Patient's-Eye-View

One soft, spring evening, three years ago, Frigyes (Frederic) Karinthy, popular Hungarian poet, sat sipping tea in his favorite Budapest cafe. Suddenly he heard locomotives rumbling, reverberating, dying away. Startled, he raised his head. He knew there had been no trains on the streets of Budapest for 40 years. But he took no treatment for his head-splitting hallucinations until his eyesight grew dim, his legs shaky, his stomach rebellious.

After long, exhaustive examinations Budapest neurologists told the 47-year-old poet that an egg-sized cyst webbed with tiny blood vessels was sprouting on the right side of his brain, back of his cerebellum. If he did not have it removed in ten days, they said, he would become paralyzed and blind.

Promptly Poet Karinthy's doctor wife, Aranka, hustled him off to the Stockholm clinic of Dr. Herbert Olivecrona, a disciple of Yale's famed Neurologist Harvey Gushing. Since surgeons usually use local anesthetics for brain operations (ether may congest brain blood vessels), Poet Karinthy remained acutely aware of everything that happened to him. Last year, he published the first patient's-eye-view account of a brain operation in medical history. This week the English translation of Karinthy's remarkable book appeared in the U. S.*

"I felt them wheel me under the lamp," he wrote. "I felt a succession of little pricks in a wide circle ... on my head. Then . . . one long horizontal incision at the back of my neck. This did not hurt me either. I felt soft gestures, as if my flesh were being opened and folded back.

"There was a sudden jerk as if he [Dr. Olivecrona] had seized the opening with a pair of forceps. It was followed by a straining sensation, a feeling of pressure, a cracking sound, and a terrific wrench. . . . Something broke with a dull noise. . . . Each cracking sound reminded me of taking the lid off a jamjar, while the process as a whole was like splitting open a wooden packing case, plank by plank. . . .

"A veritable fury of destruction seized hold of me. Break it up! I wanted to shout. Smash away! Bust it to bits! Everything had gone red in front of my eyes. If I had had an axe or a lump of iron in my hand I should have hit out with it and smashed up myself and everyone else with the wild recklessness of a maniac.

"Once the trephining of the skull was over . . . my mood underwent a change. There was a sound of pumping and draining and I could hear the drip, drip of a liquid. Although my brain didn't hurt at all, it did hurt me when one of the instruments fell on to the glass with a sharp, metallic sound. A certain idea passing through my mind hurt me too. It had nothing to do with my present situation. . . ."

Three hours after the operation began, when Dr. Olivecrona was delicately prying out the red tumor from the flaccid tissue of Karinthy's cerebellum, the poet lost consciousness. Three weeks later, after an uneventful convalescence, happy Poet Karinthy went back to his Budapest cafes, heard no more nonexistent locomotives. But two-and-a-half years after his ordeal he died of a heart attack.

* A JOURNEY ROUND MY SKULL--Harper ($2.50).

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