Word: painful
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Stand the Pain. After three years with Updyke on radio. Backus fell into a fat part as the judge on TV's now-defunct I Married Joan comedy series, whose reruns are still "in orbit." Discovered at last, Backus made 47 feature movies (best role: James Dean's father in Rebel Without a Cause). But Backus ("always too early or too late'') began his movie career at the start of Hollywood's slump. He often suspects that papa was right. Once that businesslike gentleman from Cleveland sniffed scornfully around the movie lots, pronounced one studio...
...Pathology. Called pulmonary alveolar proteinosis (because protein-like particles are deposited in the lungs' alveoli, or air sacs), it has been found in 27 patients, all but one in the last three years. Sometimes heralded by fever, it is usually marked by labored breathing, a cough and chest pain, while in X rays the lungs look waterlogged. Nine patients have died, five have improved, the rest show no change...
...contrast with patients who had real heart disease but often denied any pain, the neurotics persistently described the most severe symptoms. They identified themselves with genuine heart-disease victims ranging from relatives to President Eisenhower. They also showed "a high degree of secondary gain"-profiting from their imagined ailments, they got warm family sympathy and financial help, which released them from pressures and responsibility...
When told the bad news that their health was good, the neurotics angrily refused to believe it. One man went so far as to collect notarized statements from numerous friends to prove his continued pain. Another rushed off to a second VA hospital, succeeded in getting back his angina pectoris status (and Government compensation). Advanced cardiac neurotics, concluded the doctors, cannot give up their way of life. It may even be dangerous to disillusion them, and best to go on treating them as real heart patients. In fact, "their eventual incapacity equals [that from] the most serious type of heart...
...month, at her family's home in Hewlett Harbor, L.I., Sharry Rubin sought emotional satisfaction, probably for an unconscious need, by gorging herself. She put away the equivalent of three full meals, including a lot of meat. In midafternoon she was admitted to Meadowbrook Hospital with crippling abdominal pain; early in the evening, when doctors were about to operate, she died...