CHAPTER 152 A POX UPON ME BUT WRITING AGAIN 1982
Things were off to a promising start.
One thing that had not been so promising was my psoriasis. I had first been diagnosed with this skin disease when I was 15, although I am certain I had it long before that. I believe I had it all the way through Junior High School, mainly in my scalp. It had been all those years fairly mild, appearing as here and there little red, scaly patches, usually on my elbows or knees. A small patch of it on my shoulder had kept me out of the Armed Services and
especially Vietnam. I only had one eruption the day I was processed for induction and I didn’t even know I had that. There are several variances of psoriasis. As I aged I seemed to get them all.
My on and off flare ups really never bothered me. They were not large, bigger in the winter than summer and mostly hidden beneath my clothes. But in the early 1980s the disease spread and by 1981 my body was quite covered with the patches and I was getting new scales every day. Still, it wasn’t apparent to most people. It was up and down my legs and arms, my torso, especially my back, but hidden by my clothing. Sometimes it itched badly and in winter it was painful, feeling like a bad sunburn.
When I was driving back and forth to Metropolitan
Hospital during the time Darryl was born, I noticed a Dermatologist office on one corner of Sproul Avenue. I decided to visit this doctor and see if he could do anything about this.
I was still living on Cobbs Street, so I could drive up Route 1 right to this guy’ practice on my way home from work. I called and made an appointment and thus one evening I did just that.
I walked into his office. It was a late appointment so there weren’t any other people waiting. It wasn’t long before his last patient exited and I was sent back to an office. It was just that, an office, not an examination room. He indicated a chair and he sat down behind a desk and asked me several questions, usual things like when did I first notice any symptoms, what kind of treatment had I already had.
I told him my psoriatic history and that currently I wasn’t under any treatment. Then he asked me how extensive it was. I explained my body was pretty well covered. He told me to roll up my shirt sleeve. When I did he sat up and leaned forward. His eyes kind of widened. He explained what was known about the disease, which was not a lot at that time. Science didn’t know what caused it and there was no cure. It could be controlled to some extend by the use of certain salves. However, he went on, he felt he might be able to help me. Would it be all right if he took some photographs of my condition.
I said, okay.
He took me into another room, which was an examination room. He took a camera out of a drawer, checked it over, I guess to make sure there was film and to set the aperture and speed. He motioned me to a certain spot to stand, then told me to remove all my clothing and set these on the table. Once I was completely nude he began snapping several pictures, having me turn this way and that, front shots and back shots and what have you shots.
I felt quite uncomfortable.
Once he was satisfied with his gallery of photos, he told me to get dressed and we went back into the first office again. He seemed quite anxious. His eyes lit up. He pulled a medical magazine from his desk and laid it down open before me. He repeated what he had said earlier about psoriasis being incurable. He went on to say with my extensive case creams and oils would be difficult to apply consistently and could get expensive. He then pointed to the story in the magazine. It told of studies on the disease and about a new experimental drug they believed might reduce the symptoms and give the victim relatively normal looking skin. He said he wanted to try this new drug upon me, if I was willing. I would come in weekly and he would inject the drug into the patches and hopefully these would then clear up.
Inject the drug into the patches weekly?
Was he crazy? I hated needles, and no way In wanted weekly injection directly into a patch. My body was covered with such things. No way I wanted to subject myself to such torture.
I told him I would think about it and I left. He said he would eagerly await my decision. I drove off knowing what he was interested in, fame. He thought if he used this experimental drug on me and my skin became clear he would gain a great reputation. There would be an article in those medical journals about him. Maybe he could even write a book and yours truly would be the nude centerfold.
And of course there was that real magic word, injections. I hated needles. Fat chance I was going to become a pincushion so this guy could get a reputation.
I was still very modest about my body. I know it doesn’t sound as if I would be after some of the
things I confessed to doing or being in my youth, but I was. I didn’t want anyone to see me naked. I was one of those guys who wore a shirt even at the pool. I didn’t wear a shirt when I went in the water to swim, but out of the water I didn’t lay about shirtless. I dreaded being picked as a “skin” in school gym and certainly disliked the group showers afterward. Most of my friends ran about without a shirt every day in the summer, but I wore a T-shirt. Look at Richard Wilson and me in Wildwood. Typically, he was out swaggering about shirtless in revealing swimming briefs, while I hid my bony chest in a shirt and wore boxer style swimsuit.
Now what I didn’t realize as I stood starkers with this Dermatologist snapping away was this was a first step toward losing that shyness. In a few years I would be stripped of such reluctance, pun intended, and as an old man, who cares? Once you have been through the kind of medical attention I have received you feel as if everyone has seen your equipment anyway.
I wondered why the psoriasis began this rampant blossoming all a sudden that year.. Not really that much is known about it today, even less back in the 1980s. I’m not even certain any doctor ever talked about it being an immune system problem then. One thing that was mentioned a lot was that stress affected the condition. Gosh, in those early 1980s, was I under any stress?
In 1980, I had been terminated without cause from Mercy Catholic Medical and got a new job at Wilmington Trust. I had moved three times in two years and lost my long connection to a church where I was active. Then we had a surprise baby, who was greatly premature. We were told she would be severely handicapped. In 1981, my father-in-law died and the fourth move we were about to make was delated because the house flooded and was destroyed. We must not forget that at this time I was still going to evening college at Widener. My new job was more complex than those I had in the past and I actually had to invent it. I had to interact with many different people, something often difficult for me with my Social Anxiety Disorder. I was also going on business trips for the first time in my life.
In my earlier years, writing had eased my tensions, but my writing career as it had been came to an end by 1976. That year I did a book of poetry called, “Days of Despondency” and a collection of my published essays called, “Making an Essay of Myself”, but there was little else. There was
really nothing new.
In the ‘seventies my writing was for the church. I wrote a few essays and a couple poems that were published in, “Teens on the Scene”, a magazine I was editing. I wrote a couple plays, which were performed by the youth group at other churches and in nursing homes. This phase of writing was over with by 1977.
- P.A.T.H. II: A ConceptualOverview
- Japanese Management Style
3. Management: The Plan Ahead
4. Movers-To-Action
5. Tire Teams & Unicycles
6. Business as Usual
That last was a collection of shorter pieces I had done in company publications.
Former General Motors' executive. John Z. DeLorean's account of. the Corvair episode illustrates an alleged dichotomy faced by corporate managers:Is the manager's sole responsibility to the corporate profitability or does the manager have an equal responsibility to society. Are these seemingly separate responsibilities mutually exclusive or are they interweaved together? Does social performance preclude maximization or corporate profits? A brief examination of the rise and fall of Chevrolet's Corvair partially answers these questions.
Excerpt from "Corporate Social Performance"
by Larry Eugene Meredith
Widener University, Chester, Pa.
Publishd by Wilmington Trust Company
Walter Whitaker, editor
Wilmington, De. 1982
Included in the book, "Business as Usual"
Perhaps all these factors had something to do with my Psoriasis explosion. One thing was certain. Stress was not going away.
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