Lamar University Press (Beaumont, Tex.), Vol. 28, No. 37, Ed. 1 Wednesday, February 22, 1978 Page: 3 of 8
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UNIVERSITY PRESS February 22, 1978*3
n fair ,
Comment
Inte gration/Cuckoo/Experiment
One year in a cuckoo’s nest
By HELEN SOHLINGER
of the U.P. staff
Let’s have one thing understood from the
start-I never wanted to write this. I only
did it because of the ghosts. They came
'late Saturday night, and by Sunday
1 evening they still showed no signs of
’’leaving.
“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” had
hurt me Saturday night, but I expected
that. What I didn’t expect was a midnight
visit from voices and faces out of my own
u long-ago excursion into a “cuckoo’s nest.”
Nobody warned me about the ghosts,
back when it all began. I was a young wife,
trying hard to build a nest egg, and I knew
I would earn a good salary as the new
secretary to a team of psychiatrists.
My first day on the job began pleasantly
enough. I met the office staff and the doc-
tors, likeable persons one and all. With a
medical dictionary close at hand, I settled
down to a morning of routine typing.
At 10 o’clock, the nurse came to my desk.
“Come with me,” she said. “We need some
help with the treatments,” I turned off the
Dictaphone and followed her down the hall
to a tiny room containing a bed, a table and
a straight-backed chair.
In the bed lay a very old woman. In the
chair, a doctor--I’ll call him Dr. Smith-sat
taping some sort of electrodes to the old
woman’s temples. The electrodes were
wired to a small black box on the table.
The nurse tucked a pillow under the old
woman’s knees. “Now you just relax, Mrs.
Jones,” she said. To me the nurse said,
“Hold her legs down real tight.” She laid
herself across the old woman’s mid-
section. Dr. Smith threw a switch on the
black box, then grabbed the old woman’s
shoulders to help hold her down.
Her body began to jerk and her head
snapped back hard, exposing a jagged red
scar across her throat, from one ear
almost to the other. Dr. Smith twisted
around in his chair and grinned at me.
“See what happens when these nutty old
ladies get hold of a rusty razor blade?”
When the convulsion stopped, he listened
to the old woman’s heart through a
stethoscope and, apparently satisfied,
removed the electrodes and unplugged the
black box. The nurse was waiting at the
door. “Just four more to go, doctor,” she
said as we went to the next treatment
room.
She was wrong. There were hundreds
more, thousands it seemed, during the
year I worked there. Why did I do it? If I
had to rationalize, I guess I would have
said that a shock treatment was much like,
say, an enema—unpleasant for both nurse
and patient, but sometimes necessary for
recovery.
That rationalization didn’t occur to me
until several years later, however, when I
read a magazine article questioning the
benefits of electroshock therapy, and sud-
denly envisioned myself as a kind of head
matron at Auschwitz, torturing helpless
prisoners “for their own good.”
The simple truth is, not one of us doubted
at the time that we were helping the
patients. They seemed to feel no pain
during the treatments, and when the series
was over, they seemed more lucid and nor-
mal then they had been before. And if their
eyes had a certain dead quality, that was
just temporary after-effect.
All in all, the patients should have been
fairly easy, to forget, and I had forgotten
them, until Saturday night after “Cuckoo’s
Nest,” when the ghosts came.
I saw, very clearly, the sweet little
housewife who had recently started
prowling her home every night, armed
with a hatchet against the murderers she
imagined were stalking her sleeping
family. When she regained consciousness
after her shock treatments, her first words
were invariably the names of her three
children.
I saw the black woman I found cowering
in a corner of the room after her shock
treatment. Raising one skinny arm toward
my face, she began to scream at me~
harsh, incoherent sounds, like some an-
cient voodoo curse. I backed against a wall
and stood there, trembling, until help
came.
I saw, even more vividly, one of my
favorite patients, a big man with fierce
eyes and a thick mane of white hair, like
an aging lion. One day I came into his
room just as he was rolling slowly off the
bed.
I caught him, but he was too heavy for
me to lift, so I just knelt there for a
moment, holding him in my arms. His eyes
were open, but dull and unseeing. There
was nothing extraordinary about the in-
cident, except for the sudden terrible ache
in my chest that I knew had not come from
my physical exertion.
That ache never quite went away,
though my fellow workers assured me it
would. “It will all get easier,” they said.
“You just have to learn to put it all out of
your mind when you walk out of here at
five o’clock.”
I never learned.
