Victim

by Gary Kinder

  Cortney told the reporters he was a junior and planned to graduate with his class, the class of 1976. “I’m getting along just fine,” he was quoted as saying, “and my friends think it is just great.”

  But Cortney did not have the stamina to be back in school even part-time, and usually reported to the sick room before he had completed his two hours of class. He was unsteady and forgot things moments after his teachers had explained them. He read slowly with his one good eye, and had difficulty comprehending what he had read. Once he had appeared on television and had his picture in the paper, his attendance at school became random. After the third week of January he was not seen at all. He had to be taken to Salt Lake City where he would spend nearly another month in the hospital.

  Cortney’s only hope of ever swallowing food again was an esophageal reconstruction: rare and complex surgery requiring a team of doctors and lasting nearly eight hours. The results are not always satisfactory.

  To select a physician to try the operation, Byron had gone to LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City and pulled charts until he had found the thoracic surgeon with the most experience in esophageal replacements. In the Salt Lake area Dr. Stephen Richards had performed eleven, a total of twenty-five if his experience in residency and VA hospitals was included. All of Richards’s patients were now eating, at least soft foods.

  Cortney’s situation was the most complex Richards had ever seen: a total of five strictures in the esophagus, and the surrounding organs stuck to one another. But he consented to try the operation, and Cortney was admitted to LDS Hospital on January 22, 1975. Two days later he was taken to surgery, where Richards and two other surgeons cut out the old esophagus, edged it aside, and brought a severed length of colon up beneath Cortney’s breastbone. This segment of colon was then attached just below Cortney’s throat and again to the short piece of esophagus remaining at the entrance to his stomach.

  “This kind of reconstruction is not as good as a person’s esophagus,” explained Dr. Richards. “You have to understand that. But it is a way that people can eat and get themselves nourished. The colon replacement loses its capacity to contract, so all it is really is just a gravity tube. People who have this kind of an operation have to sit upright when they eat so their food will go down.”

  At the end of Cortney’s three-and-a-half-week convalescence following the operation, he refused to leave the hospital. He did not want to return home, and begged his father to let him stay with the nurses. When he was finally taken home, he threatened to pull out his gastrostomy tube so his father would have to take him back.

  Each time I’d take him back to the hospital for surgery, I’d have kind of a problem with him for two or three weeks. Till he got settled and adjusted back at home. And the one time, for hell’s sakes, I thought I was never going to get him back out of the hospital. He just refused to come home. That was after his big one. He didn’t want to leave that hospital, boy, and that’s all there was to it. He was really having a time adjusting.

  He said why should he have to be like this, and said that maybe he’d have been better off if he’d died and that kind of stuff. He didn’t have anyone here really to love and look after him day and night, and he missed the people he had gotten acquainted with down at the hospital. He didn’t have everybody jumping through a hoop and physicians running back and forth and nurses jumping here and there. He didn’t have that much security. And he didn’t have a mother, and he wanted a mother. He was having a little problem psychologically getting adjusted, and so naturally he felt that he was alone, and that this was damned more than he could handle. I just didn’t listen to it, and didn’t tolerate it and pointed out to him that, hell, he was in lots better shape than a lot of people, and that he could handle it, and that he would handle it, and that he had it, and that he just as well face that he had it, that it wasn’t going to go away. And I didn’t tolerate listening to that nonsense.

  So he decided he wanted to be adopted out. He was here and he was still sick and he was upset, and he was frightened. He wanted a mother and I didn’t have a mother here for him, so he wanted to be adopted out where there was a mother. It was just a phase he went through. He was feeling sorry for himself and it was bad and he wanted to be adopted where there was a mother because he wasn’t getting any motherly love. I just wouldn’t listen to it. I said: “All right, you make all your arrangements if you want. Go find out what you think.” So hell almighty, he called up all the agencies and was going the whole damn course. Trying to find himself a mother. He told some society that he wanted to get out of my house, that he was being mistreated and the whole bit. I had the agencies calling me, “Doctor, do you realize what’s going on?” “I sure the hell do, I encouraged him.” They asked me if I was having some problems. And I said that I wasn’t having any problems, Cortney was having some problems.

