ACUTE OTIS MAJOR

Acute Otis Media



Mention of middle ear infection, of acute otis media, invariably brings to mind my tonsillectomy and the following love and death event and the story 
The Tonsilectomy - or:
Liebestod at an Early Age.

that I have written about it and that this is the third time I am writing this story. The first time naively - that is, unselfconsciously - in one fine fell swoop, I did so in 1957, during my Junior year abroad. I sent it to my friend Frank Conroy, the editor of the Haverford-Bryn Mawr Review, the manuscript was stolen out of his car trunk in Nantucket. I then wrote the story once more, Senior year, back in the USSR, but it felt awkward to repeat what had come naturally, poured out of me the first time round, but as the successor editor of the Review, with the blonde lionesss, Paula Dunaway holding down the Bryn Mawr side – nontheless published the story in the only issue the two editors managed to produce that Year. Betsy Nelson, who is still Paula’s friend, did a cover with a pathetic plunging Icarus. Professor Satherswaite, the English department advisor and reviewer, pronounced the entire issue an Icarus that had plunged to death, a dud! This third and final time around the story is told with considerable knowledge of its importance in my life and its all around implications, you could say that I have subjected the story to an analysis and interprtation prior to writing it a third time, so I say who happens to appreciate a famous essay enitled Against Interpretation as he does few othrs.
On the immediate level, back in 1957 the story  provided yet one more reason to start to think of women as being made of porcelain; and, secondly, about forty years later, in the early 1980s, the story proves its essential function when  I tell the story to my presumptive analyst during the first exploratory week where he and I discover whether he the analyst and I the prospective patient will be a good fit. When I come to the the very end of the story Dr. Enigma flinches, and does so for a damn good reason, and I realize that he has the requsite sensitivities, so I realize who is am someone who nearly flinches at the sight even of his own scars, and I agree to enter into the analytic compact. I imagine I was testing him who proved the right choice indeed overall, I got quite lucky there now that I am at least halfway well-versed in the matter, and the only real mistake he committed was the usual: hubris, grandiosity: to think that he could claim not to know German and not be caught out during the extraordinary closeness that can develop between analyst and analysand, an analyzand translator at that! Now the story from painful beginning to painful end, a phenomenology condensed.
    