There is no hidden meaning in that
statement, no intimation that I was
somehow more decent or more sensitive
than the others, just because I continued to
feel. There are no heroes in this story, no
villians. Not even the callous Dr. Smith.
One day I was working the reception
desk when he was suddenly before me,
redfaced with rage and shouting that some
woman was having an allergic reaction to
her medication, and why the hell hadn’t I
put the call through to him right away?
“You could have killed her,” he yelled at
me, then turned and walked away.
As soon as I could, I followed him to the
lounge, where I found him hunched over a
cup of coffee and a cigarette.“I asked if it
was an emergency,” I told him, “but she
said no, it was nothing urgent, and to have
you call if you got a chance.”
He threw his head back and laughed.
“My god, my god,” he said. “Why do I
worry about these people?” He made some
cruel joke about the woman-I have forgot-
ten what it was—and finished his coffee,
chuckling to himself.
Some patients (like the woman on the
telephone) the office staff never met, or
never remembered meeting. Others we
came to know very well.
There was the witty and attractive
widow who spent a lot of time chatting with
us over coffee. One day she brought us a
poundcake she had made herself with lots
of real butter. And one day she took a gun
and killed herself.
I didn’t sleep much that night. But then,
I wasn’t sleeping much anyway, and when
I did sleep, the dreams were usually bad.
If I saw a spider during the day, I would
dream that night that I was caught in a
monstrous web, with thousands of spiders
crawling toward me.
The dreams didn’t come only during my
week to help with shock treatments now,
as they had in the beginning. They came
almost every night.
One day a woman patient went berserk.
She bounced our electric typewriters off
the wall, then ran to the soft drink machine
and grabbed a couple of bottles for
weapons. When the doctors tried to
restrain her, she crushed the bottles in her
hands.
After that day, I still dreaded the shock
treatments as much as ever. But where I
had once felt compassion, I now felt only
fear. I saw that if the patients ever got out
of control, they could hurt me.
That never happened. Soon after, I
became pregnant. In just a few more mon-
ths, my year in the cuckoo’s nest was over.
And, I thought, forgotten. Until Saturday
night.
When I saw “One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest,” I hurt for the patients just
as I was supposed to, but I also felt an
unexpected sympathy-empathy, almost-
for Nurse Ratched.
I couldn’t understand the traumas that
had twisted the “loonies,” but I understood
the traumas that twisted Nurse Ratched-
too many years in a world where the ab-
normal has become the norm, and where
control is more important than com-
passion.
This doesn’t mean that all psychiatric
workers are sadistic or callous. Most learn
to care for their patients without becoming
emotionally involved. By keeping their
distance, they keep their sanity.
Others, like myself and, perhaps, Dr.
Smith, lack this ability. The defense
mechanism that shields the others doesn’t
shield us. We’re the dangerous ones.
Of all the ghosts, there was one above all
that I was afraid to face Saturday night-
the ghost of a caring young woman who,
had she stayed a little too long in the
cuckoo’s nest, might have easily become a
Nurse Ratched. Or a “looney.” Or both.
Readers’ Forum
Integration depends
on people involved
To the Editor:
To begin with, integration is not
the end of the world or the break-
down of the whole economic, social,
and educational structure of this
country. The success or failure of in-
tegration depends on the people in-
volved. The community is what
makes it work. In Joe Maxwell’s let-
ter in the Feb. 15th issue of the
University Press, integration and
the government’s policy surroun-
ding it was blamed for problems at
French High School.
As for the “great melting pot” in
the Beaumont Independent School
District, I agree that it has not been
the easiest transition to adjust to.
There were many major changes
with the closing of Charlton Pollard,
to the establishment of co-principals
in some of the schools. But when is
any transition serene and tranquil?
Maxwell was appalled about the
police on French’s campus. Neither
did Charlton have any police on its
campus when it was open. The
policemen are at French now to cur-
tail any altercations, aid in any drug
arrests, and also to prevent
trespassers. I think this new policy
is a good one for it relieves some of
the burden on the teachers and ad-
ministrators and enables them to do
their jobs.
Maxwell mentioned French is now
a school of survival and not one of
education. Yes, there have been
some fights at French, but it is ironic
how the Blacks and the integration
plan get blamed for all the conflicts.
Next, Maxwell wrote about
education “experiencing a tremen-
dous setback” because of in-
tegration and tried to state a few
statistics but failed to cite sources. I
can not see how one desegregation
plan could ruin an entire school
district’s educational rating; same
teachers, same students, just a dif-
ferent learning environment. I think
Maxwell tried to imply that Blacks
need an inferior education com-
pared to^their white counterparts,
which was'-right to the extent that
Blacks who attended all Black
schools did not have comparable
educational facilities. (If you have
any doubts go to a minority school
and see for yourself.)
