I remember it like it was yesterday: Walking home from a random party around 2AM, passing the Gem Spa newsstand on St Marks Place, and literally bursting into tears when I saw the headline. “Andy Warhol Dead at 58.” It was COMPLETELY unexpected. I had just fangirled over him at a dinner party two weeks earlier. And before that at a club opening in December. It was inconceivable that the man who DEFINED New York in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s could be gone JUST LIKE THAT.
The details were few. Apparently, he had gone in for a routine gallbladder operation, and died later that night.
Over the next few days we learned more. The operation was originally deemed successful, and Warhol seemed to be recuperating just fine. He was in his room making calls by that evening. A private nurse checked on him at 4AM and still everything was AOK. But about two hours later, when she returned, he was blue and unresponsive and resuscitation efforts failed. An autopsy concluded that “ventricular fibrillation” was the cause of death, meaning that “Warhol’s heart had quivered and stopped.”
That someone so vibrant and full of life could go into the hospital for a routine operation and just… die… was confounding. There HAD to be more to the story.
Now, more than three decades later, Dr John Ryan, emeritus chief of surgery at Virginia Mason Hospital in Seattle, has given an interview to the New York Times in which he suggests Warhol’s death was not so simple after all. Warhol had had gallbladder trouble for almost 15 years prior to the operation, and multiple factors complicated the surgery.
For at least a month before his death, Warhol had been ill, but had done his best to keep up his usual exhausting pace. His terror of hospitals had prevented him from getting any serious treatment. Even once Warhol had finally ended up in the office of Bjorn Thorbjarnarson, a leading surgeon — he was known for treating the Shah of Iran — Warhol had begged for some kind of stay-at-home treatment. “I will make you a rich man if you don’t operate on me,” the artist had said, Dr. Thorbjarnarson recalled during my visit to his New Jersey home in 2014. (He is now 95 and lives in Florida.)
Dr. Thorbjarnarson refused Warhol’s entreaties and found himself justified three days later, when the sick man was at last on the operating table at New York Hospital (now NewYork-Presbyterian). The surgeon found a gallbladder full of gangrene; the organ fell to pieces as he removed it, he said.
Um, ew.
As Dr. Ryan learned in his research, Warhol was dehydrated and also emaciated from having barely eaten in the previous month; had for years been taking a daily dose of speed; and was still suffering from the effects of a brush with death in 1968, when he was shot by an enraged hanger-on, Valerie Solanas. Only a brilliant surgeon and brilliant luck had saved his life then — he had been declared dead in the emergency room and had nine damaged organs.
Recovery from his gunshot wounds took forever and was never fully complete. He was left with a lifetime of trouble eating and swallowing, as well as a split in his abdominal muscles that gave him a large hernia. (He wore girdles to hold in his bowels.) So in 1987, on top of the tricky gallbladder removal, Dr. Thorbjarnarson would have had no choice but to repair Warhol’s abdominal wall.
“Girdles to hold in his bowels” – that’s quite a visual.
I never knew.
Concludes the Times:
When a sick body goes through the trauma of a major operation, the stress on the entire system, including the heart, can sometimes be fatal, he explained. Warhol, Dr. Walsh said in a phone interview, “was unlucky.”
When Dr. Ryan entered the data from Warhol’s case into the new Surgical Risk Calculator of the American College of Surgeons, it put such a patient’s chance of dying at 4.2 percent.
Warhol had cheated death once, in June 1968, when his surgeon gave even odds on the artist lasting the night. In their second go-round, death took the longer odds, and won.
Read the whole article here.
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