Staff. Previous history of parotid and pituitary tumors with horrible complications. Came in this time with chest pain, increasing weight loss, lethargy; difficulty breathing. Should I call the Fat Man? No. I'd see him myself first. I walked into the room.
Dr. Sanders lay flat on the stretcher, a black man looking twenty years older than he was. He tried to shake my hand, but he was too weak. I took his hand and told him my name.
'Glad to have you as my doctor.' he said.
Moved by his helplessness, his weak hand still lying trustfully in mine, I felt sad for him. 'Tell me what happened.'
He did. At first I was so nervous I could barely listen. Sensing this, he said, 'Don't worry, you'll do all right. Just forget I'm a doctor. I'm putting myself in your hands. I was where you are once, right here, years ago. I was the first Negro intern in the House. They called us 'Nigroes' then.'
Gradually, thinking of what the Fat Man had taught me, I began to feel more confident, more wide?awake, nervous, but excited. I liked this man. He was asking me to take care of him, and I would do my best. I went to work, and when the X ray showed fluid in the chest cavity, and I knew I'd better tap it to see what it was, I decided I'd page the Fat Man. Just as he arrived, I put together the findings and realized that the most likely diagnosis was malignancy. I got a sick feeling in my gut. The Fat Man, a jolly green blimp in his surgical pajamas, floated in, and with a few words with Dr. Sanders established a marvelous rapport. A warmth filled the room, a trust, a plea to help, a promise to try. It was what medicine might be. I tapped the chest. Since I'd practiced on Anna O., it was easy. The Fat Man was right: with the gomers you risked and learned, so when you had to perform, you did. And I realized that the reason the House Slurpers tolerated the Fat Man's bizarre ways was that he was a terrific doc. The mirror image of Putzel. I finished the tap, and Dr. Sanders, breathing more easily, said, 'You be sure to tell me what the cytology of that fluid is, all right? No matter what it shows.'
'Nothing will be definite for a few days,' I said.
'Well, you tell me in a few days. If it's malignant, I've got to make some plans. I've got a brother in West Virginia; our father left us some land. I've been putting off a fishing trip with him much too long.'
Outside the room; chills running up and down my spine as I thought of what might be in the test tubes of fluid in my pocket. I listened to the Fat Man ask, 'Did you see his face?'
'What about it?'
'Remember it. It's the face of a dying man. Good night.'
'Hey, wait. I figured it out?the reason they let you screw around the way you do is that you're good.'
'Good? Nah, not just good. Very good. Even great. Night?night.'
I wheeled Dr. Sanders back up to the ward and went back to bed just as the dawn was exploding the hot nasty night. The frenetic surgeons were just beginning their morning rounds, getting ready for a day of doing nice civic things like sewing people's hands back on people's arms, and the first shifts of Housekeeping were boogeying along in the House bowels. I pulled on my socks to go to the Fat Man's cardflip, and realized that I felt like socks: sweaty, stale, smelly, stiff, worn a day longer than I should have been. From the cardflip on, things began to melt, meld, and blur, and by lunchtime I?was so woozy that Chuck and Potts had to lead me through the cafeteria line to the table and the only thing I'd put on my tray was 'a big glass of iced coffee. I was so ataxic that when I tried to sit I banged my shin on the table leg, stumbled, and spilled the iced coffee all over my whites. It felt cool dripping through my crotch. It felt far off, somewhere else. That afternoon the Leggo was holding Chief's Rounds with our team. He came down the hallway wearing his usual butcher?length white coat with that long stethoscope wending its way across his chest and down and tucked into his pants, and he was whistling 'Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer troooo.' As he examined the patient, I had an urge to shove Levy into the Leggo so that both would tumble into bed with the gomer who was being saved at all costs, and I fantasized that 'Leggo' was somehow cryptographic for 'Let my gomers go,' and I pictured the Leggo leading the gomers out of the peaceful land of death into the bondage of prolonged pitiful suffering life, legging it through the Sinai wolfing down the unleavened bread and singing 'Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer troooo.'
Chaos. The blur blurred. I didn't think I would make it through the day. The nurse came up to me and said that my only Italian patient, nicknamed Boom Boom, who had no cardiac disease, was having chest pain. 3 walked into the room, where the family of eight were chattering away in Italian. I took an EKG, which was normal, and then, a showman with an audience of eight, decided to use the Fat Man's reverse stethoscopoe technique. I plugged Boom Boom in, and yelled into the megaphone: 'Cochlea come in! Cochlea come in! Do you read me, cochlea . . .' Boom Boom opened her eyes, shrieked, jumped, put her fist to her chest in the classic sign of cardiac pain, stopped breathing, and turned blue. I realized that I and eight Italians were witnessing a cardiac arrest. I thumped Boom Boom on the chest, which produced another shriek, signifying life. Trying to assure the family that this whole thing had been routine, I ushered them out and called an arrest code. The first to arrive was Housekeeping, for some reason carrying a bunch of lilies; next came a Pakistani anesthesiologist. With the ring of the Italian delegation in my ears, I felt like I was at the United Nations. Others arrived, but Boom Boom was now doing OK. Fats looked over the new EKG and said,
'Roy, this is the greatest day of this woman's life, 'cause she's finally had a bona fide heart attack'
I tried to pursuade the intensive?care resident to take her off my service, but taking one look and saying, 'Are you for real?' he refused the TURF. Sheepishly, trying to avoid the family, I slunk down the hallway. The Fat Man pointed out a valuable House LAW, NUMBER EIGHT: THEY CAN ALWAYS HURT YOU MORE. I finished my work for the day, and, woozy, paged Potts, to sign out to him for the night. I asked him how it was going.
'Bad. Ina's on some kind of rampage, stealing shoes and pissing in them. I never should have given her the Valium.'
'Yeah. To try to control her violence. Worked with the Runt, so I thought I'd try it on her. Made her worse.'
Walking to the elevator with the Fat Man, I said, 'You know, I think these gomers are trying to hurt me.'
'Of course they are. They try to hurt everyone.'
'What difference does that make? I never did anything to hurt them, and they're trying to hurt me.'
'Exactly, that's modern medicine.'
'You're crazy.'
'You have to be crazy to do this.'
'But if that's all there is, I can't take it. No way.'
'Of course you can, Roy. Trash your illusions, and the world will beat a pathway to your door.'
'And he was gone. I waited for Berry to pick me up outside the House. When she saw me, her face twisted in disgust.
'Roy! You're green! Phew! Stinky! Green and stinky! What happened?'
'They got me.'
'Got you?'
'Yeah. They killed me.'
'Who did?'
'The gomers. But the Fat Man just told me that they hurt everybody and that's modern medicine so I don't know what to think anymore. He said to trash my illusions and the world would beat a pathway to my door.'
'That sounds bizarre.'
'That's what I said too, but now I'm not so sure.'
'I could make you feel better,' said Berry.
'Just tuck me in.'
'What?'
'Just put me in my bed and tuck me in'
'But today's your birthday. We're going out to dinner, remember?'
'I forgot.'
'Your own birthday and you forgot?'
'Yup. I'm green and stinky, and just tuck me in.'
She tucked me in, and green and smelly as I was said she loved me all the same and I said I loved her too but it was a lie because they had destroyed something in me and it was some lush thing that had to do with love and I was asleep before she closed the door.
