone. She figured that as long as she provided for us, she was doing what was necessary. To this day, she’ll say she did it “for you children.”

Beck is not unlike my mother in that way. Both are models of practical self-sufficiency.

She certainly would hug me and tell me that she loved me. But the person who brushed and braided my hair in the morning, and made sure I finished my oatmeal, was my grandmother.

Alice and I slept together in the same room, with me on the rollaway bed, for as long as I can remember. During the day, she kept herself active doing everything from organizing postcards to looking at picture books with me. She did whatever she could without stepping on my mother’s toes. She always deferred to Edna—probably the only way these two strong-willed women were going to get along under the same roof.

Big brother Howard—we always called him Howie—was my surrogate father, an essential figure in my girlhood, my
adult life and the story of my family. He is key to understanding Beck and me.

With my mother away most of the time, someone had to drive me to Girl Scout meetings and school functions and otherwise take a hand in guiding my development. Howie did that. I clearly remember showing Howie my report card, where I made all A’s. He said, “Why didn’t you make A-pluses?” I was crushed.

Early on in my relationship with Peach, I was somewhat competitive with Howard, simply because he was awfully bright and capable. Whenever I’m around somebody like that, I tend to try to compete with him. I enjoy the give-and-take. Peach noticed that and suggested I stop it, and I did. Howard was too kind to correct me. I grew to love him as a brother.

I realize this upbringing left me incomplete. A child needs two parents.

Yet it did put starch in my spine. I think my mother, so competent and hardworking and focused on our material well-being, effectively deleted the word
quit
from my vocabulary. Whatever my situation, particularly my marriage, I make it work. In an odd way, she may also have predisposed me to accept Beck and his own single-minded pursuit of goals, so similar to hers. I certainly had no model at home of what a good marriage should be. As a result, when things later started going bad
with Beck, I would think, Who knows? Maybe this is the way they all are.

I was born in late August, which meant that I always was the youngest one in my class, a disadvantage I made sure not to repeat when our daughter Meg also was born in late August. Meg didn’t start kindergarten until after her sixth birthday.

I made great grades but was a late bloomer socially, real quiet and shy. I don’t think I had a lot of self-assurance. That didn’t mean I avoided social situations, but I didn’t get much out of them, either. I’d go out with somebody and afterward just think, Yecch! One time, a guy I didn’t even know asked me to marry him. That certainly puzzled me. I remembered wondering what love really was. I was clueless.

My mother absolutely drove my brothers to attend the best colleges possible. Howie, who was very bright, took an undergraduate degree at Princeton, his master’s at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and earned a doctorate in textile physics at the University of Manchester in England. He’d later design the fabric for a NASA space suit.

Wayne attended the University of Georgia. When it came to me, Edna said, “You don’t know what you’re going to do; why don’t you go to the University of Georgia and become a teacher? That would fit in nicely with having a family.”

I wasn’t consumed with either prospect. If anything was on my mind, it was a growing sense that I’d led a much too circumscribed life, that I really needed to get out of Griffin and see something of the world.

After graduating from Griffin High School, I went to the University of Georgia, where I took an undergraduate degree in political
science in 1971. I then took enough courses to be certified as a resource teacher for gifted children, which is what I was doing in 1974 when Beck and I first met.

The first real go-steady romance of my life was Martha Moyer, whom I met in my sophomore year at Midwestern. She was a beautiful girl with a kind spirit and upbeat manner. What made Martha truly special, however, was that she thought I hung the moon. She could see beyond my nerdiness, past the insecurities, and we connected.

We stayed together through graduation. Then, when I entered Southwestern, Martha moved to Dallas to teach school. The question of marriage arose, but with the extraordinary demands I knew that eight years of medical training would make on me, I wasn’t ready for the added responsibility of being a husband, too. Martha moved on, and I’m sure she’s glad she did.

I met Margaret Olson, one of my brother Kit’s patients, in 1974 on a trip home to Griffin. Kit’s wife warned me about Margaret. “I’m not sure about this, Beck,” she said. “Margaret’s the kind of gal you wind up marrying.”

Margaret Olson was just as pretty as she could be, and very bright, very articulate. She has this quality of being a really good person, and that appealed to me. It wasn’t just knowing right from wrong. She has a sensitivity to other people that I don’t possess. At some level, I could see myself standing next to this person for a lifetime, the mother of my children.

I really don’t remember our first date. I think we went to Underground Atlanta and probably had dinner or something. But I do remember what I wore: navy-blue hose and a two-piece dress with navy-blue knit sleeves. It was sort of red, white and blue in an argyle pattern. It just gives me the chills to think I once dressed like that.

I recall a strong sense of Beck’s energy from that date, but no sparks between us. Maybe six months later, Jane called me again to say that Beck was coming to town once more and would like to see me. Just like him to delegate the date making.

The occasion was to be Kit Weathers’s Georgia Jamboree Show of Shows, a weekend dance where Kit and his band played in an old one-room elementary school in Griffin. Kit had purchased the place so his band would have somewhere to play. I discovered that Beck was a good dancer. After someone handed me a beer—I’m a cheap drunk—I started dancing like I’d never danced before. We danced all night.

Beck said, “I’ll call you,” and did—every Saturday night at some crazy hour, like two in the morning. Then I’d start waking up at two, waiting for his call. Beck was interesting. He made me laugh. He was never dull. He was always a little elusive, a challenge. He made me think. He was different.

It would be years before I finally understood that he talks a lot but never says anything about himself. It takes a while to figure that out.

My medical school buddies at first referred to my future wife as the Georgia Peach. Later, it was G. Peach. And then just Peach. Thus another perfectly good Southern name was lost.