Mr. Blandings' Nightmare

After a near-fatal illness that cost $21,911.32 and 160 days in three hospitals, Eric Hodgins might pardonably have tried to forget it. Instead, he set out to write off his losses. The result, Episode -- Report on the Accident Inside My Skull (Atheneum; $5), is Journalist Hodgins' wry, spry, keenly observed sto ry of a stroke (cerebrovascular accident) and how it has affected his life for the past four years.

Painless & Terrible. His story begins on the night of Jan. 8, 1960, when Hodgins was alone in his apartment. One moment he was dictating a telegram on the telephone; then suddenly all he could say was "ab, ab," over and over. As the receiver slid from his paralyzed left hand, he felt no pain, no dizziness. But he knew that something terrible had happened. Later, in a $108-a-day Manhattan hospital room (the price included three nurses at $20 each), he found out how badly off he was.

"When I first saw you," his doctor told him later, "you were mortally ill." For a few days there was little that could be done for him, and even less that he could do for himself, as he lay in an overheated room, apprehensive and overly aware of all that was going on around him. The hospital sounded like the lower decks of a battleship. The corridors were a babel of squawk boxes, counterpointed by the gun-mount rumble of food carts, the depth-charge banging of slammed doors. Though some of his nurses were ministering an gels, Hodgins laments the modern hospital's chronic shortage of hands. "In the old days," he says, "a patient put on his light to indicate he needed something, and a floor nurse would respond to discover whether this something was extreme unction or a bedpan."

Solution: Suicide. After Hodgins left the hospital and went back to his apart ment, with a practical nurse in charge, he got a nasty series of jolts. He could not button his shirt, tie his shoes, spell certain kinds of words; worst of all, he could no longer operate a typewriter. A former managing editor of FORTUNE, author of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, and an associate of Pollster Elmo Roper, Hodgins felt almost as dependent on his typewriter as a scuba diver on his air tank. Faced with a future of uselessness, he no longer wanted a future at all. He began waking up each morning "with one dominating thought: how pleasant and simple 'a solution it would be to be dead."

Break from a Break. When he relayed his suicidal thoughts to his doctors, they hustled him into Manhattan's Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic for the summer. Hodgins had hardly gotten out when he found himself back in a hospital--this time with a broken hip, the result of a bathroom fall. It proved a lucky break. Although immobile once more, he was suffering at last from a socially approved ailment: a broken hip, he points out, is perfectly respectable, whereas a stroke or a breakdown is "loaded with connotations."

Hodgins' book is not only a chronicle of the embarrassments and irritations that confront the patient in any major illness; it is also a useful handbook for sympathetic friends. To a man of Hodgins' temperament too much consideration can be dangerous. He despises get-well cards, with or without bluebirds, and the standard bunch of flowers: "I am sorry to have to cross pistils with the nation's florists, but unless flowers are quite inexpensive and casually arranged, they are an insult. The more beautifully arranged, the deeper the insult."

After all that happened to him, Hodgins emerged more or less intact: he could still see, read and speak. Most important, he could still write--with a ballpoint pen. It took three pens, and more agony than he may care to admit, to write Episode. The fact that it was written, that it reflects so much of his oldtime waspish wit and wordcraft, is the most substantial evidence of Eric Hodgins' recovery.

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