My Lobotomy by Howard Dully & Charles Fleming

Author:Howard Dully & Charles Fleming [Dully, Howard & Fleming, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography, Biography, Medical, United States, Personal Narratives, Patients, Neurology, Patient, Frontal Lobotomy - Patients - United States, Frontal Lobotomy, Neurosurgery, Psychosurgery - Patients - United States, Psychosurgery, Dully; Howard, Surgery
ISBN: 9780307381262
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2007-09-03T22:00:00+00:00

Rancho Linda School sat high in the foothills to the east of San Jose. It was surrounded by fruit orchards and framed by eucalyptus trees, and it overlooked the city of San Jose and the entire Santa Clara Valley. Covering twelve acres, and built in the same low bungalow style as my elementary school and junior high school, Rancho Linda had classrooms, dormitories, dining halls, play areas, and a swimming pool. It was a privately run institution, and it had been open for less than a year when I got there.

Rancho Linda was conceived as “a residential center for special education,” according to pamphlets advertising the place. It was “designed to meet the special education requirements of mentally and emotionally handicapped children and adolescents,” and to deal with “educational, social and emotional deficits as they affect the learning process.” The school offered “a 24-hour controlled atmosphere designed to minimize anxieties.”

I am not sure whose anxieties they were designed to minimize—probably the parents’, who were paying four hundred dollars a month to have their kids there—but the “24-hour controlled atmosphere” meant that Rancho Linda was a minimum security facility where the patients, or students, were kept under close watch twenty-four hours a day. There weren’t bars on the windows, or armed guards, and you were allowed to roam the facilities, but it was clear that the students were confined to the compound and not expected to leave—unless they were planning to run away and never come back.

After Agnews, it felt like summer camp.

There were 110 kids there at that time, half boys, half girls, with kids as young as six and as old as seventeen or eighteen. The dorms were separated by gender and by age. There were six beds in each dorm room. Each kid had his own bed and his own closet with a clothes rack in it. Every two dorm rooms had one bathroom between them, so twelve kids shared each bathroom.

The doors were all electronically wired, and there was a big board down in the main office with lights on it that showed which doors were open (green light) and which doors were closed (red light). This was their security system. After lights-out, there was a bed check. All the doors were shut, and they were supposed to be kept shut. Sometimes there was another bed check. Sometimes the person in charge would just sit in the office looking at the big board. If all of the lights on the board were red, that meant the doors were all shut. If one of them turned green, that meant someone was leaving the room.

As a further security precaution, the dorm rooms were segregated by how difficult the kids were to handle. “D Unit” was for the bad boys. Kids would be put in there for coming to class late, for not cleaning up their rooms, for goofing around in class—stuff like that.

I spent a lot of time in D Unit.

At first I was really happy to be at Rancho Linda.

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