It is the umpteenth middle ear infection. I have just recovered from yet another and gone back to ice skating! But there it is: yet another Acute Otis Media as the good doctor called it, explaining that Acute Otis Media was the Latin medical designation for the phenomenon, as though an important sounding name would make me feel better and I  speculate whether my ear drum might start to resemble a sieve if the eardrum kept being punctured or my governess’s needle-pad nose, who was always darning. 
The situation is so dire as to require immediate action, and that means piercing, and for once without anesthetic.  
    Beloved Omi (Grandma) R. and hated governess Ms. No hover about and peer down at me – I think I dimly remember - I turn my entire body to my left side, as I have been asked to. Pulling on the right ear lobe the doctor first straightens the ear canal and  then inserts the ear speculum, the gleaming metal otoscope, into the external ear. He braces his hand, holding the otoscope against my head, placing the index finger against the  head and, in an alarmingly alarmed tone of voice, announces: “I will have to puncture it now or it will burst… Be a strong boy now. This will hurt but only for a second.” I thought of other pains I had learned to prepare myself for… as when you fall and prepare to have an abraded knee I knew the impact of a sharp stone tossed against my head – very painful the one time it had happened during a village rock fight. Cuts, bruises, sprains of all kinds as piercing pain nearly makes me break out in tears, but for tears to flow the pain is actually too brief.   The ear ache usually began as  incipient pain, you could nearly think and hope it away, until it became insistent, throbbing. At that point I start to run a fever. Pain and fever gradually sharpen. The pain had been quite fierce at this point, nearly so fierce as to make me cry when the physician had to pierce the eardrum without first adminiering any kind of aneasthetic. He has  offered a trade-off - sharp pain in exchange for relief. Anything for relief. I nodded, go ahead. The scream that issues from me as the doctor pierces the eardrum must have pierced his and the women’s eardrums it was that high-pitched and extreme and unexpected, elicited by a pain against which no anticipation seemed to have bee able to insure. NO: the pain was so extreme it left me speechless in disbelief that anything could hurt that much – and yet be so brief. It was the most intense physical pain I have experienced ever and represents the high end on the continuum of sharp pain.  The continuum of dull aches had for a marker a horse needle, as it was called, the size of the instrument that is used to lubricate an automobiles front end with thick grease,  that was introduced between parts of my banged up right soccer knee to withdraw the turbid liquid that had swelled the knee as though I was starting to suffer from elephantisis. That drawing of the water was a dull, deep, seemingly forever bone pain - bone deep pain became a concept - as that huge needle was introduced into a space between parts of the knee. The ear drum piercing pain lasted a millisecond, if a millisecond can be said to last, but was so sharp and intense it left me not just speechless but incapable of uttering the scream, stuck in my throat, I felt the pain deserved. It of course makes snese that the eardrum has such a concentration of nerves, the better to hear with sensitively.
The physician annonces that I needed a tonsillectomy, the tonsils in back of my throat are the hotbed for continuous infections. I agree, I want the hot-bed gone. I look in the mirror the physician holds up for me as he shines a flashlight into the back of my throat – very red throat and two small egg-shaped very red thingies with white dots on them. “The white dots are the infection” the good doctor says as he packs his trusty and familiar physician’s mailbox shaped satchel.
#
The lamp above the operating table or is it an operating chair? is atremble, it flickers, the room shakes, the entire space is shaking, tremoring as during an earthquake, as the physicians, scalpels in hand, who are administering the anesthetic in an above ground air-raid bunker, are hovering above me as Bremen is under attack... in May 1944, now, and they bide their time. Caught in a moment of... we should we not… as I drift off…  I evidently drifted off, the anesthetic also anesthetized the air raid attack since I came to, regained consciousness in a room with nurses in the light grey habits of a religious order, so it seems, black head dress. Yes, that pain, the highest and most extreme end of it but only for a millisecond, a millipede of a second... but no pain from the tonsil operation which was performed with anesthetic, dull pain in the throat now and for some days. Aspirin as painkiller? I don’t recall. Careful what you eat and fluids fluids fluids oatmeal while it heals. Future ear aches will bring back the possibility of further punctures without anesthetic. The trembling light, the flickering light and the shaking bunker as the operation is about to proceed, is the most immediate recollection. A shaky world. What if the supposedly impregnable bunker is hit and proves pregnable was, I imagine, the unarticulated fear that I gathered from the faces of the physicians during those moments as I was drifting off; or their concern for my well being.
#