Ah! This is the whole point of in-
tegration—EQUAL EDUCATIONAL
OPPORTUNITIES for all and the
elimination of stereotypes and
bigotry among students. Integration
is a process where Blacks and
Whites learn, eat, and compete
together. This is why the govern- *
ment stepped in to unbalance the
segregated situation in BISD. One
may argue that French and
Beaumont High had some Blacks;
this is true, but the bulk of the
district’s student population was
segregated.
Maxwell cried, ‘‘Freedom of
Choice.” Well I say, join the club,
brother. We have been seeking
freedom for the past three and a half
centuries. Blacks at CP did not want
their school closed, but certainly the
Whites were not going to be bused to
Charlton. So who had their way?
Who always has their way?
The Bulldogs lost their school and
the Buffs had a few more Black
students attending their school. In-
tegration is the law and sometimes
people do not obey the law and have
to be made to (Blacks and Whites
alike). In years to come, integration
will be just as American as apple pie
and Watergate. Integration, Love It
or Leave America.
Another thing, Maxwell does not
have to worry about the government
making him attend McNeese, USL,
or any other university because he
pays tuition to come to Lamar.
(Somebody tell him, please.) For-
tunately or unfortunately, the public
school system does not work in this
way.
Lastly, Maxwell implies the BISD
integration plan is not working
adequately enough for everyone.
For this I have two comments; 1) I
do not think two and a half years is
enough time to judge this point, 2)
what solution would have been more
pragmatic? I know—no integration
plan at all, right?? I think
it is people of this limited frame of
reference that hinder progress.
Sincerely,
Terry Ann Wilson
Nationality handed over in blue and black
The guinea pig tries to ‘split’ Big H
Editor’s note—This is the second In-
stallment of an article describing the
reporter’s recent employment as a
medical-test volunteer. Due to contractual
agreements signed by the reporter, names
of people and drugs have been changed.
By JESS DOIRON
of the U.P. staff
The first $150 check I received for being
a guinea pig was still sitting on my kitchen
table (where nearly every other important
document in my possession rests) when I
got Frannie’s late Friday night phone call.
“Wanna go to Mexico City, John?”
Her voice was a mixture of haggard hum
and cheery ho.
“You’re kidding!” I exclaimed with
profundity.
“No,” she said slowly, and began to
relate a short history of hectic last minute
foul-ups that she had encountered at the
clinic.
As Project Nurse, Frannie was to us
professional volunteers something like
commander-in-chief, best friend, boss,
teacher, bridge partner, mommy and dad-
dy all rolled into one.
The short history she related wasn’t
exactly a new story. I had heard the gist of
it once before in the form of a contingency
scenario posed by Frannie the previous
week.
The gist of fact and fiction was that the
Sentinel Study needed new meat, and (as I
was down on the list as an alternate test-
subject) that meat meant me.
The Sentinel Study, an ambitious resear-
ch project, was proposed by one of the
largest pharmaceutical manufacturers in
the United States in an effort to get the
jump on its competitors.
The project sponsors planned a limited
comparison test of two drugs, their own
popularly prescribed Onodrin and a new
medication as yet unapproved by the FDA,
Anifren.
Both drugs are designed for use in the
treatment of arthritis to decrease joint in-
flamation, but Anifren is at present legally
prescribed only in Great Britain and
Mexico.
Therefore, the makers of Onodrin were
understandably anxious when Anifren
began its application to the FDA for
American approval and, in order to head
off any incursion of its home territory, em-
barked upon the Sentinel Study.
University Press
Editor:
Roger Cowles
Managing Editor:
Tara Shockley
Sports Editor:
Manuel Moreno Jr.
Circulation Manager:
Mohammad Talaee
Fine Arts Editor:
Laurie Haynes
Staff Writers:
Jess Doiron
Tim Krause
Karen McLane
Tim Meece
Sue Reeves
Helen Sohlinger
Photographer:
Steve Wilson
Typesetters:
Lillie Jones
Gloria Post
Lori Rull
Katherine Streetman
The University Press is the official
student newspaper of Lamar Univer-
sity and the editorial printed under the
heading of “Fair Comment” is the
opinion of the student management of
the newspaper. Opinions printed in the
University Press are not necessarily
Director of Student Publications:
Howard Perkins
those of the university administration.
