THE FIRST LIFE I SAVED

I have directly saved two lives in my 70 years on this rock. Both of them were because I was born with Autism. The endless torture of going to public school and having to deal with the cruelty and violence of a back-water town filled with abusers and bigotry of the worst forms; drove me to seek the solitude and relative safety of the school library. There I had real friends; Books. Endless information to fill my every questioning mind. By the time I had finished 4^th grade I had read the entire encyclopedia set. I found medical information to be of particular interest and consumed all the library had too offer.

Little did I know that I would get a crash coarse in the foibles of medicine a short two years later. Aged 11 I was taken too the University of Minnesota Hospital because of the fights and behaviors and an attempted suicide by laying down in a snow bank and waiting for the freezing temperatures to put me out of my misery. My ward was the mental ward and it was there I was to learn about myself much of which the doctors were to never understand. I wasn’t only a freak. I was an intellectual “Idiot Savant”. Because of My headaches and violent outbreaks (you know protecting myself sometime against 8 or more people), I was slated to undergo a prefrontal lobotomy. The plan was they would test me. The results would show I didn’t belong in polite society and then a nice ice pick to my frontal lobes. No one at 11 should know that. So I was given all manner of tests; a complete body scan strapped to a table with a huge box going bzzzz, click, thunk… for what seemed like hours, innumerable other tests and my favorite; the “Abstract” reasoning test. That tests stands out because when they finished the test the room filled up with lab coats… all discussion what it meant. I asked. The Doc explained it was an abstract reasoning test. It measured where I stood in comparison to people in my ability to take information and form a coherent picture of that information. I asked why all the people. He explained I had scored at the 21^st + grade level. I wondered what that meant. He drew a bell curve, explained standard statistical deviation and showed me I was in an undefined statistical deviation somewhere near where the 7^th statistical deviation would be and that they didn’t know what that meant. He detailed that people my age should be at the 6^th grad level, that people who graduated high school should be at the 12^th grade level, people who had graduated college at the 16^th grade level and people like him with a doctorate at the 21^st grade level… I asked what the + sign meant. The reply: That is why the room filled up with lab coats. They had no clue . They had never seen anything like it.

I was in the Mental ward for about a month. The end came when they held a meeting with all the departments that had tested me. There might have been 15 or more people around the table. Each one would detail the test they ran and the results. The gist of it was ; I never smiled, didn’t make eye contact, walked funny, couldn’t be touched. I was never going to be Normal. I could never graduate high school. I could never hold a job or be a member of society. Each vote was for me to be lobotomized. And there I was; the mushroom in the corner absorbing every word. Understanding and planning my escape until it got to the head of the table. A Doctor Peter Grey, I believe and his 1^st question was to me; “and so what do you think *******?” “I think the problem isn’t that I Can’t deal with them, it is that they can’t deal with me. “And he laughed and said “that’s the smartest thing I have heard in 25 years”. He proceeded to berate the entire room. He was totally ashamed of them, that I, as an 11 year old understood more than they and all their doctorates. He told me not to worry that they weren’t going to touch me. He understood that I was fully aware.

Three years later almost to the day, the realization of myself I had learned in the mental hospital came into play. I was smart and I had learned to use it.

I broke my arm. A double compound fracture. I was taken to the emergency room twenty plus miles away. There I had to wait. There was a person in surgery for an emergency appendicitis and they only had one doctor available. So there I sat with an ice pack and blood slowly dripping out of the wrap what seemed like hours(it was). After a while the ambulance came in with another patient from a local manufacturing plant who had been hit with a board off a saw. He was unconscious and left on the gurney… After about an hour, the nurse came out and said the doctor was just finishing up and that I’d be taken back shortly. I told her; “ You better take him. He isn’t breathing very well and his lips are turning blue. I can wait and I don’t think he can”.. She looked at him, started yelling orders and they wheeled him into the surgery. About 4 hours later, she came out to thank me, saying “ You saved his life. He had a ruptured spleen and was bleeding to death.” I was finally given some pain meds and put in the hospital over night. His room was next to mine. I met him a week or so later back at the doctors office. He thanked me.

And as they say no good deed goes unpunished; The Quack that set my arm the next day; took one look at the x—rays and said “I should send you to a specialist, but I want to work on it first.” He set my arm 7 times in 2 weeks. The one bone knit and the other didn’t. By the time I saw a specialist; they could never straighten the bone he had set crooked…… But that is another story.