nurses. In the midst of all this, the BMS was meat.
Despite all efforts, the BMS continued to die. As usual at arrests, as if at a dud party, after about an hour people got bored and wanted to stop and it a day and let the patient really die, the heart following after the dead brain like a car motor stopping a few internal combustions after the ignition had been turned off. Jo, angered at the idea of failure, shouted out: 'With this kid we're four?plussing it, all the way!' and wouldn't stop. When the heart finally did stop, Jo ordered the broiling of the chest, and when four shots of that didn't work, she paused, at the end of her medical bag of tricks. This was where the surgeons began, and the Chief Resident, sensing the chance to turn carnage into drama, got hot and said, 'Hey, want me to open the chest? Manual cardiac massage?' Jo paused, and then, in the hush, said, 'You bet. This kid walked in here. We're going all out. Four?plus!' The surgeon ripped the chest from armpit to armpit and spread the ribs. He grabbed the heart and began to pump it with his hand. Pinkus left the room. I stood, frozen. It was clear that the BMS was dead. What they were doing was being done for them. The surgeon, hand tired, asked me if I'd like to take over. Foggy, I did. I got my hand around the back of the young lifeless heart and squeezed. Tough, slippery, the sinewy muscle was a leather bag, filled with blood, rolling in the steamy chest cavity, tied to the tubes of the major vessels. Why was I doing this? My hand hurt. I gave up. The heart lay like a grayish?blue fruit on a tree of bones. Sickening. The face of the BMS was blue, turning white. The gash in his chest was bright red, turning to a clotted black. We'd ruined his body, even as he'd died. As I left the room, I heard Jo yell out with crisp authority: 'Any BMS students here? This is a chance you don't often get in your training, to learn to massage the heart. Great teaching case. Come on.' Sick, I retreated to the staff room, where the nurses were chattering, eating doughnuts, as if nothing had happened outside.
'Glad to see you're not wrecking your coronaries with doughnuts, Roy,' said Pinkus. 'I've tried to tell the girls, but they won't listen. They're lucky, of course, in that the estrogens lower their incidence.'
'I'm not hungry,' I said. 'I think I've caught why the BMS had. I'm gonna die. I just timed my respirations: thirty?two a minute:'
'Die?' asked Pinkus. 'Hmm. Say, did that BMS have a hobby?'
The head nurse picked up the chart, turned to the special section created by Pinkus, called 'Hobbies,' and said, 'Nope. No hobby:'
'There,' said Pinkus. 'See? No hobby. He didn't have a hobby, do you understand? Do you have a hobby, Roy?'
With some alarm I realized that I did not, and said so.
'You should have at least one. See, my hobbies are directed to the care of my coronary arteries: fishing, for calm, and running, for fitness. Roy, in my nine years on this Unit, I've never see a Marathon runner die. Not of an MI, not of a virus, not of anything. No deaths, period.'
'Really?'
'Yes. Look: if you're not fit, your heart beats like this,' and Pinkus made a motion with his fist, slowly moving his fingers toward his palm as if he were slow motion waving someone good?bye. 'But if you run, your cardiac output goes up dramatically, and you really pump and I mean PUMP! Like this!' Pinkus clasped and unclasped his fist so hard that his knuckles turned white and his forearm musculature bulged. It was dramatic. I would be converted. I grasped his hand and asked, 'What do I have to do to start?' Pinkus was pleased, and went right to shoe size. Instead viruses and atherosclerosis, my mind filled with New Balance 320s, anaerobic glycolytic muscle metabolism and a subscription to
Except for frolicking in the occasional erotic fondle I spent the rest of the day avoiding Jo and running scared. Jo wanted to teach me everything about everything so that when she left that night, my first night alone, I would be able to handle things. Apprehensive about turning her Unit over to me, she loitered around, and telling me 'I never turn off my beeper,' she finally left. As usual in my medical training, knowing little, I was put in charge of all. I needed someone who knew the nuts and bolts of the Unit. I ran to the night nurse, and made it clear that I was her pawn. Pleased, she used me, and began teaching me things never mentioned in my four rarefied BMS years filled with enzyme kinetics and zebraic diseases. I became a technician, getting off on how to set a respirator's dials.
