My Son, My Son

The doctor's worried wife was waiting at the door when he got home for lunch. "Bob and Shari are terribly ill." said Mrs. Oliver Cook, and she handed her husband a letter. It had arrived that morning from Memphis, where their son and daughter-in-law, both 19, are Memphis State University sophomores. General Practitioner Cook, 49, began to read:

Dear Folks: I'm sorry I took so long in writing but we moved to a different place Monday, and we have been too busy trying to get things in order. Last night Shari passed out on the couch, only I wasn't here when it happened, and when I got here I thought she had just fallen asleep. This morning at 5 she called me to help her out of the couch because she couldn't get up. She had vomited while she was asleep. As soon as I got out of bed I passed out on the floor. After I regained my senses I got up to walk outside and get some fresh air, and as soon as I walked out the door I passed out again and fell down five concrete steps. I've got scratches and bruises all over me and I'm so sore I can hardly move.

After we got up in the morning we both vomited. Shari went back to bed but I went [to classes]. Shari went to her afternoon classes and so did I. I've been feeling somewhat better this afternoon but worse tonight.

Dr. Cook paused to consider. They were feeling better after they had been away from the house. The house, he decided. must be the source of the trouble. He read on:

Shari has been heaving up all day. The doctor over at the school thought we had some kind of virus and gave us some medicine but it hasn't done any good. I can't imagine why we passed out like we did. We both seem to have the same thing--a tremendous headache, continuous dizziness, upset stomach and heaving up all day. If you have any idea what it is, please send something for it. I had better quit now. I'm so dizzy I can't even light.

"It's Worse Than That." Young Bob Cook meant "write." He had not corrected that last word, but like the good drafting and design student he is, he had neatly organized the essential facts for his doctor father back home in Caruthersville, Mo. "It doesn't sound like a virus to me." said Mrs. Cook. "It sounds like ptomaine." Dr. Cook answered. "It's worse than that--it's gas." He reached hurriedly for the phone.

Bob had written his landlady's phone number in a last-minute postscript, and Dr. Cook got a long-distance call through with no delay. A maid answered. Dr. Cook asked her to go out to Bob and Shari's little cottage and call his son to the phone. When the maid returned and told Dr. Cook she could not rouse anybody, he shouted back at her: "Go out there and break in a window."

The aroused landlady joined the maid and checked the cottage. "I saw them lying in the bed," she reported to Dr. Cook. "They were sweating up a storm." Dr. Cook roared back: "Haven't you got in the house yet?" The landlady told Dr. Cook to hang up so she could get the maid to call the fire department. Then she grabbed a hammer herself. She .broke a small pane in the door and reached in to release the latch. Intense heat blasted into her face. "It was just like opening the door to a furnace," she said.

She raced through the house opening windows and doors; then she began rubbing her unconscious tenants' faces with cold wet towels. Shari came to and remarked: "I blacked out." The firemen had to use a resuscitator on Bob before he came around. At the emergency room of Memphis' Methodist Hospital, where the pair spent four tense days recovering, a doctor said: "Fifteen minutes later would have been too late. They would have been dead."

Firemen's Confirmation. A quiet, careful man who runs his small-town practice with no frills (he does not even own a white coat), Dr. Cook is not the type to make a habit of long-distance diagnosis. But of Bob's letter he said: "It was a perfect case history, and a clear message to me." That message was "carbon monoxide poisoning." And 90 miles away, firemen who found a blocked furnace ventilator pipe that was forcing carbon monoxide back into the cottage made the final confirmation of Dr. Cook's diagnosis.

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