  I just had to be firm enough to point out to Cortney that he did not have a mother and there was not going to be a mother and that he just as well face that fact and learn to live with it. I think he was going through all kinds of changes at that time. Lord, he was trying to find out if he was an individual at all, or alive or dead or what, or whether he could function, and I suspect that this was part of his finding out that he could make it on his own.

  Cortney remained psychologically dependent on hospitals for a long while. Between February 15, when he was discharged, and April 10, when his father took him on a cruise of the Mediterranean, he had to be returned to the hospital four times to have his new esophagus dilated. For each dilatation he was in the hospital a day or two, and each time he fought going home.

  In April, after Cortney’s fourth return to the hospital for dilatation, he and his father flew to the Canary Islands where they boarded the ocean liner Golden Odyssey and sailed up the coast of Morocco to Spain and through the Strait of Gibraltar. Cortney was tired for most of the trip, usually remaining on board for the ports of call. He enjoyed driving around Gibraltar, but got sick again during an outing on Malta. He made friends with some of the crew members who showed him the wheelhouse and the engine rooms of the ship, which seemed to interest him more than going ashore. Before the cruise was over, Cortney was embarrassed twice at dinner when he regurgitated his food onto the table.

  Upon returning from the cruise, Cortney went back into the hospital again, this time to have his neck opened and the stricture in his throat repaired surgically.

  When he was released from the hospital, once again he refused to leave and became so combative, so adamant in his refusal, that Dr. Richards himself had to deal with the problem of getting Cortney out of the hospital.

  “I even have it written here: ‘Cortney said that he had no desire to return home. He only wants to stay in the hospital. It was necessary, after some discussion and the inability of any of the persons attending him to convince him that he should be going home, to take him bodily and carry him out of the hospital.’ He just refused to leave. In fact, he hung onto the door frames when we were taking him out.

  “I’ve operated on people with gunshot wounds in the chest, I’ve operated on people who have stab wounds in the chest, but nothing drawn out as long as this. I don’t think I’ve ever operated on anybody who’s had that much problem, that kind of violent insult. And that much emotional deficit.”

  After he was returned home, Cortney tried once more to get back into the hospital by claiming that he had strictured again and could not swallow. However, instead of admitting him Dr. Richards saw Cortney in the emergency room as an outpatient. On X-ray Cortney’s esophagus appeared as wide as when he had left the hospital nine days earlier. Richards refused to dilate him again. He told Byron that even if Cortney experienced an actual narrowing in his esophagus, as long as he could swallow enough liquid to keep himself alive, what scar tissue remained eventually would relax and Cortney would be able to swallow almost anything.

  That summer Byron often took Cortney sailing on Bear Lake or up to the cabin at Solitude. Gradually, Cortney
got away from his dependency on hospitals and nurses, though he still visited the ICU at McKay-Dee two or three times a week. When he visited, he would sit down next to one of the older nurses who had taken care of him and lay his head on her shoulder. Once he showed them how he could tie his own shoe. The nurses would give him a kiss on the cheek and a hug, talk with him a few minutes about what he’d been doing, and then Cortney would leave, driving off in the little green Mazda automatic his father had bought him to encourage his independence.

  * * *

  On August 11, 1975, nearly a year and four months after his first solo flight, Cortney phoned Wolfgang. Since the previous October he had been calling his old flight instructor once or twice a week, first from the hospital, then from his home between operations. Each time he wanted to know what chapters he should be studying in his flight manual. But when he called this time, Cortney had a different request: he wanted Wolfgang to take him flying again.

