Senator Noe was the first and apparently only donor, and it is my recollection that we met in the Heidelberg Hotel elevator Monday night when he told me he had “just given blood to Huey.” Mrs. Noe was with him at the time, said she was sure Senator Long would recover, and expressed the hope that future installments of the Saturday Evening Post’s biographical portrait would “do him proud.”
A little after two o’clock that afternoon Dr. Maes had prescribed a rectal instillation of laudanum, aspirin, brandy, and normal saline solution. Once this was given, the chart notes: “Resp. less labored, less cyanosis, P 148 Temp. 1034⁄5 axilla. Quieter.” During the handling that was incident to the instillation, Senator Long awoke and asked Dr. Maes whether he would be able to take the stump in the approaching campaigns. “It’s a little early to tell, yet,” the physician replied. As before, the patient lapsed into drugged slumber the moment the handling that had roused him came to an end.
As concerns the one transfusion recorded on the hospital chart, Dr. Cecil Lorio reports:
“I recall clearly the fact that the young physician who was to give the transfusion was so nervous, and his hands were shaking so, that he was having difficulty placing the needle in the vein that was to receive the blood; and my brother Clarence said to me, knowing that I frequently gave transfusions to children: ‘Dr. Cecil, haven’t you your equipment here so that you might assist in transfusing the Senator?’ I said I had, and of course to me, accustomed to performing this with the small veins of children, it was child’s play to place the needle in the large vein of a man. A number of volunteers—everybody wanted to volunteer—had already been typed, and one of those whose blood matched was State Senator James A. Noe. He was the first donor.
“But as the day wore on it became evident that the patient was losing blood about as fast as we were transfusing it into him, and while there were no external evidences of bleeding, the conclusion was that he must be hemorrhaging from the apex of the right kidney. So Dr. T. Jorda Kahle of New Orleans [head of the urology department of Louisiana State University’s College of Medicine] was sent for. He got to Baton Rouge Monday night and thrust a needle just under the skin of the kidney region and drew out a syringeful of blood. That made it evident the Senator’s case was hopeless, barring a miracle. The only way to stop such a hemorrhage would have been to remove the kidney, and that would certainly have killed him.
“At the end, the dying man threshed wildly about the oxygen tent that had been put over him. A little after four in the morning his breathing stopped.”
Mrs. Long and the three children—Rose, Russell, and Palmer—did not reach Baton Rouge until after the operation was over, in spite of the fact that the Airline’s new bridge across the Bonnet Carre Spillway was opened to the passage of their car, thanks to Earle Christenberry’s directions to the highway guards at Lousteau’s. Since the Senator was never really conscious after he left the operating room, the members of his family had little or no communion with the man who to them was not merely a public figure, but husband and father.
They were given rooms directly across the hall from the one in which physicians strove unremittingly to save Huey Long’s life. He had not been a very devoted family man. He was away from home too much in the pursuit of objectives it seemed impossible for him to share with the Rose McConnell he had met when he was a brash young door-to-door salesman of Cottolene.
Those days were now so long in the past, the happy days of shared trial when every penny had to be stretched to the uttermost. Success had come so quickly—the big ornate home in Shreveport, the new Executive Mansion at Baton Rouge of which Rose had been the first chatelaine, the elaborate residence on Audubon Boulevard, the days of triumph and rejoicing that followed the effort to impeach him....
All of it was now slipping away forever, while Huey Long’s blood seeped slowly but relentlessly out of his body, with no possibility short of a miracle of halting its ebb as some physician, now forever anonymous, made on his hospital chart a final entry to the effect that even “the oxygen tent discontinued as pt. grew very restless under it—delusions of photographers, etc.”