Chapter Two
When I was still capable of being a law enforcement officer, I have been shot.
That hurts and hurts a whole lot! A bullet, even one, plowing into your skin and muscles and into the bone and whatever else!- then the intense pain you feel as the bullet lies there inside your body, is something no cop ever wants to experience!
Like when it was close to Thanksgiving in 1978, and inside my car Starsky was using an Examiner rag mag and me to test his ESP skills. A bit later on we responded to a call, and that is when a black female shot me inside a house she was robbing with a black male. I chose not to shoot her even though I had the chance to shoot her first, because she was just a teen. Just a teen. And so was the black male.
And I could've died then but didn't. I pulled through because of Starsky- even though he was partnered with the pretty Joan Meredith, and even though the bullet from the gun the teen girl had shot me with lodged itself a mere six inches from my heart.
The doctor took it out and stitched up the wound so that the scar is barely noticeable. Unlike the many scars I have from being burned so badly that even plastic surgery can't take care of.
That's right. Me. 'Hutch.' Severely burned.
Fire doesn't choose its victim depending on whether someone is considered by the majority of the human population as being physically beautiful. Or considered as being ugly. Fire does not have a preference on whom it chooses to strike.
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Then there was the time, later on in the same year I was shot, when having botulism isn't a party either.
I was exhausted! Past beat! And if that wasn't bad enough, even though Pardee was in police custody, I was, on top of everything else-dizzy! Was seeing double of everything! Had difficulty swallowing and problems talking, as well as had facial weakness on both sides of my face. Nausea, vomiting and abdominal cramps! Oh, Wow! Then there was the sweating which had increased that I had to deal with, and all that sweating would've done me in if not for Starsky bathing me with cool water and a washcloth.
And in Memorial Hospital, Starsky and I were even more alarmed when this one physician told us just how close my whole body was to being paralyzed!
The look on Starsky's face, too, telling me that a different doctor had already told him that one of the symptoms of botulism was the person who had it could very well end up paralyzed.
Due to botulism, I spent twelve whole nights and days in Memorial Hospital, and with a breathing tube stuck down my throat, and other medical things done to me. But once I was well, I was well. No symptoms of botulism remained.
Though not botulism, or anything like it, that wasn't so with spending a whole lot of nights and days in the hospital from being severely burned.
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As for the time I, as well as some other people including Richie Yeager, were in Memorial Hospital in Bay City, and deathly ill from the plague, we were eventually given a shot in the thigh.
I don't know about those other people, but the shot they gave me hurt, and combined with the pain caused by the plague, I was not in a good mood, to say the least.
And I recall someone…probably a nurse in a gown and a mask telling me, "Sorry about that shot hurting, Hutch. But it will keep you alive."
At least doctor Judith Kauffman (she and I had become smitten with each other before it was found out I had the plague) and the male Dr. Meredith- both from the Center for Disease Control in Alabama-had been able to make whatever was in that shot from the prince of all hit men Thomas Callendar's blood. -
Callendar was the walking cure for the plague. You see… Richie's mom had a boarding house out in the sticks of Bay City. It was there that before Richie fell ill and with no professional medical help that Richie and his mom took care of the sick Callendar. But it was Callendar's immune system that made the antibodies needed for him to keep from dying from the plague.
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My days and nights spent in Memorial Hospital with the plague even combined with the time I spent in there with botulism, had been short compared to how I felt destined to be a permanent resident in West Hills Hospital, and all because of being burned so badly!
West Hills-the best hospital in southern California for those who are burned.
And like I already mentioned, being severely burned is the tremendously horrible thing that happened to me when I was in my late thirties that would forever change my life! Starsky's too! And other people's life's who I was close to.
That's right, me - Ken Hutchinson - severely burned!
Doesn't matter at all if prior to that the majority of people thought I was so handsome. So beautiful. Because (again) fire doesn't have a preference on whom it chooses to strike.
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Speaking of life's frightful moments, this nurse- Diana Harmon- was jealous if I paid any attention at all to another woman.
Because Diana couldn't have me all to herself, she tried to murder me, slicing my arm open with a knife…a big one… while I was taking a shower inside my Venice Place apartment I had at that time.
Getting out of the shower and winding my bathrobe tightly around my arm and using it as a makeshift tourniquet, I still lost quite a lot of blood.
Was in a lot of pain, and felt like I might faint, and by then I was in the hallway outside my apartment door. Then Starsky arrived and attended to my needs and the paramedics showed up. But Starsky didn't stop taking care of me though, even helping the hospital's medical staff take care of me, and just like he always does when I'm in there sick or hurt.
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Then there was that slimeball who wore a cheap toupee, Vic Humphries.
With his lawyer's assistance, he hired this mean guy- Roy Slater- to kill me. Slater had no quibbles at all ramming the dump truck he was driving into the driver's side of my Ford Galaxie 500 and off the road and into a canyon.
The car rolled over several times and combined with being thrown out of it, I had lots of nasty lumps and bruises. A bloody gash on my forehead. But a whole lot worse was my left leg was trapped underneath the heavy metal of my overturned car.
After Starsky arrived, I overheard some of those paramedics who afterwards showed up talking about how my leg might have to be amputated!
It still causes me to sometimes have nightmares that it might have needed to be amputated, and I cry out to Starsky. Yet even those nightmares don't make me so anxious I feel like I'm being suffocated.
But…
As for this forever life-changing incident of being burned I'm talking about, the haunting memories from when I first caught on fire…
The memories that don't fade of all the other horrible stuff I've been through because of catching on fire—memories so horrific that sometimes it is very difficult to finish a sentence about what catching on fire can do...
That at times, even a firefighter, or someone who works in a burn unit finds it hard to discuss what kind of agony and suffering a burned person goes through- do cause me to have those tormenting nightmares and make me feel like I am being suffocated.
Even with Starsky there in the bed with me, lying beside me with his arms wrapped tightly around me, and feeling the warmth of them along with hearing the musical rhythmic beat of his heart as the side of my head lies there on his chest.
A chest that normally I would prefer as smooth as silk, and even though it's not as hairy as an ape's, it is still hairy and tickles my ear.
Anyhow, I still pray that one day those suffocating nightmares of catching on fire do stop.
Pray one day they will stop just like the panic attacks did that came about because of that mobster Ben Forest and his thugs Monk, Coney, and Walsh.
How I was kidnapped, had the living daylights beaten out of me, then was strung out on heroin ('Poppy Seed Paradise' I sometimes like to call it, and so does Starsky)-until the heroin was unmercifully withheld from me, and the pain of withdrawal so bad I coughed up where Jeanie Walden was!
Then I was given another shot of the highly addictive drug…
Then later, inside Huggy Bear's Bar and Grill in an upstairs room used as a crash pad, with Starsky and Hug making me go cold turkey off the heroin!
I sincerely thought the torturous pain and suffering was going to be the worse I would ever experience.
It was a piece of cake in comparison to catching on fire! And, the withdrawal only lasted 48 hours.
Not so with catching on fire as the excruciating pain and anguish and suffering goes on and on and on and on and on and on….
