The next morning, I woke up in tears. The terrible stomach pain from yesterday had returned. When my mother came down to see if I was well enough to go to school, she recognized I was very sick and ran up the stairs and out the back door, flagging my dad down as he backed out the driveway.
“Earl, you’ve got to come down and give Brian a blessing. I think he must have a bowel blockage. He seems really sick.”
My dad, always a man of duty, put the car in park, turned off the ignition, and followed my mother down to my bed room.
Placing his heavy hands on my head resting listlessly on my pillow, he started to pronounce a blessing in his always somber voice.
In answer to the blessing, I threw up.
My pain diminished. I spent the day at home sleeping, watching reruns on TV, but neither eating nor drinking. By early evening, the pain returned, growing through evening until at night I could only lay paralyzed in my bed, managing to breath with little more than pants as each breath was excruciating: inhaling bringing stabbing knives, exhaling creating penetrating needles. Instead of taking me to the hospital, my parents again turned to a priesthood blessing. Again, the pain subsided.
My parents had decided that if I was still sick in the morning, they would call our family practitioner, but that morning I definitely felt better, though not well enough to go to school. My mother did not call.
As night returned, so did the knives and needles in my abdomen. My dad once again gave me a priesthood blessing. Once again I slept through the night.
The next morning, my mother decided to call. Shortly after the diagnosis of my Wilms’ tumor, David Sundwall had left Utah to serve as the chief of the Family Medicine section at the University of California, San Francisco, so we were now seeing his older brother, Peter, at his Murray office. Over the phone, my mother described my symptoms to a nurse and told her she had never seen me in such pain. The nurse concluded that I was probably suffering from the stomach virus then passing through the valley, and suggested I try some over-the-counter relief.
My mother went to the store and got some flu medication. I took the medicine; it didn’t help. That night, instead of attending my ninth grade promotion ceremony, I was at home watching “Magnum P. I.” Just as with the previous nights, as the night progressed the pain increased, and once again my dad had to resort to giving me a blessing, blessings that were beginning to feel a lot more palliative than healing.
By Saturday morning, we had all lost faith in priesthood blessings and flu medication. I had not eaten since Monday. I was exhausted, in pain, listless. But to my mother I wasn’t yet fit to go to the hospital: I needed a haircut. Following a fashion of the day I had my hair cut so as to have a tail—a rat’s tail as we called it—a thin strand of hair at the back of my head that was allowed to grow several inches longer than the rest of my hair.
I lay on our living room couch, the drapes shut so the room was mostly dark. “Brian, I’ve arranged for Dr. Sundwall to meet you at his office, but I won’t take you unless you let me cut that tail off.”
“I’m about to die.”
“I won’t take you until we cut your hair.”
“What does my hair matter?”
Even though I protested, my words had no energy. She stepped out of the room and returned with a pair of scissors, her mannerism more matter-of-fact than triumphant. I lay motionless on the couch. I didn’t care about my hair. I didn’t care that she cared.
Cut it. I don’t give a shit, I thought silently.
A single snip of the scissors, and my mother was satisfied. She helped me up, and we shuffled to the garage.1
Dr. Sundwall’s office was just a few miles west. I sat in the front seat of our car, leaning my head against the window, gazing mindlessly at the passing scenery but not looking at anything. Once we arrived at the office, Dr. Sundwall quickly surmised that I had acute appendicitis and sent us off to Cottonwood Hospital for an emergency appendectomy.
At the hospital my condition must not have been viewed as particularly urgent; nothing seemed rushed. My mother answered question after question from the admissions clerk, while I sat next to her staring at my feet. Whether the questions were meant to ensure I was properly taken care of, or to ensure payments would be made or to simply stall for time while a surgeon was found mattered little to me—the wait was intolerable. I just wanted someone to cut me open and end this pain. On June 4, 1983 at 11:42 AM, my mother signed the papers admitting me to the hospital.
1 My mother says she would have taken me to Dr. Sundwall’s, even if I had refused to let her cut my hair.↩