Letter from Margaret Baumeister to Minnie, 24 April 1953 — page 3: pre-amputation schedule
Book 2, Page 225 ·1953
Transcription
morning, and is much less tense. She is making her peace with the dreadful actuality, and is going to accept it and deal with it day by day, as it comes. She has told me several times that the amputation is a simple surgical operation, not nearly so trying as appendicitis, and that Puck will be given plenty of narcotic to deaden the post-operative pains. He is to go into a private room on Sunday, and early Monday morning the amputation is scheduled. Dee will be allowed to spend the night in his room if she wishes, and there will be no visiting hours for her, she can be with Puck constantly until he is off the critical list, and back in the Ward with his little friends. I think Dee plans to keep him here until they are able to teach him to manage himself, as she has seen some of the other little “amputees” doing. She feels Puck will need her more after the operation than he does now, and she seems to have a mischievous feeling that out of this painful ordeal she is having a gay and pleasant visit in New York.
“I shall be so rotten spoiled when I go home,” she says, “Everybody asks what I would like to do, and tries to fit in with my plans, wants to do what will suit me. It will take me a long time to get back to normal.”
She says Puck is overwhelmed with gifts, letters
AI Notes
Third page of Margaret Baumeister’s 24 April 1953 letter to Minnie (Mary Annie FitzSimons Allston — the compiler’s sister, who shared the ‘Minnie’ nickname with their late mother Mary Anne Perry FitzSimons d. Jan 1934). Continues the previous pages’ account of Dee Corbell (Emma Dee Walker Corbell, the compiler Amy’s daughter) and her young son Puck at Memorial Hospital, NY. This page focuses on the operative schedule: Puck moves to a private room Sunday with the amputation scheduled for Monday morning. Margaret describes Dee’s acceptance and resolve, and quotes Dee on feeling ‘rotten spoiled’ by New York friends. Hand-written in blue fountain-pen ink on yellowed lined stationery. The ‘Minnie’ / ‘Dee’ / ‘Puck’ identifications match the canonical forms used on the companion sheets pp223 and 224 in the same letter: Minnie = Mary Annie FitzSimons Allston (compiler’s sister, not the elder Minnie Perry who died 1934); Dee = Emma Dee Walker Corbell, m. Dr. Robert Corbell Jr. 1938; little Puck = the Corbell child, undergoing deep X-ray treatment and now scheduled for amputation, named after his maternal grandfather James Pickens Walker Sr. (‘Puck’ = the elder).