house, set the bag and the paper on the small foyer table and then stepped outside again and locked up. He turned around on the landing and looked at the sky. It was turning overcast and gray. Across the river, black clouds scudded swiftly toward the west and a stinging wind sprang up, shaking branches of the elders lining the streets. They were bare at this season. Amfortas slowly buttoned up the neck of his sweater and, with no other baggage but his pain and his loneliness, began walking toward a far horizon. He was ninety–three million miles from the sun.
Georgetown General Hospital was massive and fairly new. Its modern exterior sprawled between O Street and Reservoir Road and fronted on the western side of Thirty - seventh. Amfortas could walk there from his home in two minutes, and that morning he arrived at the fourth floor neurology wing at precisely half past seven. The resident was waiting for him at the charge desk, and together they began to make the rounds, moving from room to room among the patients, with the resident presenting each new case, while Amfortas asked questions of the patient. They discussed the diagnoses while moving through the hall.
402 was a thirty - six - year–old salesman manifesting symptoms of cerebral lesion; in particular, “unilateral neglect.” He would carefully dress one half of his body, the side ipselateral to the lesion, while completely ignoring the other side. He would shave only one side of his face.
407 was an economist, male, fifty - four. His problems had begun six months before when he’d undergone a brain operation for epilepsy. The surgeon, given no other choice, had removed certain portions of the temporal lobes.
A month before arriving at Georgetown General, the patient had walked into a Senate committee meeting and for nine straight, grueling hours devised a new plan for revising the tax code based upon the problems the committee had set him only that morning. His judgment and marshaling of facts was astonishing, no less than his acquaintance with the present code, and it took six hours just to organize the details of the plan and set them down in an orderly manner. At the end of the meeting the economist summarized the plan in half an hour without ever referring to the newly made notes. Afterward he went to an office and sat at his desk. He answered three letters; then he turned to his secretary and said, “I’ve got a feeling that I should have attended a Senate meeting today.” From minute to minute, he could not form memories that were new.
411 was a girl, aged twenty, with a probable case of Cocci meningitis. The resident was new and didn’t notice the flinch when Amfortas was given the name of the disease.
In 420 was a fifty - one - year - old carpenter complaining of a “phantom limb.” He’d lost an arm the year before and was continuing to suffer excruciating pain in a hand he did not have.
The disorder had evolved in the usual manner, with the carpenter at first having “tingling feelings’’ and a sense of a definite shape to the hand. It seemed to move through space like an ordinary limb when he walked or sat down or stretched out on a bed. He would even reach for objects with it unthinkingly. And then came the terrible pain as the hand clenched up and refused to relax.
He submitted to a reconstruction operation as well as the removal of small neuromas, nodules of regenerated tissues of nerve. And at first there was relief. The sense of having the hand remained, but now he felt that he could flex it and move his fingers.
Then the pain came back with the phantom hand in a very tight posture with the fingers pressed closely over the thumb and the wrist sharply flexed. No effort of will could move any part of it. At times the sense of tenseness in the hand was unbearable; at others, the carpenter had explained, it felt as though a scalpel were being repeatedly driven deep into the site of the original wound. There were complaints of a
Georgetown General Hospital was massive and fairly new. Its modern exterior sprawled between O Street and Reservoir Road and fronted on the western side of Thirty - seventh. Amfortas could walk there from his home in two minutes, and that morning he arrived at the fourth floor neurology wing at precisely half past seven. The resident was waiting for him at the charge desk, and together they began to make the rounds, moving from room to room among the patients, with the resident presenting each new case, while Amfortas asked questions of the patient. They discussed the diagnoses while moving through the hall.
402 was a thirty - six - year–old salesman manifesting symptoms of cerebral lesion; in particular, “unilateral neglect.” He would carefully dress one half of his body, the side ipselateral to the lesion, while completely ignoring the other side. He would shave only one side of his face.
407 was an economist, male, fifty - four. His problems had begun six months before when he’d undergone a brain operation for epilepsy. The surgeon, given no other choice, had removed certain portions of the temporal lobes.
A month before arriving at Georgetown General, the patient had walked into a Senate committee meeting and for nine straight, grueling hours devised a new plan for revising the tax code based upon the problems the committee had set him only that morning. His judgment and marshaling of facts was astonishing, no less than his acquaintance with the present code, and it took six hours just to organize the details of the plan and set them down in an orderly manner. At the end of the meeting the economist summarized the plan in half an hour without ever referring to the newly made notes. Afterward he went to an office and sat at his desk. He answered three letters; then he turned to his secretary and said, “I’ve got a feeling that I should have attended a Senate meeting today.” From minute to minute, he could not form memories that were new.
411 was a girl, aged twenty, with a probable case of Cocci meningitis. The resident was new and didn’t notice the flinch when Amfortas was given the name of the disease.
In 420 was a fifty - one - year - old carpenter complaining of a “phantom limb.” He’d lost an arm the year before and was continuing to suffer excruciating pain in a hand he did not have.
The disorder had evolved in the usual manner, with the carpenter at first having “tingling feelings’’ and a sense of a definite shape to the hand. It seemed to move through space like an ordinary limb when he walked or sat down or stretched out on a bed. He would even reach for objects with it unthinkingly. And then came the terrible pain as the hand clenched up and refused to relax.
He submitted to a reconstruction operation as well as the removal of small neuromas, nodules of regenerated tissues of nerve. And at first there was relief. The sense of having the hand remained, but now he felt that he could flex it and move his fingers.
Then the pain came back with the phantom hand in a very tight posture with the fingers pressed closely over the thumb and the wrist sharply flexed. No effort of will could move any part of it. At times the sense of tenseness in the hand was unbearable; at others, the carpenter had explained, it felt as though a scalpel were being repeatedly driven deep into the site of the original wound. There were complaints of a
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