The house of God

'Insulin City,' said Fats. 'Rough TURF. Next?'

'You should know,' said Eddie, 'that Sam Levin is a man who eats everything. Watch your food, Fats.'

Fats got up and locked his locker, in which he kept a stash of food, including several prized Hebrew National salamis.

'Next is Fast Tina the Taxi Woman,' said Eddie, 'a private patient of the Leggo's.' At that the cabbie started yelling about his fare, and Fats TURFED him to HELP. He left, cursing, and in walked Bonni and said to Eddie: 'Your patient Tina Tokerman's IV bottle has run out. What do you want me to hang next?'

'Tina,' said Eddie.

'That's inappropriate. Now, about the lice: it's not our job to delouse, it is the intern's:'

'Crap,' said EMD, 'it's a nursing job, 'cause nurses already got lice.'

'What?! Well! I'm calling my supervisor! And as for the lice, I'm dialing HELP! We're having problems in communication, good?bye.'

'Anyway,' Eddie went on, 'there was Tina, and I thought, Hmm dementia, I'll go right for the money and invade. So first I did the LP.'

'You did the LP first? Did you ask the Leggo before you did it?'

'Nope.'

'A private patient of the Leggo's sent three hundred miles in a cab and you started with a painful invasive procedure without asking him first? Why?'

'Why? It was either her or me, that's why.'

'Maybe she didn't mind it, right?' asked Fats.

'Oh, she minded it. She screamed bloody murder. And at three A.M. I heard some maniac whistling 'Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer troo.' ' j

'Daisy, Daisy . . .' said Fats, looking out the window into the face of a hardhat hanging like a spider from the rising web of the Wing of Zock. 'It wasn't really the Leggo who came in at that hour. Why should he? I mean, there's no Wing of Tokerman, is there?'

'Tina was so mad she smashed me in the nose and I got that stinging feeling all up and down my face and, tears in my eyes. I realized then that I needed a big CVP line in her internal jugular in her neck.'

'You didn't put in a big CVP line, because you know that the Leggo hates them because they managed without them in his day and he can't understand them anyway, right?'

'Right, I didn't.'

'Good, Eddie, good,' said Fats.

'But I tried like hell to, and as I was trying, the Leggo came in and asked Tina, 'Is there anything' wrong, dearie?' and Tina screamed out 'Yes! This needle in my necks' and the Leggo turned to me and said 'We managed without those in my day. Take it out and come see me tomorrow morning.' And Tina refuses to sign for dialysis.'

'Eddie,' said Fats quietly, 'don't do what you're doing. Believe me, it's not worth it to antagonize these guys. Go easy, it's better to go easy, see? Ah, it's a tough case: the only relief for her dementia is dialysis, but the thing that keeps her from signing for dialysis is her dementia. A real tough TURF.'

'How about holding a pen in her hand and scribbling her name with it?' asked Hooper. 'I do that to get my, gomers to sign for posts.'

'Well, stop doing that, it's illegal!' yelled Fats.

'No sweat,' said Eddie, 'when Tina realizes that at night, when I'm on call, she's totally at my mercy, she'll sign, Fats, she'll sign.'

Later that morning, Hooper and Fats and I were sitting at the nursing station. Fats was into his Wall Street Journal, and Hooper and I were watching the flow. We were still chuckling at having seen Lionel from HELP, paged by the nurse, checking out the room numbers and then, with a spiffy straightening of his Blazer and forelock, entering the room of the Lady of the Lice, the room crawling with the crabs. Eddie had been called to the Leggo's office, and we had been worried, but we were relieved to see the Leggo come walking down the corridor with him, his arm around Eddies shoulder. While we waited for the Fish so we could start rounds with our leggy Chief, Fats collared Eddie and rushed us all into the on?call room, locking the door behind us.

'All right, Eddie,' said Fats, 'you are in serious trouble.'

'Whaddayamean? We dad a nice chat. Go slow with Tina, was all he said. He even put his arm around me as we walked back down here.'

'Exactly,' said Fats, 'that arm around you. Did you ever look closely at the anatomy of that arm? Fingers like a tree frog's, with suckers on the ends. Arachnodaotyly, like a spider. Double joints at the knuckles, universal joints at the wrist, elbow, and shoulder. When the Leggo puts his arm around someone, often it's the end of a promising career. The last guy he put his arm around was Grenade Room Dubler, and do you know where he went for his Fellowship?'

'Nope.'

'Neither does anyone else. I doubt if it was on the continental USA. The Leggo puts his arm around your shoulders and whispers in your ear something like 'Akron' or 'Utah' or 'Kuala Lumm?poore' and that's where you go. I don't want my Fellowship in the Gulag, get it?'

'Yours?' asked Eddie. 'And what about mine? In Oncology.' i'

'What? You? Cancer?'

'Natch. What could be better than a gomer with cancer?'

Chief's Rounds that day were introduced by the Fish, and the patient was one Moe, a tough truck driver who'd had to wait in the freezing cold during the gas crisis to fill up his rig. He had a rare disease of the blood call cryoglobulinemia, where with cold the blood clots small vessels, and Moe's big toe had turned as cold an white as a corpse on a slab in the morgue.

'What a great case!' cried the Leggo. 'Let me ask few questions.'

To the first question, a real toughie he asked Hooper. Hooper said, 'I don't know,' and so the Leggo answered the toughie himself and gave a little lecture it. To the next question,.not a toughie, to Eddie, Ed answered, 'I don't know.' The Leggo gave him benefit of the doubt and gave a little lecture none which was news to Eddie or to anyone else. The Fish and the Fat Man were getting apprehensive about what we were doing, and the tension rose as the Leggo turn to me and asked me an easy one that any klutz who read Time could answer. I paused, knit my brow, said, 'I . . . Sir, I just don't know.' The Leggo asked, 'You say you don't know?'

'No, Sir, I don't, and I'm proud to say it.'

Startled and troubled, the Leggo said, 'In my day, the House of God was the kind of place where on Chief's Rounds the intern would be embarrassed to say 'I don't know.' What is going on?'

'Well, sir, you see, the Fish said that he wanted the House to be the kind of place where we'd be proud to say 'I don't know,' and, damnit, Chief, we are.'

'You are? The Fish said? He . . . never mind. Let's see Moe.'

The Chief fairly burned with the excitement of getting at Moe the Toe's toe, and yet at Moe's bedside, for some strange reason, he went straight for Moe's liver, poodling around with it sensually. Finally the Leggo went for Moe the Toe's toe, and no one was sure exactly what happened next. The toe was white and cold, and the Leggo, communing with it as if it could tell him about all the great dead toes of the past, inspected it, palpated it, pushed it around, and then, bending down, did something to it with his mouth. Eight of us watched, and there were to be eight different opinions of what the Leggo did with Moe's toe. Some said look, some said blow, some said suck. We watched, amazed, as the Leggo straightened up and, kind of absentmindedly fondling the toe as if it were some newfound friend, asked Moe the Toe how it felt and Moe said, 'Hey, not bad, buddy, but while you're at it could you try the same thing a little higher upT»

'The Ten Commandments and Chicken?' I asked the Fat Man later that night as we awaited our admissions and the ten?o'clock meal.

'Right. Charlton Heston, Jews squashed under rocks, and then the House of God 'chicken with tire tracks.' And Teddy.'

'Who's Teddy?'