The Lighthouse Road(91)
Hosea ushered her to a chair and urged her to sit. To Rebekah he said, " Apply an ample dose of Vaseline to the boy's prepuce and wrap him up." Turning to Thea he said, "Miss Eide, listen to me."
Thea seemed to have no breath left in her.
"Miss Eide!" Hosea shook her by the shoulders. "Miss Eide, listen to me. Odd is fine. I gave him an examination this morning, I circumcised him. There's nothing wrong with the boy that a little nap won't cure. You've nothing to worry about. These are things the child must have done. Do you understand me?"
Of course she did not.
On the table on the other side of the room Rebekah had wrapped the boy's bottom, had dressed him in his layette and his knit hat. In her clumsy way she picked him up and carried him to Thea, who pushed Hosea out of the way and stood and took her boy in one motion. Odd stopped wailing as soon as he was in his mother's arms. Thea hurried from the surgery, ran up to her bedroom, and closed the door behind her.
Hosea and Rebekah stood in the surgery, looking at each other, shocked though they ought not to have been.
After a moment Hosea said, "There's no use denying it any longer. She's suffering badly. Postpartum melancholia. Worse than I've ever seen it." He looked at Rebekah and said softly, "Will you check on Thea?"
Hosea read deep into the night, consulting his old medical journals and further chapters in Fox's Psychopathology of Hysteria. Around midnight he'd decided there was but a single course of action: He must remove her ovaries to quell the madness. It was a decision that greatly eased his concern, and after he reread Battey's "Oophorectomy: A Case Study" in the British Medical Journal he made notes in his surgeon's journal. Before he retired for the night, he wrote a long explanation in Norwegian and practiced it twice.
Early the next morning, after only two hours' sleep, as soon as he heard stirrings in Thea's bedroom, he knocked quietly on the door.
He knocked, put his ear to the door, and listened to her feet hurry
ing softly across the floor. "Miss Eide?" he said quietly. He knocked again when she did not answer. "Miss Eide, I must speak with you. May I come in?"
When she failed to answer again he pressed the door open. She sat on the bed, Odd clutched in her arms. She had the look of a cornered animal.
"Thea, dear, what do you think I've done? Do you not understand that I took Odd yesterday only to perform perfunctory and essential examinations? That if I'd failed to perform those examinations I would have been in breach of the code of ethics by which my profession is governed?"
He'd intended to spare her his lecture on professional ethics, to cut right to the matter at hand, but he couldn't help himself.
She only looked at him fearfully.
He proceeded in Norwegian, reading from the notes he'd prepared late the night before, notes he hoped would convey not only his sense of urgency but his profound affection for her and her boy. "Miss Eide, I am your friend. I have tried to help you. And your boy." He paused, judged the look on her face, and took a step closer.
"Thea, I was helping your boy yesterday." He paused again, looked at his prepared remarks, looked at Thea, still clutching Odd on the bed, her eyes swollen with tears and lack of sleep, and thought he loved them both. He wished he could tell her, wished he could convey the honesty of his feelings. Instead he returned to his remarks.
"Thea, you are sick. Postpartum melancholia. You must get well. If you don't, you will be unable to care for the boy."
This last made her clutch Odd tighter still.
"I would like to perform a surgery called Battey's Operation to remove from your body what's causing your morbid condition. I will remove your ovaries. It will cure you. Do you understand what I'm proposing?"
She only looked more frightened.
"Miss Eide, without this surgery, you will go insane." This last he said in English as he shook his solemn head.
And so two days later Hosea Grimm held a sponge to Thea Eide's nose. She breathed in the chloroform and went into a catatonic sleep and he, with his sure hands, removed his scalpel from a bath of carbolic solution, took measure of her linea alba, and made a small incision from which he removed the first of her ovaries. He stanched the flow of blood and stitched the incision. He gave her another dose of chloroform and made a matching incision on the other side of her abdomen and repeated the procedure within and without. An hour later, after Thea woke vomiting and feverish, he injected a dose of morphine into her thigh and set a cold compress on her forehead.
He stood back, wiped the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his shirt, and believed honestly that his methods were sound and that Thea Eide, asleep again on the table, awaited a kinder fate thanks to his steady surgical hand.