Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole by Allan H. Ropper Page B

years as a player, and many more as an instructor and broadcaster. As he once admitted, “Probably the best thing that ever happened to me was going nuts. Who ever heard of Jimmy Piersall before that happened?” Nobaseball fan would ever forget him after he hit his hundredth home run at the Polo Grounds in 1963, and ran the bases facing backward.
    Although I would never again see Gordon Steever once he left the Brigham, I did visit Wally Maskart three weeks later at the psychiatric hospital where Hannah had managed to place him.
    “I feel much better,” he told me.
    “Are you oriented? Is your mind clear?”
    “What used to take ten minutes now takes a few minutes.”
    “Are you writing in here?”
    “Yeah, I’m writing my life history.”
    Among his topics were accounts of Mrs. G’s code blue, a summer cottage he had bought in Mattapoisett thirty years ago, and his time working for Polaroid in the 1970s. He looked much better, sounded much better, his memory was improving.
    “I feel like I could go home today,” he said.
    “Wally, who is Sanjay Sanjanista?”
    “You are.”
    “How does that work? How can I be Dr. Sanjay Sanjanista and Dr. Allan Ropper at the same time?”
    “That’s your first name and your second, and you’re my wife’s cardiologist, and that’s when I first met you, and in your office there’s a sign, ‘Go Bruins,’ and that’s what attracted my eye, and that’s how it got started.”
    “How are you sleeping?”
    “I never did sleep well. I have to get up and pee a lot. Then there are these damn alarms here. But I feel like I’m much more rested.”
    “Will you be able to manage at home?”
    “Oh, yeah. The house is all set up.”
    There was one other issue that bothered me. “Do you remember talking about Dwight Evans? You were under the impression that he had died. You might have been confusing him with Dick Williams, the Red Sox manager, who did die a few weeks ago.”
    “You know what? I think I said . . . no . . . here’s what happened. The greatest right fielder the Sox ever had was traded, and what reminded me of it was when the coach died. Yeah, he was the coach when they won the World Series. And they had the greatest right fielder ever. He’s the one that ran the bases backward.”
    “That sounds like Jimmy Piersall. Different right fielder, but a great one.”
    “Oh, yeah, was it? No, you’re right, it was Jimmy Piersall.”
    A light went on. It was Jimmy Piersall, and not Dwight Evans, who had been traded by the Red Sox, who had hit his hundredth home run while playing for Casey Stengel, who was traded soon after, but lasted four more years in the majors. I had waded into Wally’s stream of thought, and had met him somewhere in the middle. If Piersall could make it, I thought, so could Wally. And he did. With the help of Seroquel and lithium, he would soon be discharged and return to the problems that had driven him to us in the first place.
    “I sold the locomotive,” he said. “I took a loss.”
    “Better to be rid of it,” I told him. “You can’t pull freight with it anyway.”

4
    My Man Godfrey

    A poor sort of memory that only works backwards
    In the late 1970s I had a patient, a salesman who drove from Philadelphia to Boston unwittingly, and made it as far as Leverett Circle, a traffic rotary near Massachusetts General Hospital, where he got stuck driving around and around for almost an hour. Eventually a policeman noticed him, pulled him over, and said, “Is everything okay?”
    The man replied, “I don’t know how I got here.”
    The policeman had the good sense to send him to the emergency room, where he was examined by a junior resident who found nothing amiss beyond the memory loss. Concluding that it was an episode of transient global amnesia, or TGA, a dramatic but entirely benign condition, the resident came to me to approve a discharge in anticipation of the expected return of the patient’s memory. Although it may sound