His lobotomy, his recovery, in his words

Howard Dully a professional bus driver for a tour company in San Jose where he lives with his wife. When Howard was 12 years old he was given a lobotomy. He is the author of a new book" My Lobotomy" about his life. THURSDAY, AUG 30, 2007 KURT ROGERS SAN JOSE SFC THE CHRONICLE LOBOTOMY_102_kr.jpg MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND SF CHRONICLE / NO SALES-MAGS OUT less Howard Dully a professional bus driver for a tour company in San Jose where he lives with his wife. When Howard was 12 years old he was given a lobotomy. He is the author of a new book" My Lobotomy" about his ... more Photo: KURT ROGERS Photo: KURT ROGERS Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close His lobotomy, his recovery, in his words 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

Until he was 5, Howard Dully was a happy child. That was the year his mother, June, died of cancer. June was "loving and indulgent," Dully writes, so devoted that his father once said, "I could've dropped dead and it wouldn't have made a bit of difference. She had you."

After his mother's death, neighbors started sewing and cooking, doing laundry for the Dullys. One of them, Lucille "Lou" Cox, became his stepmother two years later. Rigid and punitive, Lou hated Howard. When he was 12, she arranged for the boy to have a transorbital lobotomy.

The surgeon, Dr. Walter Freeman, did the procedure at Doctors General Hospital in San Jose. After sedating Howard with four jolts of electroshock, Freeman inserted two skewer-like steel knives into his skull, entering through the inside of the right and left eye sockets.

"(He) swirled them around," Dully writes, "until he felt he had scrambled things up enough." The lobotomy took 10 minutes to perform. The charge was $200.

This is the story that Dully, a 58-year-old San Jose bus driver, tells in his memoir, "My Lobotomy" ($24.95, Crown Publishers). It's a gruesome but compulsively readable tale, ultimately redemptive. Unlike most lobotomy patients - some became vegetables, 15 percent died - Dully was relatively unscathed.

"The biggest impact it made on me was my self-esteem," Dully says during a conversation in Jimmy's, a San Jose coffee shop with early-'60s decor. "You know, they changed me. They rearranged me. 'Am I me any more? Am I really crazy and don't know it?' These things all go through your mind."

Dully is hardly the picture of victimhood. Six-foot-seven, 330 pounds, he's a bear of a man with enormous hands, a voice like a cello and the visage of a grizzled biker. Until last year, he wore his mustache super-long and droopy, like Yosemite Sam, and then decided "I was hiding behind it."

No one would want to mess with this guy, but when you sit down with Dully you find a gentle, vulnerable man who speaks easily of emotional hurt. Traces of sadness are embedded in his face. His mood is subdued - or at least leveled - by the Prozac he's taken for four years.

What's surprising is Dully's lack of bitterness. Despite the lobotomy, despite the subsequent years when he was bounced from foster home to juvenile hall to mental institution - he says "there's no point" in being angry.

"I've worked through all that. The only person it's gonna hurt is me. My biggest question is 'Why?' Why would an adult play the game to the extent it was played? ... I'm not going to say I was walking on water and here came the evil stepmother who just had things poked into the back of my head. But I don't feel I did anything to deserve a lobotomy."

At 12, Dully was already 6 feet tall - a "hellious" kid, in his words. He lied and shoplifted on occasion. He smoked cigarettes. Hated homework. Because his dad worked three jobs and was never home, his stepmom meted out the discipline. "Lou was a fairly small woman and it finally got to the point where she'd spank me and I'd laugh. I think that scared her."

In "My Lobotomy," Dully and co-writer Charles Fleming describe how Lou consulted six psychiatrists in her search for a solution, and was told by four of them that she was the problem and not Howard. Finally, she found Freeman and convinced him that her stepson was a candidate for lobotomy.