The paper is published semi-weekly on
Wednesdays and Fridays. Articles to be
published must be submitted by Friday
to be included in the following Wed-
nesday’s issue; deadline for the Friday
issue is the previous Wednesday. Ar-
ticles may be delivered to the Univer-
sity Press office, 200 Setzer Student
Center, or mailed to the University
Graphics Manager:
David Campbell
Advertising Manager:
Don Young
Assistant Advertising Manager:
Brenda Young
Advertising Salesman:
Larry Ferguson
Beaumont, Tex., 77710. Articles should
contain the name and phone number of
the person submitting them so that any
questions that arise may be answered.
Display and classified advertising rates
may be obtained by calling the Univer-
sity Press office at 838-7628 or 838-7629.
Business Manager:
Cheryl Ware
‘...the Sentinel Study
needed new meat,
and... that meat
was me.
Eighteen people were to be selected and
sent to Mexico City along with a project
nurse and physician to monitor side-
effects of the two drugs.
Each test subject would undergo an
initial gastroscopy in Houston to deter-
mine the condition of his stomach mucosa
lining. This was necessary because both
drugs involved in the study were known to
have some irritation of the stomach lining
attributed to them.
After four days of drug regimen (six test
subjects would be taking Onodrin, six
would take Anifren and six would receive
placebo), the eighteen volunteers would be
given blood tests in Mexico City.
When the entire week had passed, the
guinea pigs would be flown back to
Houston and another gastroscopy, along
with a biopsy, would be performed to
determine the final condition of their
stomachs.
Frannie’s frantic phone call made me
“Numero Diez y Ocho.”
I spent the next week rearranging my
schedule and packing; the latter proved to
be the more difficult. While no actual limit
had been imposed upon the volunteers, the
Sentinel project sponsors had let it be
known that luggage was to be kept at a
minimum.
I left my largest suitcase open for the
week, and as I thought of various articles I
threw them into it. By week’s end I’d
managed to pile everything I owned into
one suitcase.
1 My sister, Maggie, and her husband,
Terry, were both going to be guinea pigs,
too. Part of the original volunteer group,
they had been well prepared for a con-
siderable time and had even attended a
special meeting with the project sponsors
to iron out any questions they might have
had concerning the study.
Maggie planned on leaving her daughter
with my parents here in Beaumont for the
duration of the project. She brought my
niece down to Beaumont from Big D, and I
’caught a ride with her to Houston; Terry
was already in the Space City on business.
During the drive over, Maggie filled me
in on the orientation meeting that I had
missed.
Since Maggie is a registered nurse, a
veteran gastroscopite, and a born ex-
plainer, she used the travel time to
elucidate some of the finer points of the
procedure that we would have the cour-
thouse issue me another card.
According to Maggie, a gastroscopy, and
bear in mind this is something of an over-
simplification, is a visual reconaissance of
the stomach’s mucosa lining accomplished
by means of an optical fiber tube (about
the size of your little finger) that is in-
serted into the stomach by way of the
esophagus.
The procedure itself is quite safe when
properly conducted and is usually ad-,
ministered under anesthesia. Of course, as
in all surgical or semisurgical procedures
conducted under anesthesia, there are
some risks.
Gastroscopy can result in perforation of
the esophagus or damage to the stopiach,
; and there is always a risk involving reac-
tion to drugs used in anasthesia.
You know, it sounded even worse on an
empty stomach. Neither Maggie nor I had
had a thing to eat since midnight as
preparation for the gastroscopies.
When we finally arrived at the clinic, we
were both walking with a slight stoop and
wearing the grimace characteristic of
those suffering from uremic poisoning.
“Where’s the bathroom?” I asked the
first person I saw.
“Down the hall to the left,” was the
inevitable reply.
After relieving myself, I wandered about
the clinic until I found my sister sitting in
the laboratory with a smirk on her face
and a urine specimen in her hand.
“Say, Maggie, I didn’t know we were
supposed to save anything.”
“Neither did I, but y’know, I had so
much if they really needed it, I think I
could probably go back for more.”
My sister is six feet tall, capable of
protecting herself and renowned for her
capacity...and, no doubt, probably could
have gone back to more, but I couldn’t!
“Mr. Doiron,” the lab technician smiled
as she handed me a cup, “could we have a
specimen?”
“Well...Y’see, we just got in from
Beaumont...they didn’t say that we’d have
to give...we just rushed right in
and...well...I..I’m sorry.”