  When Cortney arrived at the airport though, things were different than the last time they had flown together. His personality had changed: He was quieter and he had difficulty remembering what he was talking about. To Wolfgang he seemed hesitant and apprehensive. “He just wasn’t the same happy Cortney that I knew before,” Wolfgang said later.

  Wolfgang piloted the plane through takeoff, turning the controls over to Cortney after they were in the air and flying level. But when Cortney reached over to set the trim, his trembling right hand wouldn’t move fast enough. Wolfgang had to set the trim for him. When it came time for Cortney to set the trim again, he was concentrating so hard on uncurling his right arm and hand toward the trim wheel he let the nose drop and they suddenly lost altitude. At the same time, one wing began to dip and Wolfgang had to grab the controls to keep them from going into a spin.

  “He decided he didn’t want to fly anymore,” said Wolfgang, “and he started sweating. I asked him, ‘You sick?’ He said, ‘No, I’m just a little nervous.’ That was a complete change. I said, ‘Do you want to go back to the airport?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I want to go back.’”

  Wolfgang told Cortney not to worry. “It’ll get a little bit better and we’ll go up again. When you’re ready, just call me.”

  A few months later Cortney did call and Wolfgang took him up one more time, but it was obvious that Cortney no longer knew how to fly. Even when he was able to get the radio mike into his hand and switch to the right frequency, he couldn’t remember what to say. After that second flight, Cortney never again flew with Wolfgang. Occasionally Wolf would still see him out at the airport, and Cortney would say to him, “You gonna take me up again?” And Wolf would say, “Yeah, I’ll take you back up. We’ll go schedule the airplane.” But then Cortney would say that he had to check with his dad first, or that maybe he should wait awhile, till he got a little stronger. Sometimes in the afternoon, Wolfgang would see him sitting alone behind the small hangars, just watching the airplanes. Cortney never again learned to fly.

  In the fall Cortney returned to Ogden High, where he was again the object of much attention. The students talked with him in the halls, encouraged him in the classroom. They made him feel welcome and special, and Cortney enjoyed his popularity. The previous spring, while he was still undergoing operations in Salt Lake City, many of them had written in his yearbook that he was an inspiration. Returning to school after so long in the hospital, Cortney had an identity: he was a survivor of the Hi-Fi Murders.

  “When he first came back,” said one of his teachers, “he was like a hero returning.”

  Cortney could be seen in the halls, carrying his books under his left arm, his right hand held above his stomach and shaking. He still had a noticeable limp, but his posture was a little straighter, his speech a little clearer now. An ophthalmologist had cut and realigned the muscles of his right eye, and the right eye had properly fused with the left. With the aid of thin corrective lenses for nearsightedness, Cortney’s vision had returned to normal. Around school, he wore smoke-tinted glasses—even indoors.

  When other students approached Cortney between classes to ask how he was getting along, he would slowly say, “Just fine.” But he couldn’t walk up and down the stairs, from one class to another, as fast as other students. He couldn’t eat the same food because the top of his new esophagus was still no bigger than his little finger. Even a spoonful of soup had to be lifted slowly with his left hand, slid into the left side of his mouth, then swung around to the front and up. Since there was no valve at the entrance to his stomach, acid frequently rose into his new esophagus, burning it and sometimes entering his lungs. Every day Cortney had to take tablets of Maalox to neutralize the acid.

  In class Cortney could work trigonometry problems on the blackboard that dazzled other students, but he couldn’t explain verbally what he had done. The thoughts and the ideas seemed to be inside his head, but he lacked the motor skills to express himself. Often, words and facts heard only moments before got lost in the gaps of his memory, and then there seemed to be nothing, not even the thought that something was missing. Frequently Cortney asked questions his teachers had answered only minutes before. At first the teachers and the other students were patient with him. But then, Kelly remembered, “Most of the teachers would just say, ‘Well, why don’t we wait till after class, Cortney, then we’ll get out what you have to talk about.’”

