X-Ray Jolt

In X-ray Room No. 13 of Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital a 15-year-old girl with abdominal trouble diffidently stretched out on the X-ray table. The technician, a ruddy, healthy farm boy named Frank Brown, 28, who "was lucky to get a job at Bellevue right after coming out of high school," smiled reassuringly. He placed a metal cassette containing a photographing film under the girl, whose name was Martha Berger, adjusted the X-ray tube over her, turned on the current. There was a brief hum and the picture was made.

Technician Brown, long at the profession and in a hurry, as everyone at busy Bellevue must be, told the girl to turn on her side for another view of her insides. As he slid a second cassette under her with his right hand, with his left he started to push the tube into position. Then the accident happened which X-ray operators fear more than the sterilization which their profession makes practically inevitable.

Brown's right hand froze to the metal cassette and table. He had neglected to turn off the supply of electricity, and 75,000 volts, 37 times as powerful as prison executioners use in electric chairs, poured through him. Electric chairs use five amperes of electricity, X-ray machines only one-tenth of an ampere, and although that small unit rushed through him like straws blown by a tornado, sturdy Frank Brown had strength enough to haul his stiffened left hand away from the X-ray tube to tug at his right hand frozen to the metal. The current gripped his right hand also. Both hands began to burn and stink.

Young Patient Martha Berger sniffed, screamed, rolled off the table, scrambled from the room. Mrs. Grace Fusco, 48, X-ray assistant, whose back had been turned, noticed the commotion, grabbed Frank Brown's arm to pull him from the grip of the electricity. The 75,000 volts knocked her across the room. She staggered back for another tug. The man thought he shook his head to warn her away. But his muscles were too tense to do that. Mrs. Fusco saw only his popping eyes, grabbed again, was again knocked away.

By this time young Martha Berger, wondering if all this were part of the routine of taking X-ray pictures, put her head through the door. She was just in time to see Mrs. Fusco knocked down for a third time. The girl's screams summoned a man who turned off the current which then let Frank Brown fall unconscious to the floor.

Said Mrs. Fusco, who had a headache as result of the incident: "Screams are not unusual in our department. But the girl had good lungs--fine lungs, in fact--and she kept screaming so loud that they must have thought it was something different, and come running in."

Said Frank Brown, whose only apparent injuries were seared hands: "It must be the anticipation, the thinking about what you are going to feel in the days and hours before you go to the chair, that is the worst suffering.

"I know damned well that, if they told me today I'd have to go through at noon tomorrow what I've been through already, I'd jump right out of this bed and run from here to Jericho!"

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