Then, the weather not inclement, comes the most significant upshot from the tonsil operation. A nurse walks me – or am I in a wheelchair the first few days after the operation? - out onto the hospital terrace to recuperate. – To recuperate! I couldn’t wait! And I lie on a deck chair next to a woman who I near immediately decide must be “the most beautiful woman in the world” – more beautiful it appears than Viola, the mother of Constantine and Sven, of just a year prior, whose photo I can google some seventy-five years hence, confirming that initial memory and impression. Viola/ Jola, a film actress of the 20s and 30, on her photos, even now looks amazingly beautiful. It appears I must have forgotten about my mother! as I regard my neighbor, who I am told is twenty-eight years old, a dark-haired beauty, I had not seen such full breasts, albeit in outline, since... from the side the curve of the breast looks like the ramp you could use for a ski jump, its pert comma-like end would provide that extra fillip to get you airborne I thought as a nurse inveighs: “One does not look at breasts!” At this moment the young dark-haired woman, who is lying next to me on the veranda in a deck chair, is resting, recuperating aw well, it turns out that she has an ailing heart. We proceed to play solitaire for two which I know how to play since I play it nearly each day with one of my two grandmothers, the one who says that she has no further interest in being alive and refuses to go down into the cellar during air raids. The young woman tells me that she has for a husband - does she realize that I would marry her on the spot? is that why she is telling me that she has a husband? - a Messerschmidt pilot, the pilot of one of those objects in the sky that you only hear, like chalk being scraped across the chalkboard, screech across the slate grey dark or blue sky, but that, so far, you have not caught sight of: The nag, Lisa, and you and the foreman on the bench of the ladder-wagon rear up as one as the screech slashes scythe-like across the sky… but leaves no mark. “What was that?” (“Wat war denn dat?” Klinner speaking in Platt, the lowland dialect.) Perhaps it is the miracle weapon the radio talks about. At any event, yet another fright, for man and beast alike. Another terror in the sky. The beautiful woman, who is in her late twenties, has a heart ailment and you play solitaire for two with her as you did as you do with your grand-mother during air raid attacks during which she no longer wants to go down into the cellar and as you will continue to do with your grandmother once you are back home and she, who is longing for her daughter, your mother, and her husband, and who has been bombed out of her apartment, refuses to go into the cellar during the air raids. - Spring and summer 1944 wonderful air raid days, a profusion of cloudless skies and nights that allow the admirers of armadas in the sky a profusion of admirable formations, the occasional moth caught in the beams seeking to escape the puffs of smoke that want to pummel it, and the occasional downed bomber, and lots of shrapnel for the shrapnel fanciers and don’t stick your head out the window when the ack-ack is blasting away. The wife of the pilot is the most beautiful woman in the world, something of a refrain of mine for the rest of my life, since there are so many beautiful women in the world, so many of whom will die prematurely, of breast cancer, but I associate the sight and this refrain with the excruciating pain of the initial incision to relieve the pressure on an ear drum that is about to burst, and what a pain that explosion would have been!, but with an equally surprising pleasure a pleasure that I will feel periodically throughout my life and would like to feel at all times. However, the first time of all kinds of matters is always the most memorable, and some pleasures never become routine. For not only is the young woman the most beautiful woman in the world she also has the world’s most beautiful bosom! I cannot take my eyes off her breasts, even as we play solitaire, or especially then since she has to lean forward revealing their naked fullness. My eyes fasten, feast on them, with the result that I begin to feel, that I begin to notice my “little one,” my penis, become erect in my pajamas under the blanket – and that I look to discern whether the erection is visible, it felt so strong and powerful, so extraordinarily pleasurable. And very different from when I had touched myself. The beautifully-shaped full young breasts, that curve, that ski-slope-like curve, that lilt from breast bone to the tip of the breast, on which you could wanted to slither as on a toboggan, launch yourself to heaven is what they looked like, looking up at that face. Ski slopes made for reverying, and for interruption by the habited nurse: “One doesn’t look at breasts.” Curved, ski-slope-like young breast that elicit that powerful reaction. Young breasts like that have a kind of twist, a comma curve to them, these breasts are young and ask for something other than a child, virginally tempting. I love them but am puzzled. I will certainly be a most loyal knight if the lady would bestow her favors, which I realize are not just milk chocolate, relief from the sweetness in my groin. The dark-haired somewhat melancholy beauty and my erection provide something to look forward to each morning after breakfast and I have washed up… and I visit her in her room if it isn’t sunny, but like it best when we lie next to each other on the hospital veranda, I cannot recall a single other patient, but recall the nurses hovering about, in their habits and their head coverings. I spent perhaps two weeks in the hospital recuperating… occasionally Ms. No shows up even though I thought I had killed her when she had tried to spoon-feed me yet once again while I had been lying sick in bed… and seeks to interfere… and that is the first time I recall that I used the tactic of utterly ignoring someone who was not supposed to interfere. I return to the hospital for a checkup after a few weeks and ask to see my love with the dark hair and the beautiful breasts. The nurses tell me that she has died, that her heart gave out, and that she died because I excited her too much (And Dr. Enigma flinches once again & acquires yet another sensitive patient.)… and it is unlikely that the nurses have the slightest how, what was meant to be a sweet joke the kind that only the puritanical are capable of making, terrifies me, their teasing me in this fashion for a deep infatuation. It is a significant event for several reasons. One, I will have yet one more reason to start to think of women as being made of porcelain; the grandmother who refuses to go down into the basement and her Dresden Chinaware with the calligraphy being another reasons;  and forty years hence, I tell the story to my presumptive analyst during the first exploratory week, whether I and the analyst will be a good fit, my analyst, Dr. Enigma flinches… and I realize that the analyst is as sensitive as I, can be to pain, who flinches at the sight even of his own scars, and I agree to enter into the analytic compact.





