Being Shot [Part 2 – Final]

By Ed Rogers

The following account is a true story. I have used the real names of individuals who were with me during the time recounted. [Part 1 appeared on Saturday.]


Seven days later, I opened my eyes. A plastic oxygen tent covered the top half of my body. Through the plastic I saw my mother with two girls from my school that she was sneaking into my room because I wasn’t allowed to have visitors. I asked what she was doing there and she let out a holler for a nurse.
    I learned that I had been in a coma for seven days, and the doctor had told her I might never wake up. Two nurses came rushing in and started poking and prodding me. Then the pain hit. My entire mid-section cried out at once. I was given a shot of morphine and soon floated off on a cloud. The following week was like a dream. I got a shot of morphine every four hours but a shot’s effects wore off after three, and the fourth hour was hell.
    I had private nurses round the clock. The one that came on at midnight was going to quit because I cussed so much when the shot stopped working. I don’t even remember her. I would remember people coming into my room to visit and would either not remember them leaving or remember them leaving but not remembering when they had arrived.

Now all of
the rich kids
wanted to be
my friend

        Bobby Hurst came to see me for a seventh time, but I didn’t remember him ever being there before. He said I talked with him each time he came. Bobby was the only other friend I knew at the time who had a car. After I got out of the hospital, all of the rich kids wanted to be my friend and they would come by my house and pick me up to go to parties out of the blue. I never did understand that.

Tubes were coming out of me at three places. One was draining from just below my left breast, another from my right side, and there was the catheter.
    At sixteen, erections happen out of nowhere. One night I was coming down from my last shot before the pain had started. It was semi-dark in the room, and the nurse had a small lamp by her chair and was reading a book. The hospital seemed asleep. That was when it happened.
    I was not thinking of anything, especially not anything dealing with sex. But the pain that began as my penis filled with blood and enlarged was unbelievably bad. I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I damn sure wasn’t going to call the nurse.
    As with all boys, I heard and believed a lot of stupid shit. One was that there was a spot on the penis that could be thumped and it would go down. I’m here to tell one and all that there is no such place. Lucky for me, the pain from the erection was surpassed by the pain from my wound. And then, finally, I got the next shot of morphine.
    The next day, when the doctor came around, I told him the catheter had to come out. I didn’t care if I never took another piss, that thing had to go. When I explained what had happened, he laughed and had it removed.

Warren Rogers

My father was retired from the Air Force and, as such, I was a dependent. They moved me to Harlingen Air Force Base, which was just outside of town. It limited the number of visitors I had, but my aunt worked at the hospital and we lived across the street from the main gate, so it was easier on my mother and aunt.
    I was now in a ward with about nine other men. At the far end of the ward was a retired Coast Guardsman. He would wake up at midnight every night, like a clock had gone off in his head. He would take out his Bull Durham smoking tobacco and roll a smoke. When he finished it he would toss the butt into the middle of the floor and go back to sleep.
    Speaking of sleeping, I could only sleep on my back and my left side because of the stitches running from where the bullet entered and stopping under my right arm. (I still have the scar running across my torso.) At the hospital in town, the tubes had been removed.
    At last I was taken to a room where the staples and the stitches were removed, and that night I decided to roll onto my belly. Rolling over wasn’t easy, and after I managed it I discovered that laying on my belly wasn’t as pleasant as I had thought it would be. I tried to roll back over, but could not do it. The muscles in my midsection had yet to mend, and there was no strength in them. Nor could I reach my buzzer. And everybody else in that ward were bedridden from their operations and couldn’t help, so I lay on my belly all night, waiting for my aunt to show up on her way to work.

A sergeant
took me under
his wing

The next day, they moved me to a different ward. I was walking now, as were the men in the new ward. A sergeant who had had a kidney operation took me under his wing. He was across from me and two beds to my left.
    They brought in a young airman the same day who looked to be about my age and was in bad shape because his appendix had ruptured. I guessed from his arrival that the ward I had been in was full.
    They placed him in the bed next to me, and that night he woke me calling out for help. He said he couldn’t reach his buzzer and he was in terrible pain, so would I call for the nurse.
    The nurse, who was a man, came in and checked the airman’s chart. He said the doctor had not ordered any pain medicine and the airman would have to wait until the doctor made his rounds the next morning.
    I listened to the guy cry and moan for an hour and hit the buzzer again. The same nurse came in and I told him that the airman needed something for the pain and he should call someone. The nurse told me that if I ring the buzzer one more time he would take it away.
    That was when my friend the sergeant (who had taken me under his wing) got into the conversation. The sergeant was on the side of his bed with his metal water pitcher in his hand. He called out for all to hear, “You touch that buzzer and you’ll be wearing this pitcher upside your head.”
    The next morning they rushed the airman back to the operating room. My sergeant friend filed a report against the nurse and we never saw the airman or the nurse again.

I was feeling pretty good after being in the hospitals for five weeks and was ready to get the hell out, but I had lost so much weight they wouldn’t let me go home until I weighed 120 pounds. So, I would walk to the mess hall and load my tray up with food. The first time I did that, I learned to carry a towel with me. My muscles were too weak to hold the weight of all that food and I had to wrap the towel around my body to walk back to my bed.
    One of the girls from school whose father was stationed on the base had a car with a base sticker on it and would load up her car full of girls and come visit me. I was very popular among the young airmen in the wards; they all wanted to be introduced to the girls.

A doctor told me
I would never
get into the military

    At last, I was set free. The doctor told me it would be at least a year before I regained my mobility, and I would never get into the military. I went home on a Wednesday and that Friday Bobby Hurst and Jack picked me up and we met Bones Russell, along with Buddy and Bobby Tanner, down in Boystown, Mexico.
    My father died two months later and was buried at the military cemetery in San Antonio; he was 43. I’ve heard people today say that after death or close-to-death experiences they felt like they were a different person. But at the time I was going through my ordeal, I had not yet heard anyone say that, but I did experience the feeling.
    It has always seemed to me that the person I was the day I was shot died that day, and another person was born as me. I don’t mean I saw the light and became a noble person. I mean I really was a different person – a person I didn’t know or understand. I lost interest in school and the dreams that that the other person had had.
    So, when a friend suggested we join the Army, I said, “Why the hell not? I need to get away from here.”
    Less than a year after I was shot, I joined the Army with an “A” profile. I had turned 17 on Jan. 3, 1960, and on the 28^th, the Army said I was in top physical condition.

    It didn’t take me long to figure out that the Army and I were not a good match, but that’s a whole different story.

Copyright © 2021 by Ed Rogers