Don't Die In Bed: The Brief, Intense Life of Richard Halliburton by John H. Alt

Author:John H. Alt [Alt, John H.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Quincunx Press
Published: 2014-06-09T04:00:00+00:00

Richard’s doodle in a letter home on his frenetic life.

BURNT OUT & BACK AT THE BATTLE CREEK SAN

After his lecture engagements were over for the 1923-1924 schedule, he went to Siasconset, an island off Nantucket, to continue his writing. He wrote home, “For nine weeks I’ve not left my desk. I don’t take any heavy exercises or long walks. So long as I’m quiet inside and out I feel—or rather don’t feel—anything. The moment I get tired or in a tension the old troubles begin.” The old troubles were what took him in his teens to Battle Creek and the San. He ignored them and doubled his efforts, reporting that he was moving fast, “about out of India, Malay, Siam, and Angkor.” He was soon into the Java and Bali pages.

Throughout 1924 the old troubles steadily worsened. In July he wrote from Nantucket “for nine weeks I’ve not left my desk.” His will held him to it and he ignored signals from his body. In August he became extremely tired and nearly sick after motoring down to New York. The next day he sailed with friends off Long Island and discovered he had difficulty climbing aboard the yacht. His pulse “was beating a mile a minute” and he “felt very bum in general.”

After he returned to Nantucket a doctor listened to him as Richard complained about “extreme nervousness, a fast-beating pulse, and a general weakness.” Without examining him, the doctor announced that Richard had all the symptoms of goiter. Goiter?, Richard asked himself. He said, “There is something raising hell with my nerves and it might be goiter, though to save my life I can’t find any swelling and neither can anybody else.” Richard had to ask the physician to examine his heart. The man did, thumping his back, listening with stethoscope, and assured Halliburton that it was “sound as a dollar.” No murmur. Not enlarged. He decided to return to New York to get a second opinion. He would look up a goiter specialist. Whatever he had, it was getting worse, and he was concerned.

He drove back to New York, where a physician diagnosed him correctly. He alarmed his parents, telling them he was told what caused his “trembles and debility this past year.” The doctor told him he had no goiter problem but he did have an overactive thyroid. The man found “a marked oversecretion of thyroid” and recommended that he go to Battle Creek. Richard was relieved that he finally had a name for the “overstimulation” he had felt “for a year without knowing it.”

His Ammudder had visited him at Siasconset to be by his side while he was ill and she accompanied him to Battle Creek. She had set him on her knee when he was a child and read to him adventure stories, which helped shape the world-traveler he became. He tells his mother and father that he is glad she is with him and we learn that he started feeling weak way back in Japan.

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