“But we have to have a specimen!”
“But I’m empty!”
The lab technicaian turned to some
august personage behind a row of jaun-
diced vials, “He peed already and can’t
give me a specimen. What should he do?”
There was a pause behind the yellow
screen—then wisdom: “Drink some
water.”
The lab technicain turned to me and
reiterated the Solomonic advice to which I
had little to add except: “Bottoms up.”
I located the water fountain and gulped
at the arching water. Maggie, once she had
finished in the lab, found me waiting in the
hall.
As is her wont (because of her nursing
experience and natural proclivity) she
began to go over an extensive check-list of
necessary items she felt I needed to see
about before departing for Mexico. My
heart sank into my empty bladder when
she said, “You did bring proof of citizen-
ship for your tourist card?”
Both my birth certificate and my voter’s
registration card were still in Beaumont
on my kitchen table with all those other
important documents. I began to think my
horoscope for that day was coming
true—“You will be forced to delay a trip
you are planning, but your change in plans
will work out for the better.”
I was sitting in the clinic trying
desperately to urinate and thinking how
the hell could I possibly get to Beaumont
and back again before the five o’clock
gastroscopies were scheduled to begin
when a flush of genius came over me.
All I needed was either a birth cer-
tificate or a voter’s-registration card. I
didn’t have to drive back to Beaumont af-
after all; I could simply re-register to vote
in Harris county and have the courthouse
issue me another card.
I phoned the courthouse and had my
hypothesis confirmed. It was possible.
That day I decided to move to Houston—at
least, for a short while.
Now that one problem was theoretically
solved, I got a grip on myself and strode off
to finish the more immediate business at
hand. Momentarily, I presented my con-
tribution to the yellow horde that had by
now swamped the laboratory.
I had a little over two hours to establish
my citizenship at Harris County cour-
thouse. Because my brother-in-law, Terry,
was reared in and about Houston, and
because my sister thinks I’m basically an
incompetent fool when it comes to such
matters, it was decided that it would be ad-
viseable for Terry to accompany me on the
trip downtown.
After driving around for sometime,
reassuring one another that our directions
were most likely accurate, we decided to
confirm our calculations with a
knowledgeable-looking pedestrian.
“Excuse me, sir, could you tell me which
way Caroline Street rims?”
“Yes I can. Sure can, yes. Le’seenow,
yes. I think...no. Now this is...no. Y’know,
it’s ’round here somewhere, I mean,
You’re clostoit.”
My horoscope loomed everpresent.
After a few more wasted moments, we
struck out on an intuitive turn and found
our destination dead ahead. To save time,
Terry made the block while I attempted to
wade through the official sea of citizen-
ship.
I sat down at the first desk I saw and
began my memorized story,delivering a
flawless performance in spite of my ner-
vousness. The yeung lady assured me of
the simplicity of the procedure and im-
mediately disappeared in a cloud of
bureaucratic forms, leaving behind only
an official grin.
I whiled away the time by humming in
my most honest hum-voice until my
brother-in-law, curious as to what was
keeping me, disturbed my new found
tranquility.
He stole quietly up to the desk where I
was sitting (as quietly as any 6 foot, 5 inch
blond-bearded Texas boy could have
stolen) and bellowed (as such boys are
prone to do after stealing for any length of
time).
“Say, boy, what’s keeping ya? Are they
buying it?”
I furtively glanced toward the official
grin suspended in the air.
“Yeh, I think so,” I replied.
“Can they do it today, though. Now, I
mean.”
The disembodied grin nodded and
replied, “Yes sir, can I help you?”
Terry smiled a furry new smile and said,
“No, no I’m just waiting for him.”
“Just waiting for him to what?”
“Do what?”
“To what.”
My horoscope loomed a longer loom
before me.
After some significant signatures, proof
of my nationality was handed over to me in
blue and black.
It was almost 4 o’clock when we entered
the American mainstream on Main Street.
The nation was celebrating 5 p.m. early. It
made me proud to be a citizen to witness
such a parade.
After what seemed to be another 200
years of U.S. history, Terry and I had
made it across town, picked up my sister
and got to the clinic surprisingly on
schedule.
Next week: At the clinic
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Cowles, Roger. Lamar University Press (Beaumont, Tex.), Vol. 28, No. 37, Ed. 1 Wednesday, February 22, 1978, newspaper, February 22, 1978; Beaumont, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth499892/m1/3/?q=Lamar+University: accessed June 8, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Lamar University.