Surgery on an Analyst's Heart
FREEMAN, LUCY
Surgery on an Analyst's Heart Straight to the Heart. Reviewed by Lucy Freeman By George Lawton. Author, "Fight Against Fears," "Hope International Universities. 347 pp. $5.00. for the Troubled,"...
...But, urged by his cardiologist, he finally decided to risk the operation on his heart, whose aortic valve was slowly closing, damaged by a rheumatic fever attack when he was a child...
...Bailey as both surgeon and man...
...He said the shock of realizing he was going to survive had been too great...
...The only way the victim part of me can relieve its suffering is to work harder at being the observer...
...So always I am back at the old stand, in the business of living again, and maybe even a little bigger and better...
...He describes life in a hospital as no one else has, giving a picture of the dramatic work done in our hospitals and bringing to life the people in them, other patients as well as doctors and nurses...
...She saw one man, in whom she sensed deep fear and despair, go into the operating room and come out dead...
...Although long since finished with his own personal psychoanalysis, he went back for a few sessions...
...He has the highest praise for Dr...
...Charles Bailey...
...So it was natural that when I faced my greatest fear I instinctively tried to conquer it by subjecting the experience to observation and study...
...He attempts to answer the questions everyone who falls ill asks himself: "Why did this have to happen to me...
...Lawton, at the age of 54, found himself feeling sicker and sicker...
...Lawton maintains...
...His adventures in what he calls Heartland are described step by step, succinctly, graphically and always with humor...
...Lawton does...
...Lawton, a marriage counselor, describes her feelings during her husband's operation...
...Lawton admits he is not a brave man, that for years he had been stalling on having his tonsils out again...
...even turning over in bed winded him...
...Most of the time he felt nauseous, and he always felt fatigued...
...The result was a successful heart operation and a stirring book in which the author writes about his feelings before, during and after an operation performed successfully for the first time only seven years before...
...Here we are, at Hahnemann Hospital and at other hospitals, men and women who were once creatures, who had been not alone snatched from death, but saved from premature crippling of old age...
...heart surgery represents an achievement of equal type and rank...
...He was graduated from the hospital, as he says, "cum cultellus corum," with a little knife in the heart...
...He went to Hahnemann Hospital in Philadelphia to undergo aortic surgery at the deft hands of the famous Dr...
...He writes of the pioneer work in heart surgery that is being done by the Bailey team and others: "The atomic and hydrogen bombs represent man's wresting from nature one of her greatest secrets...
...Dr...
...He became so short of breath he had to give up climbing steps...
...Perhaps hospitals could not be run very efficiently if every patient had to have everything explained, but if doctors and nurses had pointed out a few things to him at the start, "it would have prevented annoyance and wasted energy for them and misunderstanding and misery for me...
...What did others do to me, what did I do to myself, to cause this suffering...
...He wrote of his emotions, he says, trying to understand how he felt about everything, because "my typical defense against the insults and vicissitudes of life, my method of surmounting suffering has lain in trying to understand the meaning of what is happening to me...
...Lawton once told his analyst in a "rebellious and boastful speech from the couch" that he felt he was "indestructible...
...Not only psychological help, but help in understanding some of the physical problems would comfort the patient, Dr...
...Just the opposite, for it was the surgical know-how that Dr...
...In a supplement, Mrs...
...I have been almost crushed, and almost destroyed...
...She stresses the "great need in special cases for treatment of excessive fear and anxiety before surgery is attempted," and asks that emotional support be given to such people...
...Lawton could not face...
...The effect of medical miracles is made even more stunning when described by one who has been saved by them, especially when that patient writes with eloquence, wit and wisdom as Dr...
...Dr...
...It was his psychoanalyst who first asked him, "How do you feel about heart surgery...
...Such a book is this one by George Lawton, a lay psychoanalyst and national authority on emotional problems of aging...
...If I was afraid of having my tonsils removed, what should I say to an operation of the most extreme and daring kind...
...The book is no routine description of complicated, bloody surgical details...
...For nine months prior to June 14, 1954, Dr...
...In facing the greatest catastrophe of his life, he proved his bravery...
...The doctors asked what hurt...
...He would have been even braver if the doctors had told him more about what was happening, he says...
...Ultimately this is what originally led me to the choice of my profession...
...he thought...
...He said, "I can go, and have gone, through catastrophes of all kinds again and again...
...Repeatedly I've been told that a plan of mine is impossible, but by the time it is told me the impossibility has become a reality...
...for the Troubled," "Before I Kill More" It is rare that a book presents something never before attempted...
...When he realized he would live, after the operation, he burst into tears and violent sobbing...
Vol. 40 • March 1957 • No. 12
