Mary H’s Psychosurgery Travesty

Mary H was born in 1919 in Nevada and grew up on a horse ranch there. After skipping two grades in school, she attended nursing school in Santa Barbara. She then worked as a nurse briefly, but then as a laborer in a copper mine in NV for the war effort in the 40’s. She married an army officer and had two children, one in 1943 and the second in 1945. The sketchy family history goes that she was hospitalized psychiatrically in both 1950 and 1954 for extended periods of time (6-12 months each), perhaps receiving many ECT treatments during those periods. She divorced during this time, and the lives of her two children were chaotic and confused as they were passed between various relatives. It was during the second hospitalization in Sparks, NV that she had a trans-orbital leucotomy.

During the hospitalization she met my father, a Cornell engineer and musician, a super-achieving all-American guy, who was hospitalized for depression and alcoholism. They married when they were discharged and I was born shortly thereafter in 1957 in Reno, NV. There was some short time that I spent in foster care there due to my parents’ neglect, and then we three then moved to Long Island, NY to my father’s home town. They divorced but were together off and on. My father was somewhat ostracized by his family there and for whatever reasons found it difficult to get work. He killed himself violently in public there in 1961. My mother really had no other family, though her two older children were in and out of her life over the years. They were quite angry with her and estranged from her, and understandably so as her long “disappearances” for hospitalizations had occurred when they were young children.

I relate this history as it is inextricably related to my mother’s psychosurgery. One of the many effects of that surgery was to impair her judgment substantially. Her choice of my father as a mate evidences this point. She had many such effects of the surgery that I simply attributed to her being a very strange person while I was growing up. Some of these characteristics included:

· having no sense of smell

· impaired visual-spatial perception

· a chronic facial tic and a low, quiet grunting throaty utterance

· blunted, shallow “sing-song” affect juxtaposed against explosive and sometimes violent rages

· an absence of social skills or interest in relationships

· comfort living in squalor and filth, wearing dirty clothes and eating spoiled food sans souci

· marked short-term memory loss

· abysmal personal financial management including numerous bankruptcies

· use of biting, nasty sarcasm in place of real discussion deficit in abstract thinking

All was simplistic and back & white: concrete, not unlike many head-trauma victims. And there was the sense always that one could not quite “touch” her, not ever fully connect with her in a real way.

She would do one very weird and scary thing sometimes: she would call out loud for me while she was sleeping, and when I would go into her room, she would sit up, eyes wide open while completely asleep, and order me around in her role as head nurse talking about this patient and that. Then she would lie down and continue sleeping. It was very bizarre.

Her life involved working as an RN on the night shift at hospitals all over L.I. (including Pilgrim State and Central Islip state psychiatric facilities), sleeping till 3PM each day, then watching TV until it was time to go to work. She never re-married, though she did have two amorous relationships after my father’s death, one with a married cop who eventually returned to his wife, and another with a man she was to marry but who ran off one night. These relationships occurred when I was between 8-12 years of age. There was no one thereafter. She was an extremely isolated person, but I don’t think that she really was able to experience that level of emotional pain around loneliness that you or I might feel. She lived a very sad life as a surgical casualty.

It was not until she became frail and had been duped into signing away her little house to some stranger with the promise of fast cash that I learned of the surgery. This came about when I began to explore guardianship for her to protect her from herself. She was then 70 years old, and I was able to get the medical records from the hospital in Sparks and one day received the surgical report in the mail. I was then 30, had gotten a Masters degree from Columbia, had recently married and was overseeing a social work program for frail elderly in California. It was shocking to finally understand what her strangeness was really about. Ironically, she had told me of the surgery on a couple of occasions during my teen years, and I dismissed her as being crazy.

So, in the end, the surgery took away the obviously bright and beautiful, energetic woman, and left a marginally functioning human being in her place, one who was truly incapable of the highs and lows of living and the intimacies that sustain our humanity. Though her “procedure” may have been well-intentioned, a travesty borne of well-meaning ignorance, it surely robbed me and her other children of a real mother and her of any real quality of life. It was truly tragic. Had her mental decompensation occurred 10 years later, she most likely would have been spared such a fate.