-- 




 Acute Otis Media



Mention of middle ear infection, of acute otis media, invariably brings to mind my tonsillectomy and the following love and death event and the story 
The Tonsilectomy - or:
Liebestod at an Early Age.

that I have written about it and that this is the third time I am writing this story. The first time naively - that is, unselfconsciously - in one fine fell swoop, I did so in 1957, during my Junior year abroad. I sent it to my friend Frank Conroy, the editor of the Haverford-Bryn Mawr Review, the manuscript was stolen out of his car trunk in Nantucket. I then wrote the story once more, Senior year, back in the USSR, but it felt awkward to repeat what had come naturally, poured out of me the first time round, but as the successor editor of the Review, with the blonde lionesss, Paula Dunaway holding down the Bryn Mawr side – nontheless published the story in the only issue the two editors managed to produce that Year. Betsy Nelson, who is still Paula’s friend, did a cover with a pathetic plunging Icarus. Professor Satherswaite, the English department advisor and reviewer, pronounced the entire issue an Icarus that had plunged to death, a dud! This third and final time around the story is told with considerable knowledge of its importance in my life and its all around implications, you could say that I have subjected the story to an analysis and interprtation prior to writing it a third time, so I say who happens to appreciate a famous essay enitled Against Interpretation as he does few othrs.
On the immediate level, back in 1957 the story  provided yet one more reason to start to think of women as being made of porcelain; and, secondly, about forty years later, in the early 1980s, the story proves its essential function when  I tell the story to my presumptive analyst during the first exploratory week where he and I discover whether he the analyst and I the prospective patient will be a good fit. When I come to the the very end of the story Dr. Enigma flinches, and does so for a damn good reason, and I realize that he has the requsite sensitivities, so I realize who is am someone who nearly flinches at the sight even of his own scars, and I agree to enter into the analytic compact. I imagine I was testing him who proved the right choice indeed overall, I got quite lucky there now that I am at least halfway well-versed in the matter, and the only real mistake he committed was the usual: hubris, grandiosity: to think that he could claim not to know German and not be caught out during the extraordinary closeness that can develop between analyst and analysand, an analyzand translator at that! Now the story from painful beginning to painful end, a phenomenology condensed.
    

