'Why not?'
'Never mind. I gotta go, but listen, whatever you do, do not take her back to your place. Go to her place. Remember: FAKE HIGH, GO LOW. So long:'
For some reason, admission diagnoses in the House of God ran in spurts: three cardiac, two renal, four pulmonary. That hot and dismal night, the disease matched the oppression?it was cancer night at the House. First it was a little tailor named Saul. As I read his chart in the E.W., Howard?the tern who seemed to love every aspect of the ternship and whom I hated for that?bubbling with excitement at 'really being a doc,' told me that Saul had pneumonia. The blood smear told me that Saul had acute leukemia, his pneumonia being part of his generalized sepsis because his white cells didn't work. Saul knew he was sick, although he didn't know yet how sick, and when I wheeled him to X-Ray for his chest film, I asked him if he could stand up by himself.
'Stand up? I could peech a full game,' said Saul, and fell down. I propped him up, this little bony just- young?enough?to?die old man, whom I'd just told he had leukemia. As I left him to himself in front of the X?ray beam, his boxer shorts fell down.
'Saul,' I said, 'you're losing your shorts.'
'Yeh. So? Here I'm losing my life, and you tell me I'm losing my shorts?'
I was moved. He was all of our grandfathers. With the laconic resignation of a Diasporic Jew he was watching the latest Nazi?leukemia?force him from his only real home, his life. Leukemia was the epitome of my helplessness, for the treatment was to bomb the bone marrow with cell poisons called cytotoxins until it looked, under the microscope, like Hiroshima, all black, empty, and scorched. And then you waited to see whether the marrow regenerated any healthy cells, or the same old cancer. Since there was a period of time when there were no blood cells?no whites to fight infection and no reds to carry oxygen and no platelets to stop bleeding?to deliver care was to fight: the infection and transfuse red cells for oxygen ands platelets to control bleeding, all the time creating more bleeding and anemia by drawing blood for countless' tests. Terrific. I'd gone through it with Dr. Sanders,: and I hated it. The start of this horrific treatment was to inject modified rat poison, nicknamed the Red Death for its color and the way it eroded your skin if you splashed it around; directly into Saul's veins. Thinking 'so long, marrow,' I did so, brimming with disgust.
The second E.W. admission: Jimmy the name, cancer the game. Young enough to die for sure. Howard, smiling, chubby, smoking his chubby pipe like a TV doc, presented the case to me: pneumonia, and Howard thought he might have leukemia. One look at Jimmy's chest X Ray showed that Howie had missed a homungus lung cancer that would kill Jimmy pretty quick. As I worked on him in the E.W., trying to shoo away the hovering Howie, I heard Hooper battling a gomere behind the next curtain. The gomere, his third admission of the night, was trying to kick him in the nuts. I asked Hooper how it was going.
'Terrible. MOR, Roy, MOR.'
'MOR?'
'Marriage On Rocks. We're both doing everything we can?joined a California?style sauna where they whip you with hot eucalyptus leaves and give you some aquanude group psychotherapy but I don't think it's going to work. The little woman is mad as hell that I'm here all the time, and that I'm into death.'
'You're into death?'
'Who isn't? It's where we're all headed, you know.'
'I can't deny that, but I guess I just don't get the charge out of it that you do. I'm sorry about the MOR,' I said, wondering if my R?for Relationship?would get to the point of ROR during the internship.
'Doesn't matter,' said the hyperactive tern, 'no kids. In California, being married two years means you've hit the median. Hey, I got a question for you: do you think it's legal to have this woman sign her own postmortem permission slip along with her insurance voucher?'
'It's probably legal, but I'm not sure it's ethical.'
'Great,' said Hooper, 'another post coming up. In Sausalito nobody's heard of ethics. Hey, thanks. I didn't want to stay married to that bitch anyway. You should see what I've got simmering down in the morgue.'
'In the morgue?'
'A female pathology resident from Israel. Dynamite. Grooves on thanatos, like me. Romeo and Juliet, man, so long.'
I sat in the E.W. nursing station thinking about how the Leggo and the Fish had blessed our ward with 'the toughies,' the dying young, like Jimmy, like my friend Dr. Sanders, out there on his last fishing trip before his last autumn?
'That's tough to do, to face the dying and the dead'
I looked up. It was one of the policemen, the fat one, Gilheeny.
'Strength of character,' said the other one, Quick, 'it doesn't grow on trees.'
'Nor can one buy it in any store,' said the redhead. 'It's the toilet training that does it, I do believe. So said Freud and Cohen.'
'Where did an Irish cop learn about Freud?' I asked.
'Where? Why, here, man, here, from spending the last twenty years here, five nights a week; in trialogues of discussion with fine young overeducated men like: you: Better than night school, more broad and useful.' And we get paid to attend.'
'Not only that,' said Quick, 'but all the different viewpoints contribute. Over twenty years one learns a good deal. Currently a surgeon named Gath brings?the news from the Southern Rim, and with Cohen we are in the middle of a gold mine of psychoanalytical thought.'
'Who is Cohen?'
'A sophisticated, jocular, and unrestrained resident in psychiatry,' said Quick. 'A textbook in himself.'
'You must make his acquaintance,' said Gilheeng Twitching his red eyebrows so that they coerced the rest of his fat face into a gap?toothed smile, he went on, 'We can hardly wait to hear from a Rhodes Scholar like yourself, a man with high qualities of body mind, with experience gleaned from corners of the round globe, like England, France, and the Emerald Isle, which I have visited only twice.'
'A textbook in yourself,' said Quick.
Upstairs, I had just finished working Jimmy over, putting in lines and tubes and starting to treat his untreatable diseases, when Mrs. Risenshein arrested and I was surprised to hear myself cursing under my breath as I resuscitated her, 'I wish she would die so I could just go to sleep,' and I was shocked when I realized that I'd just wished a human being dead so I could go to sleep. Animal. Eat My Dust rolled up from the MICU to take Risenshein away and I asked how he was.
'Glad you asked. It's going just great. Here, Bob,' he said, nodding to his BMS, 'wheel this stretcher on down to the Unit, will you, pal? Keep pumping the oxygen and keep the lines open, I'm just going up to floor eight for a minute to jump off and kill myself.'
He left, and Molly?clean and pretty and sexy and off duty left, and I was desolate watching her go.
I should have been going with her. The Runt called back again.
'How's Lazarus?' he asked.
'Stable. Where are you?'
'At Angel's. I'm scared. How's Risenshein?'
'There's nothing to be scared about. Risenshein's had a cardiac arrest and is in the MICU:'
'Oh, no! I'm coming in right away!'
'You do and I'll kill you. Put Angel on'
'Hi, Roy,' said a healthy drunk voice, 'I'm'?gesture?'drunk.'
'Fine. Listen, Angel, I'm worried about the Runt. He's not going to make it unless he gets some confidence in himself. He's a great guy, but he needs some confidence. Chuck and I are really concerned?suicide?that's how concerned we are'
'Sruicide!' Gesture. 'Wow! WhatcanIdo?'
I told Angel exactly what she could do to prevent the Runt's suicide.
'Sruicide!' Gesture. 'You mean he's freee?'
'Not yet, Angie. Right now, he's still a bird in a cage. Open it up, Angel, set him free, let him fly.'
'Flyfly his'?gesture?'fly bye?bye,' and the phone went dead.
Hot, sweaty, with the dried sweat salt like sand on my eyelids, with my flu declaring itself in malaise, photophobia, myalgia, nausea, and diarrhea, cursing being in the House while Molly was out and Berry was out
