CHAPTER THREE

THE HORROR

Physical problems were nothing new to me as you have seen. So in the headaches, numbness, staggering unstable walk and finally the inability to pronounce some words with clarity continued to come and go. I learned how to live around those problems, too. My mind had always been good: I’d never come up against anything I couldn’t learn, so the new job as a TV studio engineer didn’t bother me. I was able to settle in quickly in spite of the physical problems I was having.

However, my emotional state left a great deal to be desired. I continued to blame myself for my wife’s mental problems and berated myself for being talked back into a re-marriage that I still wasn’t able to come with. I felt trapped. I know I became very short-tempered at home, both with my wife and the boys, but I seemed totally unable to control my anger and frustration.

Yet away from home with the boys, as when we went to Boy Scout camp (I had become an assistant Scoutmaster), or on a fishing trip, or when we went digging clams at the beach, I could relax and have fun with my sons. Horse play and foolishness that would get them a swat on the buy at home because it might disturb their mother was just part of our being together when we were away.

I remember when Mike, my eleven-year-old son, got hungry and he and his buddy proceeded to cook and eat a very large trout I had caught. I was still out fishing and hadn’t even had a chance to get a picture of the fish to prove I had caught it. At home such a departure from routine could have upset the whole family and would have caused severe punishment. But our fishing, after the initial shock of finding nothing to take a picture of but a pile of bones, I could laugh about it with him. (I’m not sure I’ve ever really forgiven him though, because I’ve never been able to catch one nearly that big since.)

And at work I got along very well. When I found out that to get and keep a job at that TV station I had to join a broadcast union, I not only joined, I started going to all the meetings. I asked a lot of questions about where my money was going and stuff like that. When it came time to elect officers to serve in the local for the following year, nobody wanted the extra work it took to do the job. Then somebody said, “how about Pageler? He’s always making noises and asking questions.” I became president of the union local after only a few months on the job. Quite a responsibility for someone who had never even belonged to a union before.

All in all, I was doing pretty well and so was my wife, really. She was near her family for one of the few times in our married life. We saw them often and life was pretty good as long as I could sit on my temper and bite my tongue. She was still going to therapy and seemed to be holding her own.

We were living in a rented house, kind of in the country and I had a drive of almost 30 miles to the TV station every day. One morning, in the fall of 1967, while I was driving to work, my vision suddenly started to get cloudy. I had noticed that my eyes had been bothering me a little bit at work for a couple of days. I had been having some difficulty in getting the color balance right on the cameras. But it was nothing that worried me. Now, though, this was something different. I blinked my eyes and rubbed them a couple of times as I drove. But this time, my vision was getting much worse and fast.

I was in the middle lane of three lanes of traffic headed toward Portland at about 70 miles an hour and suddenly I couldn’t see well enough to drive. I turned on my blinker, held my hand down on the horn button and started easing to the right. Thank goodness the guy beside me had sense enough to give ground and let me slip over. I was slowing down as easily as I could so we didn’t all end up in a mess.

By the time I was down to 30 to 40 miles an hour, I couldn’t really see where I was going at all, it felt like my eyes were vibrating in their sockets. Still braking, still steering slightly to the right, I moved myself over and felt the wheels drop off the pavement. Then I really jammed on the brakes and I got stopped. The car was a couple of feet off the pavement I guess. Anyway, traffic was going by, no one had hit me and the angry honking had stopped.

I just sat there for a while. I was trying to figure out what had happened. My eyes stopped feeling like they were trying to do the jitterbug in my head. I could see blurry movement as the cars flashed past. Part of the time there were colors like a kaleidoscope. Part of the time it was all in black and white. But I couldn’t really see! Nothing was in focus. Nothing was recognizable. It was as if I were in the bottom of a soup bowl, looking up through some egg drop soup. Everything was misty and cloudy.

“My God, I’m blind!” No, I’m not blind. Don’t be silly. I just can’t see right now. Maybe I’m, asleep and the alarm will go off in a minute.” It was a strange feeling. Almost as if I were outside myself, watching the strange goings on. I held a long, protracted conversation in my mind, trying to cope with the uncertainty and the rising fear.

