Strange items from the campaign

Of Bill Clinton, 'pump head' syndrome and Hillary's defeat

By J. Mudcat Miller

Many people dread a visit to the dentist, but I actually look forward to mine. That's because I have the most entertaining dentist in the world. His name is Al.

Over the years Al has made more than a few transformative remarks while my mouth was too filled with hardware to do anything but gurgle appreciatively in response. Once, for instance, he observed that my teeth were a microcosm of the American socio-political scene, by which I think he meant slow, steady decay.

But he outdid himself during my last visit. As I lay there gurgling, he went off on his usual tangents, mentioning gunshot impact effects and a few other choice oddities before arriving, inevitably, at Hillary. "Inevitably" because, well, she's perfect dentist-visit fodder, but also because it was Friday, the day before she was to announce her exit from the campaign trail.

From Hillary, of course, it was only a small step to Bill, and that's when the visit got gripping.

"You know why he's been behaving like this, don't you?" Dr. Al queried.

"Gurgle."

"He's got machine head."

"Urgle?"

He went on to describe a magazine article he'd read a few years ago about side-effects of the heart-lung machine, to which patients are often attached during coronary surgery.

"It does weird things to blood cells," he said. "They get banged around in there, slamming up the machine's walls. They get hammered into strange shapes, like boxes and corkscrews and stuff."

Then, according to Al, once off the machine, those misshapen blood cells can cause mayhem in the patient's body or, more observably, the patient's brain.

"Like a series of tiny strokes," Dr. Al said. "They call it machine head. That's what happened to Bill Clinton," he maintained categorically. "That's why he's been acting so crazy."

Wow.

Sometimes, in our day-to-day lives, we hear bizarre ideas and concepts. But when Al launches one I tend to think wow because he's usually right, or at least very close to it.

So I went home vowing to check into this earth-shaking deduction. If true, it explained so much. Why one of the brightest lights in American politics had been short-circuiting so badly during primary season, snapping at reporters, sliming Obama clumsily, torpedoing his wife's campaign.

Sure enough, he was right, except for one detail.

They call it "pump head."

Some Googling took me to a 1999 treatise about Billy Cohn, who took a soup ladle and customized it by cutting holes in it, and then used it during coronary surgery to hold the heart steady and keep blood from pumping through incisions, but allowing him to suture through the holes he'd drilled in the ladle. A simple, brilliant solution, but not one that was used during Bill Clinton's 2004 quadruple coronary-bypass surgery. And so, in Dr. Al's professional opinion, the former POTUS came out with pump head, which was causing his erratic behavior.

Dr. Al maintains that he put all this together himself and I believe him. He comes up with brilliant connections all the time.

But further Googling revealed that he wasn't the only one to connect the dots. Just a few days before, Vanity Fair had published a 9,647-word opus by Todd Purdum on Bill Clinton, snappily headlined "The Comeback Id," and subheaded, "Bubba trouble."

Deep into it, after exploring some other likely causes for Clinton's erratic behavior, Purdum talks about the potential effects of the bypass surgery, quoting a prominent Johns Hopkins cardiologist who said, "It's very similar to postpartum depression." Also, "a lot of people are never really the same again." And "their mood is not right."

Further checking revealed that others had already reached this conclusion.

"One of the savviest politicians of our generation, known for his wit, charm, and calm under extreme pressure, Bill Clinton appears out of character in the speeches and interviews televised since his bypass surgery September 6, 2004," wrote Dr. John McDougall of McDougall Wellness Center in Santa Rosa, Calif., a while back.

"[A]nd his mental deterioration may be accelerating," wrote the doctor. "Remember, this is the president who withstood public impeachment before the entire world for his relationship with Monica Lewinski without once losing control. Now, he is easily angered by hecklers, and makes factual mistakes and racial slurs while aggressively defending his wife's campaign for presidency. Everyone sees his mental and emotional decline, yet to date, no medical professionals have spoken out about the cause or offered help."

McDougall then does so, diagnosing Clinton from afar with "post bypass surgery cognitive dysfunction" and writing, "One of the best-kept secrets in medicine is the brain damage caused during bypass surgery." That damage is "so common that hospital personnel refer to it as 'pump head.' "

Unlike the "Bubba trouble" subhead deployed by Vanity Fair, McDougall's column was topped with "We Need to Understand and Show Some Compassion." The doctor goes on to do that, writing, "I am saddened to see our former president suffer from public humiliation, but I am disgraced that my profession has thus far failed to come forward with a long over-due explanation and an apology to the Clintons and our nation for the harm they have done and the secrets they have kept."

Further checking revealed that even Dr. McDougall wasn't first with this revelation. Back in September 2004, shortly after Clinton's surgery, freelance writer Judy Foreman wrote in the Boston Globe, "With luck and his relative youth and health going for him, Clinton, 58, hopefully will rebound in both heart and mind from the surgery." And yet, "many people who go through the procedure -- as 305,000 Americans did in 2001 ... -- find that, at least for a few days, often for weeks and sometimes for years afterward, their brains don't work as well as they did before."

A few hours later I watched Hillary make her concession speech, giving up a history-making run for the White House. And I couldn't help wondering if she realized that her husband's bypass surgery in 2004 might have played a key role in the demise of her campaign.

I doubt if even Dr. Al knows the answer to that.