Just before the ten?o'clock meal, I was called to the E.W. for my first admission, a forty?two?year?old man named Bloom, with his first MI. He was coming to the Unit because of his age. If he had been sixty-two, he would have been fending for himself on the wards, his chances of immediate survival halved. Bloom was lying on his stretcher in the E.W., white as a sheet, puffing with anxiety and cardiac pain. His eyes showed the terrified longing of a dying man wishing he'd spent his last days differently. He and his wife turned to me, their hope. Uncomfortable, I was surprised to find myself thinking of Pinkus, and asking Bloom if he had a hobby.
'No,' he gasped, 'I don't have a hobby.'
'Well, after this you might think of developing one. I'm taking up running, for fitness. And there's always fishing for calm.'
The risk factors were weighted against Bloom. He'd suffered a serious MI, and for a period of four days he'd camp on death's door, courtesy of the Unit. I wheeled him into the MICU, where the nurses swarmed over him, wiring him for sound, light, and whatever else they could grab onto. Ollie's face lit up with Bloom's ratty EKG. What was I doing for poor Bloom's heart? Not much. Watching for when Bloom stopped.
The Runt and Chuck, knowing what a strain my first night on call in the Unit would be, stopped by to talk. Even though it had gotten increasingly hard to make contact with each other, what had happened to Eddie and Puts had made us try to be with each other more. I said to the Runt, 'I always meant to ask you, Runt, what's the matter with Angel's language centers. I mean, she starts to talk, fades out, and waves her hands around. What's it all about?'
'I never noticed,' said the Runt. 'She seems to talk fine to me.'
'You mean you still haven't talked about anything?'
Thinking it over, the Runt paused, and then broke out in a wide grin, walloped his knee, and said, 'Nope! Never! HA!'
'Damn,' said Chuck, 'you sure come a long way from that poet.'
'I think I do love Angie, but I don't think I'll marry her. See, she hates Jews and she hates doctors and she says I whistle too loud and that I follow her around too much when we're not in bed. I think I might . . . Oh, hi, Angie?Wangie, I was just tell?'
'Runt,' said Angie, 'you know what'?gesture toward self?'I think?' Gesture toward Runt. 'You; talk too'? gesture toward cosmos?'Goddamn much, Roy, Mr. Bloom wants to'?gesture toward mouth 'talk to you. We need'?gesture toward heaven-'help.'
Chuck and the Runt left, and left me to the shocks and thrills of my first solo night in space. Walking a tightrope with Bloom and the other patients, balancing over their catastrophies, I passed the evening. At eleven came the striptease, the nursing change of shift: smooth leading thighs, a black lace panty rolling down as the tight dungarees came off, flashing pubic hair, the side slope of a jiggly breast, the full frontal of two firm ones, errant nipples, the works. Testosterone storm. Who had each been abed with, how had each been abed with, before coming to work, to me? When I'd calmed down, I went to bed. A nurse awoke me at four A.M.: new admission, age eighty?nine; small MI; no complications.
'We don't take them that old,' I said, 'she goes to the ward.'
'Not if her name's Zock. Not if it's Old Lady Zock.'
Old Lady Zock turned out to be a typical gomere except for her money, which was three bags full. I was impressed. I would be nice to this Zock, she would give me a bag of money, I would leave medicine and marry the Thunderous Thigh and promise not to whistle, ever, or follow her around. I wheeled Old Lady Zock?whose shriek was MOO?ELL MOO?ELL?up to the Unit. If Bloom and Zock were to have clamored over the last intensive?care bed, who would have gotten it? No contest.
When a Zock gets admitted to the House of God, the whole ice?cream cone of Slurpers shakes and shimmers like a belly dancer in a hall of mirrors. The Leggo gets a call, and he calls on down the cone to the lower Slurpers, and as the nurses were settling Old Lady Zock into her bed, in trotted Pinkus. I looked at him and said, 'Great case, eh?'
'Does she have a hobby?'
'Sure does. Moo?elling.'
'Never heard of that one,' said Pinkus, 'what is it?'
