The treatment was highly successful, we thought, and I was moved to a convalescent ward. After two days, I swelled up like a “poisoned pup”. The pain must have been similar to that of a woman suffering the agonies of a difficult childbirth.

Another diagnosis by Dr. Blondell. This time, sulfa crystals were completely blocking my kidneys. How soon we learn esoteric medical terms. The relief I had to have would come from a cystoscope. The technique was to gently insert a tube into my urinary tract and work it up to the kidney blockage. Then a metallic inner core would be used, like a tiny cookie cutter, to crush the offending sulfa crystals.

When the moment arrived, Major Blondell was accompanied by three other individuals of varying military rank. Immediately to his left was a Captain, to his left a 1st Lieutenant, and completing the line a Master Sgt. When the cystoscope was worked to the proper depth and the cutting tool did its work, the relief was immediate and blessed.

The backed up urine, under pressure, became a stream with a four foot spray range. Major Blondell being the operator of all this equipment received a face spray, the Captain's chest a damp line, the 1st Lieutenant had a strip across his stomach, the Master Sgt. who was on the weakening end of the stream, only received a token wet momento.

At that time, in the military, a Cadet was about the lowest rank possible to hold. But I got a lot of mileage out of describing, to anyone who would listen, how I was the only cadet who ever actually PISSED on three officers and a Sgt. without being blindfolded and shot at dawn.

A few more days in the convalescent ward and I returned to the Classification Center across the hill, but only on a limited duty basis. Every morning at nine, it was mandatory for me to attend sick call which was held in front of the squadron pharmacy. One warm Texas morning the line was fairly long, and by the time I had reached the middle of it, the skies began to darken, my head whirled and I passed out from excruciating abdominal pain.

The hospital center was the hub of all its activities. Every admission, procedure and discharge had to pass through the front desk. Because mine was an emergency situation, the ward doctor had judged my problem and instigated the surgery process. The paper work arrived for filing at exactly the moment when Major Blondell happened to be standing where he could glance at the name on the admission sheet.

The Major grabbed the forms and scanned to the entry about immediate surgery for appendicitis, he screamed, “Stop that procedure in Ward eleven O.R.! If that man is cut, he will explode like a watermelon dropped off the top of the house! He doesn't have an appendix problem, he has blocked kidneys!”

After Major Blondell saved me from exploding like a water balloon dropped from the seventh floor, he performed another Cystoscopy on me. This caused almost instant relief (needless to say the operator of the gadget was completely organized to avoid another hosing). The process of slowly moving that metal tube up the urethra does open several small blood vessels which gives the first few urinations a highly colored tone.

I was assigned to a genitourinary ward for three days to make sure another crystallization didn't occur. Those 72 hours were crammed with a series of humorous, and yes, tragic incidents that will forever stick with me.

When I walked down the space between the two rows of beds inside this little wing of the hospital, I noticed all the occupants were prone. After finding the assigned spot and settling in, it didn't take long to make the acquaintance of at least ten patients in my vicinity. One of the problems came from an undescended testicle that had been mechanically pulled down from the groin, inserted in a slash made inside the guy's thigh, with his scrotum opened and sewed to the flesh of the thigh over the ?planted? testicle. The process resulted in the rather chubby cadet being in a constant state of pain and discomfort, and when the jokes started among us, “Chubs” would cry for us to stop because when he laughed the pain was almost unbearable.

There were two or three kidney stone operation patients, and next to me was “Georgia” who had been circumcised. An infection had set in and the poor guy had to have a tent built over his midsection as even the weight of the sheet was more than he could stand.

The getting acquainted session had gone on for about an hour when the urge to relieve the bladder came to me. Under the bed was a glass urinal which was called “the duck”. I used it and the contents were a clear bright red liquid. Which I held up high and said, “Anybody for a drink of wine?” After the third or fourth offer for a sip from my duck, a sweet soft voice, finely mellowed with a touch of the Yellow Rose of Texas, sounded behind me saying, “I think you should put that down and out of sight, don't you?” There was the prettiest, sexiest neat female I'd seen since leaving home weeks before. She was a civilian nurse who worked at the SAACC Hospital. We quickly became good friends, and because I was the only ambulatory guy in the ward, we soon started to dance in the aisle between the beds. The radio played all the Big Band Tunes of the day which we both could adapt to any style from jitterbug to what was called, “uptown shopping for downtown goods”, a very sexually suggestive blending of bodies. The latter of course was what we displayed mostly to those poor guys who couldn't even sit comfortably on a damn bed pan.

As new patients were brought in from the OR's we could hear the instructions given to those who were barely out of the fog of surgery. For those who had kidney stones removed the word was, “No matter how much it hurts, when you get the urge to piss, you MUST do it. If you don't, clots will form in your tube and we'll have to dig them out.” A new member of our ward arrived about four in the afternoon and wasn't in his bed twenty minutes when he started to moan and complain that he couldn't pass any water because, “it's like someone sticking a knife in my gut when I try to pee, I'll wait a while and try again.” By midnight the poor guy was screaming at the top of his voice. No one was around in our ward, so I went down the hall and told a Ward Boy to find the night Doctor. It was about twenty minutes before this Dr. came in with a Cystoscope to unplug the man's urethra. Within a minute or two the screams reached a crescendo and then subsided. We found out later that the sharp metal tube was forcibly rammed through into the bladder cutting all the muscles of his urethra which meant the fellow would spend the rest of his life with a bladder sack tied to him. Reason?? The Dr. was putting the plug to a night nurse in the back of the ward office when the word came about the emergency, and he was damn mad at the interruption and wanted to return quickly to his project with the gal.

The morning of my third and final day a new member joined our group and was assigned the bed directly across the aisle from Georgia; he of the infected circumcision. The conversations went sort of like this:

“Hey, Buddy, where you-all from?”

“Me? I'm from New York City in the Bronx.”

“What are they going to do to you?”

“I wasn't born a Jew, but I'll be one when they get my foreskin cut off this afternoon. They told me this should have been done years ago.”

“Hey friend! Have them use the pinking scissors, that's the only thing that could give any New Yorker a little class.”

“One of these Sawbones always cuts on the bias, so you piss on the shoes of the guy next to you when you're in a crowd.”

“Look you wise-ass bastards, I've been in this man's army for six months and I've heard and seen about everything so far, your bull-shit just isn't making a dent in me, go ahead and have your fun, I don't give a rat's ass.”

A short lull in the invogorating discussion was broken when Georgia said, “Yah-all come ovah hyar buddy and lift this sheet, I'll show you what yoor oll talle whaker's gonna look like this time tomorrow.”

A rather smug young man collapsed on the floor in a dead faint after he lifted the sheet and laid eyes on the unholy ugly specimen of manhood attached to the boy from Georgia in that hospital bed.

That was the end of medical problems for the total of my time in the Service.