William Henry Devereaux II’s Urinary Crisis and Hospitalization

William Henry Devereaux II’s urinary crisis turns an abstract question about what he wants into an urgent physical answer. After recurring painful difficulty urinating, he finally produces a forceful stream in the men’s room, laughs uncontrollably, and blacks out. He wakes in the hospital with a head injury and Lily at his side. Later tests find no tumor or prostate abnormality, and his ability to urinate returns, but the cause remains uncertain: a physician offers a stress-related explanation, while Hank reads a small sound in the porcelain as evidence that he passed a stone.

Background and Recurring Symptoms

The crisis is not a single interruption but a recurrence. After an earlier episode that left his chinos soiled, Hank’s urination has returned to a painful dribble. At a late dinner, he pays for his meal and Tony’s, then tells his companion he needs to stop at the men’s room. Tony offers to wait, but Hank, expecting that he may be some time, sends him home. The embarrassment of the earlier episode has not made the next one easier: by this point Hank describes himself as painfully and angrily backed up.

The contrast between the episodes gives the problem its unsettling rhythm. Hank has recently experienced an extraordinary release, yet it has not resolved the difficulty; he has reverted to dribbling and fears what his body may be telling him. His attention is caught between the ordinary expectation of being able to relieve himself and the possibility that his inability to do so signals something worse. The crisis is both concrete and unexplained, a bodily failure that resists the reassurance of routine.

The Question and the Collapse

During a later confrontation in the dean’s office, Jacob Rose challenges Hank for declining a proposed course of action. Jacob is angry that Hank will not accept his offer, and turns the disagreement into a broader indictment of Hank’s habit of frustrating other people’s expectations. He invokes Lily and the strain of being married to a man he considers perverse, then asks the question he believes Hank cannot answer: what does he want?

The exchange unfolds alongside Hank’s physical distress. Nausea comes in waves; he sweats, his fingers tingle, and the edges of his vision blur. When Jacob blocks the door to press for an answer, Hank is struggling to remain upright. The office argument may read as a demand for self-knowledge, but Hank’s immediate need is neither figurative nor open to interpretation. He takes Jacob by the lapels, draws him close, and solemnly says that he wants to pee. The blunt answer punctures the grand scale of Jacob’s challenge without resolving the larger questions behind it.

Hank hurries into the corridor toward the men’s room, unzipping as he goes. When Jacob follows a minute or so later, Hank is still laughing and cannot explain what Jacob is witnessing. The stream is powerful, confident, and intensely relieving. Hank hears a distinct plink against the porcelain, which he takes as the sound of a small pebble. The relief gives way to a blackout; the last thing he remembers is the moment in the restroom.

Hospitalization and Medical Explanation

Hank regains consciousness in a hospital room with Lily beside him. At first he is disoriented, unsure why he is in a bed and absorbed in the dream from which he has just awakened. Lily explains that he blacked out and hit his head. He has a headache, but says that he feels good, and Lily tells him that Phil Watson expected the painkillers to leave him feeling that way. The hospitalization thus follows a blackout and head injury during the urinary episode, rather than a diagnosis already established as its cause.

Afterward, Phil puts Hank through a full battery of tests focused on his urinary tract and prostate. The results provide substantial reassurance: there is no tumor, and examinations find neither asymmetry nor enlargement of the prostate. More important to Hank’s daily life, he is again urinating freely, regularly, and without discomfort. The recovery is clear even though its explanation is not. The examinations rule out several feared physical problems but do not identify a definite mechanical cause for the temporary retention.

Phil’s probable explanation is a condition he calls hysterical prostate: a rare disturbance that is partly physical and partly psychological. He attributes it to stress, aided by Hank’s overuse of antihistamines during the spring to deal with allergies and colds. Hank suspects that Phil may have invented the phrase to entertain him and account for symptoms that otherwise remain difficult to explain. The diagnosis connects the crisis to strain and medication while preserving the uncertainty that runs through the episode.

Recovery, Interpretation, and Significance

Hank is not satisfied with a diagnosis that explains the symptoms but leaves out the sound he heard. He tells Phil that the first blast against the porcelain produced a distinct plink, which he interprets as proof that he had passed a stone. Phil objects that a stone large enough to make an audible sound could not pass through a human ureter and would have caused considerable bleeding; Hank had experienced none. The two accounts remain sharply different: medical reasoning rejects the stone as physically implausible, while Hank’s interpretation gives the sudden release a tangible cause and a private, almost poetic certainty.

The episode’s resolution is therefore practical but not absolute. Hank’s tests are reassuring and the painful retention ends, yet neither fact conclusively settles what produced the crisis. Its narrative force comes from the collision between bodily urgency and the language of intention: Jacob demands that Hank name a desire, and Hank can answer only with the immediate need his body has made impossible to ignore. The humiliating simplicity of that answer becomes, in turn, the opening to relief, blackout, hospitalization, and a recovery whose meaning remains contested.