It is the umpteenth middle ear infection. I have just recovered from yet another and gone back to ice skating! But there it is: yet another Acute Otis Media as the good doctor called it, explaining that Acute Otis Media was the Latin medical designation for the phenomenon, as though an important sounding name would make me feel better and I  speculate whether my ear drum might start to resemble a sieve if the eardrum kept being punctured or my governess’s needle-pad nose, who was always darning. 
The situation is so dire as to require immediate action, and that means piercing, and for once without anesthetic.  
    Beloved Omi (Grandma) R. and hated governess Ms. No hover about and peer down at me – I think I dimly remember - I turn my entire body to my left side, as I have been asked to. Pulling on the right ear lobe the doctor first straightens the ear canal and  then inserts the ear speculum, the gleaming metal otoscope, into the external ear. He braces his hand, holding the otoscope against my head, placing the index finger against the  head and, in an alarmingly alarmed tone of voice, announces: “I will have to puncture it now or it will burst… Be a strong boy now. This will hurt but only for a second.” I thought of other pains I had learned to prepare myself for… as when you fall and prepare to have an abraded knee I knew the impact of a sharp stone tossed against my head – very painful the one time it had happened during a village rock fight. Cuts, bruises, sprains of all kinds as piercing pain nearly makes me break out in tears, but for tears to flow the pain is actually too brief.   The ear ache usually began as  incipient pain, you could nearly think and hope it away, until it became insistent, throbbing. At that point I start to run a fever. Pain and fever gradually sharpen. The pain had been quite fierce at this point, nearly so fierce as to make me cry when the physician had to pierce the eardrum without first adminiering any kind of aneasthetic. He has  offered a trade-off - sharp pain in exchange for relief. Anything for relief. I nodded, go ahead. The scream that issues from me as the doctor pierces the eardrum must have pierced his and the women’s eardrums it was that high-pitched and extreme and unexpected, elicited by a pain against which no anticipation seemed to have bee able to insure. NO: the pain was so extreme it left me speechless in disbelief that anything could hurt that much – and yet be so brief. It was the most intense physical pain I have experienced ever and represents the high end on the continuum of sharp pain.  The continuum of dull aches had for a marker a horse needle, as it was called, the size of the instrument that is used to lubricate an automobiles front end with thick grease,  that was introduced between parts of my banged up right soccer knee to withdraw the turbid liquid that had swelled the knee as though I was starting to suffer from elephantisis. That drawing of the water was a dull, deep, seemingly forever bone pain - bone deep pain became a concept - as that huge needle was introduced into a space between parts of the knee. The ear drum piercing pain lasted a millisecond, if a millisecond can be said to last, but was so sharp and intense it left me not just speechless but incapable of uttering the scream, stuck in my throat, I felt the pain deserved. It of course makes snese that the eardrum has such a concentration of nerves, the better to hear with sensitively.
The physician annonces that I needed a tonsillectomy, the tonsils in back of my throat are the hotbed for continuous infections. I agree, I want the hot-bed gone. I look in the mirror the physician holds up for me as he shines a flashlight into the back of my throat – very red throat and two small egg-shaped very red thingies with white dots on them. “The white dots are the infection” the good doctor says as he packs his trusty and familiar physician’s mailbox shaped satchel.
#
The lamp above the operating table or is it an operating chair? is atremble, it flickers, the room shakes, the entire space is shaking, tremoring as during an earthquake, as the physicians, scalpels in hand, who are administering the anesthetic in an above ground air-raid bunker, are hovering above me as Bremen is under attack... in May 1944, now, and they bide their time. Caught in a moment of... we should we not… as I drift off…  I evidently drifted off, the anesthetic also anesthetized the air raid attack since I came to, regained consciousness in a room with nurses in the light grey habits of a religious order, so it seems, black head dress. Yes, that pain, the highest and most extreme end of it but only for a millisecond, a millipede of a second... but no pain from the tonsil operation which was performed with anesthetic, dull pain in the throat now and for some days. Aspirin as painkiller? I don’t recall. Careful what you eat and fluids fluids fluids oatmeal while it heals. Future ear aches will bring back the possibility of further punctures without anesthetic. The trembling light, the flickering light and the shaking bunker as the operation is about to proceed, is the most immediate recollection. A shaky world. What if the supposedly impregnable bunker is hit and proves pregnable was, I imagine, the unarticulated fear that I gathered from the faces of the physicians during those moments as I was drifting off; or their concern for my well being.
#