Freeman, subject of a recent book, "The Lobotomist" by Jack El-Hai, didn't need to be lobbied or prodded. A psychiatrist and neurologist, he didn't invent the lobotomy but popularized and promoted it. Full of hubris, he touted the procedure's benefits at medical conventions, behaving, his partner James Watt said, "like a barker at a carnival."

When patients suffered permanent brain damage, Freeman was unfazed. "Maybe it will be shown," he said, "that a mentally ill patient can think more clearly and constructively with less brain in actual operation."

Given the brutality and imprecision of the lobotomy procedure, Dully is luckier than most survivors. He believes his tear ducts were damaged by the lobotomy and attributes his sinus problems to the procedure. His thinking processes, he says, "seem to go off in different directions to reach conclusions, instead of focusing down one path."

More than anything, he feels a loss - a sense of having missed his youth. "I still go to Los Altos, to the old house where I lived (before the lobotomy). Go to the schools that I went to. I get out of the car and walk around. I'd do it daily if I had time. For some reason it fascinates me.

"I think it gives me an attachment to when I had a family," he says, clearing his throat. "A normal family life. Mom and dad and brothers. Because from 12 years on my life was not normal."

Throughout his 20s and 30s, Dully had problems with alcohol, drugs and homelessness. He went sober in 1985 and quit smoking in 1994 after a heart attack. In his 40s, he went back to school and got a degree in computer information systems but found he was too old to find work in that youth-centric market.

"I'll never get to where my brothers are, because I started at 40 and they started at 20. I lost 20 years. It happened too late in some respects. That's just the way it is."

Dully credits his wife, Barbara, with putting him on a positive track. They met 22 years ago and got married in 1995. Wedding pictures show them in gown and tux, astride matching motorcycles. Dully has two sons, 30 and 27, from an earlier relationship and has worked as a bus driver for 10 years. He's on a leave of absence from San Jose Charter Bus while he promotes his book.

"My Lobotomy" began as a radio documentary on NPR's "All Things Considered" in November 2005. Producers Dave Isay and Piya Kochhar intended a profile on Freeman but when they found Dully, who had recently started researching lobotomy on the Internet, they fell in love with his story. They decided to focus on him instead, and urged him to narrate the piece in his gentle, resonant baritone.

Isay and Kochhar took Dully to Freeman's medical archives at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. "My file has everything," he says in the narration. "A photo of me with the ice picks in my eyes, medical bills. But all I care about are the notes. I want to understand why this was done to me."

The NPR piece captures a conversation with Dully and his father, Rodney, a former schoolteacher who was later divorced from Lou. "I was manipulated, pure and simple," his dad says in regard to the lobotomy.

But when Howard breaks down and professes his love to his dad, his father answers, "Whatever made you think I didn't know that? You shaped up pretty good!" He doesn't say "I love you" back.

"Ever since my lobotomy I've felt like a freak," Dully says at the end of the broadcast. (But) I know my lobotomy didn't touch my soul. For the first time, I feel no shame. I am, at last, at peace."

The response to the broadcast was huge. So many e-mails flooded in that NPR's Internet server collapsed. Today, Dully says, there's interest from Hollywood producers to make a TV movie or feature film from his book. "I'd love it, provided it's done with truth. I don't want any fictional account making someone out worse than they were or better than they were."

There's also a playwright in New York who, inspired by the NPR documentary, has written a play about Dully called "The Memory of Damage."

Dully, who looks like a Buddha as he sits in his favorite coffee shop, seems to regard the celebrity as a cosmic joke. For someone who spent his life plagued by self-doubts, who says he's still intimidated by his father, it's difficult to accept this attention.

"I tease my wife and other people, and say I have a swollen ego," he chuckles. "But I don't have any news people camping outside my door. I don't live in any mansion.

"My idea for writing the book was first to get a little closure - which I find a little selfish, but that's OK. The other reason was to help people to think about how we treat each other daily. Not just loved ones but everybody.

"Something you start here or say here may affect somebody's whole day, maybe their whole life. Ten minutes of what Freeman did to me has affected me for 47 years."