  The hero’s welcome that Cortney received from the students ended after a few weeks. Now when he asked questions that the teacher had just answered, they rolled their eyes or shuffled their feet. Or laughed.

  “They were a little cruel to him,” one teacher observed, “to let him know that his period of grace was over.”

  The reality was that the students couldn’t continue to make exceptions for Cortney. At some point they had to begin treating him as they would any other student. Their laughter meant that Cortney no longer was someone special, no longer a survivor of the Hi-Fi Murders. He was just one of them.

  Cortney went through his senior year mostly alone. He saw friends at school and talked with them, but his life outside the classroom was spent at home. Chris was playing football, and Kelly worked in a grocery store thirty-five hours a week. Another friend, Dave Whiteley, who shared Cortney’s interest in computers and electronics, had a girl friend now and spent most of his time with her. Once, Dave and his girl friend took Cortney to a pond to run Dave’s radio-controlled boat, but Cortney didn’t show much interest. He seemed tired. Dave had other things besides his girl friend that occupied his time, too. He and Cortney had started taking flying lessons at the same time during their sophomore year, and Dave was now a licensed pilot.

  Friends sometimes called on Cortney at home, and he went bowling a few times and to an occasional movie, but he missed the football games and the school dances, the winter parties and basketball season. He didn’t have the stamina to sit in crowded bleachers, and he had trouble swallowing a hot dog and a Coke. When he phoned friends just to talk, he often called them back a few minutes after hanging up, as if he had never made the first call.

  Even at school Cortney got tired during the day, frustrated and impatient with his frequent losses of memory. Sometimes he would walk out of class and wander around the halls or call his father, who would encourage him to return to class. On some days Cortney reported to the school sick room until time to go home, or until his make-up classes began in the afternoon after school. Cortney was taking additional courses because he wanted to graduate with his class, and the combined credits from his sophomore year and from summer school and tutoring sessions gave him only half the number required by the state for graduation. If he wanted to graduate with the class of 1976, Cortney had to earn in his senior year one half of the 15 credits most students earned in three years of high school.

  Trying to fulfill the requirements for graduation, Cortney had signed up for German, college algebra and trig, physics, computer science, swimming, and electronics. Two days a week, after school let out at two forty-five, he attend
ed make-up or “extended day” classes in English and American history until five o’clock. On most nights Cortney was in bed asleep by eight.

  As the year progressed, Cortney walked a little straighter, spoke a little faster, forgot less. But the changes came so slowly that people around him hardly noticed. And some things didn’t change at all. He still cared little about his appearance, leaving his hair unwashed, his face unshaved, sometimes forgetting to brush his teeth. The few times he tried to get a date, the girls he asked wouldn’t go out with him. For the senior prom he called nearly every girl he knew, but most of them were going steady and all of them already had dates. That night Cortney stayed home alone.

  Cortney never complained about his handicaps or having to stay home. Most of the time he seemed almost content to stay at home and rest, and study when he could, because though he was gradually becoming stronger and more agile, he still tired easily. His only motivation was to try to graduate with his friends, yet he was so weak even that seemed at times unlikely. He was barely keeping up with all of the courses he had to pass before he would be allowed to graduate with the Class of ’76.

  * * *

  In the late afternoon of May 27 the 492 members of Ogden High’s class of 1976 assembled in the fieldhouse at the Weber State College stadium. Outside, on the 50-yard line, a large stage had been erected with high backdrops of red and white. In keeping with the theme of the country’s Bicentennial celebration, thirty American flags lined the stage.

  The stadium sat at the foot of the mountains with the red-white-and-blue stage facing the west bleachers. As the graduates gathered in the fieldhouse, the bleachers filled with over two thousand parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, and friends. Cortney’s family arrived early: his father, his two brothers and Diane, Claire and Scott. Two newspapers and the Associated Press already had published stories on Cortney’s pending graduation, and television camera crews were now positioning themselves in front of the stage to film Cortney walking across to receive his diploma.