Then, the weather not inclement, comes the most significant upshot from the tonsil operation. A nurse walks me – or am I in a wheelchair the first few days after the operation? - out onto the hospital terrace to recuperate. – To recuperate! I couldn’t wait! And I lie on a deck chair next to a woman who I near immediately decide must be “the most beautiful woman in the world” – more beautiful it appears than Viola, the mother of Constantine and Sven, of just a year prior, whose photo I can google some seventy-five years hence, confirming that initial memory and impression. Viola/ Jola, a film actress of the 20s and 30, on her photos, even now looks amazingly beautiful. It appears I must have forgotten about my mother! as I regard my neighbor, who I am told is twenty-eight years old, a dark-haired beauty, I had not seen such full breasts, albeit in outline, since... from the side the curve of the breast looks like the ramp you could use for a ski jump, its pert comma-like end would provide that extra fillip to get you airborne I thought as a nurse inveighs: “One does not look at breasts!” At this moment the young dark-haired woman, who is lying next to me on the veranda in a deck chair, is resting, recuperating aw well, it turns out that she has an ailing heart. We proceed to play solitaire for two which I know how to play since I play it nearly each day with one of my two grandmothers, the one who says that she has no further interest in being alive and refuses to go down into the cellar during air raids. The young woman tells me that she has for a husband - does she realize that I would marry her on the spot? is that why she is telling me that she has a husband? - a Messerschmidt pilot, the pilot of one of those objects in the sky that you only hear, like chalk being scraped across the chalkboard, screech across the slate grey dark or blue sky, but that, so far, you have not caught sight of: The nag, Lisa, and you and the foreman on the bench of the ladder-wagon rear up as one as the screech slashes scythe-like across the sky… but leaves no mark. “What was that?” (“Wat war denn dat?” Klinner speaking in Platt, the lowland dialect.) Perhaps it is the miracle weapon the radio talks about. At any event, yet another fright, for man and beast alike. Another terror in the sky. The beautiful woman, who is in her late twenties, has a heart ailment and you play solitaire for two with her as you did as you do with your grand-mother during air raid attacks during which she no longer wants to go down into the cellar and as you will continue to do with your grandmother once you are back home and she, who is longing for her daughter, your mother, and her husband, and who has been bombed out of her apartment, refuses to go into the cellar during the air raids. - Spring and summer 1944 wonderful air raid days, a profusion of cloudless skies and nights that allow the admirers of armadas in the sky a profusion of admirable formations, the occasional moth caught in the beams seeking to escape the puffs of smoke that want to pummel it, and the occasional downed bomber, and lots of shrapnel for the shrapnel fanciers and don’t stick your head out the window when the ack-ack is blasting away. The wife of the pilot is the most beautiful woman in the world, something of a refrain of mine for the rest of my life, since there are so many beautiful women in the world, so many of whom will die prematurely, of breast cancer, but I associate the sight and this refrain with the excruciating pain of the initial incision to relieve the pressure on an ear drum that is about to burst, and what a pain that explosion would have been!, but with an equally surprising pleasure a pleasure that I will feel periodically throughout my life and would like to feel at all times. However, the first time of all kinds of matters is always the most memorable, and some pleasures never become routine. For not only is the young woman the most beautiful woman in the world she also has the world’s most beautiful bosom! I cannot take my eyes off her breasts, even as we play solitaire, or especially then since she has to lean forward revealing their naked fullness. My eyes fasten, feast on them, with the result that I begin to feel, that I begin to notice my “little one,” my penis, become erect in my pajamas under the blanket – and that I look to discern whether the erection is visible, it felt so strong and powerful, so extraordinarily pleasurable. And very different from when I had touched myself. The beautifully-shaped full young breasts, that curve, that ski-slope-like curve, that lilt from breast bone to the tip of the breast, on which you could wanted to slither as on a toboggan, launch yourself to heaven is what they looked like, looking up at that face. Ski slopes made for reverying, and for interruption by the habited nurse: “One doesn’t look at breasts.” Curved, ski-slope-like young breast that elicit that powerful reaction. Young breasts like that have a kind of twist, a comma curve to them, these breasts are young and ask for something other than a child, virginally tempting. I love them but am puzzled. I will certainly be a most loyal knight if the lady would bestow her favors, which I realize are not just milk chocolate, relief from the sweetness in my groin. The dark-haired somewhat melancholy beauty and my erection provide something to look forward to each morning after breakfast and I have washed up… and I visit her in her room if it isn’t sunny, but like it best when we lie next to each other on the hospital veranda, I cannot recall a single other patient, but recall the nurses hovering about, in their habits and their head coverings. I spent perhaps two weeks in the hospital recuperating… occasionally Ms. No shows up even though I thought I had killed her when she had tried to spoon-feed me yet once again while I had been lying sick in bed… and seeks to interfere… and that is the first time I recall that I used the tactic of utterly ignoring someone who was not supposed to interfere. I return to the hospital for a checkup after a few weeks and ask to see my love with the dark hair and the beautiful breasts. The nurses tell me that she has died, that her heart gave out, and that she died because I excited her too much (And Dr. Enigma flinches once again & acquires yet another sensitive patient.)… and it is unlikely that the nurses have the slightest how, what was meant to be a sweet joke the kind that only the puritanical are capable of making, terrifies me, their teasing me in this fashion for a deep infatuation. It is a significant event for several reasons. One, I will have yet one more reason to start to think of women as being made of porcelain; the grandmother who refuses to go down into the basement and her Dresden Chinaware with the calligraphy being another reasons;  and forty years hence, I tell the story to my presumptive analyst during the first exploratory week, whether I and the analyst will be a good fit, my analyst, Dr. Enigma flinches… and I realize that the analyst is as sensitive as I, can be to pain, who flinches at the sight even of his own scars, and I agree to enter into the analytic compact.





--