I don’t know how long I sat there, but long enough for the volume of cars going by me to have slowed down. I was afraid to get out of the car because I really didn’t know how far I was from the pavement. I could just imagine the headline in tomorrow morning’s Oregonian, “Jerk Parks Too Close to the Traffic Lane On I-5 During Rush Hour; Then Steps Out Into The Path Of A Car.” Finally, I fished what I hoped was a clean handkerchief out of my pocket and started waving it out the window.

In a few minutes, a highway patrol officer walked up beside me, identified himself and asked what the trouble was. I explained my sudden vision problem to him and told him that I wanted to get to my father’s old office for an eye exam. (My father had been an optometrist in Portland before his death in 1966.) The officer, who immediately recognized my father’s name, helped me into his care, locked the doors on mine and took me into town.

Dr. Melvin Kelly had been my father’s partner and had kept the office open after my father’s death. He took only a quick look at my eyes and then got on the phone to an ophthalmologist who was an old friend of the family. After five minutes in the back of a cab between the offices, I was going through another exam. Flashing lights, drops of some kind in my eyes, more lights and a lot of questions. He finally told me it had to be one of three things: This particular kind of vision problem could be caused from (1) a brain tumor, (2) a massive vitamin deficiency or (3) Multiple Sclerosis.

Strange how my mind works. I could only think of a TV gag line from that era done by a comic using a very bad Chinese accent; “You can have two from Column A, but only one from Column B.” I told him if I really had a chance I would like Number 2 and please, make it to go.

He said he wouldn’t make the diagnosis but would send me to the university for a determination. (Although the University of Oregon is located in Eugene, the medical school is in Portland). He called and made an emergency appointment with a Doctor Swank.

While I was at Dr. Kelly’s office I had called the TV station and someone from there had picked up my car keys and gone after my car. They brought it into town and one of the off duty engineers fro the station was standing by to drive me around. By four o’clock in the afternoon I had the word. When one of my union Guys finally got me home, I was numb.

The doctor had done a full work-up on me from sticking pins in me and hitting all my joints with a hammer, to running an encephalogram and X-rays and I don’t know what-all. Getting wheeled around from place to place, I kept hearing that this Dr. Swank was supposed to be some kind of specialist in M.S.

Dr. Roy Swank, MS, PhD, head of the Department of Neurology, University of Oregon Medical School. A kind of grayish looking man, with stooped shoulders and spectacles who somehow looks like a professor should look. A man much respected in the medical world for his invention of the Swank blood filter, but a man also ridiculed by he medical profession for his belief that diet can control Multiple Sclerosis.

Well the specialist had spoken and the word was that I had Multiple Sclerosis, an incurable disease. He tried to explain some things to me about the disease and how he thought it could be controlled, but I really couldn’t hear anything except the ringing in my head like a bell tolling my death. “MS, MS: You have MS – MS, MS: You have MS.”

He sent me home and told me to stay quiet for a few days, in bed if I could stand it. And in a darkened room, just like they did with me while I was stationed in Germany and I got the measles. I lay there for a week, day after day, with the radio mostly on soft soothing music. By the time I had to go back and see the doctor a week later, I was able to distinguish large objects, but there were big holes in my field of vision where it was a total blank. I even had trouble recognizing a person I knew who was standing right in front of me unless they spoke. More tests, same conclusion: I did have MS.

Dr. Swank told me about the diet he wanted me to go on. I really didn’t want to hear about any diet, but I finally told him I would follow it just to get out of there. Then the next day, I had my wife drive me to the Portland office of the Veterans Administration.

The doctors there were real doctors, with magic pill, not professors with diets! They would take care of this little problem right away, like real doctors always did! More examinations, same conclusion. I was recalled to the VA again and again, always with the same conclusion: Multiple Sclerosis.

The VA doctors increased my disability and said I should come back to have it raised further whenever I felt it necessary as they were sure my disease would get worse as time went by. But they offered me no magic pills, not even any hope.

As you read in the preface, they finally sent me to see a psychiatrist when I insisted that there must be some type of treatment for my problem.

Modern medicine had failed me. With all their scientific advancements, the only type of treatment they could offer me was head doctor to try and make me understand that nothing could be done for people like me. I must just learn to accept my fate.