In tune with this spring theme of sex and death, like eight vultures, the days of Passover swooped down upon the House of God. Despite the false hope offered by Good Friday and Easter Sunday, with the coming of Passover there was no question of God's intent: death. Despite the technocratic thrust toward life, God flexed his
It was eerie. We'd work like hell on someone, who'd appear to have made it, and then?BLEEP?a cardiac arrest and death. I'd pick up a patient in the E.W., and as I put my stethoscope on him, he'd clutch his chest, turn blue, and die. I'd be sleeping peacefully, and?BUZZ?the arrest button would sound and I would run, blinking and trying to hide my sleep erection, into the bright neon and MUZAK searching out the room with the panic, and sure enough God had made his move and another had cooled on us. Afterward, looking back over the recordings stored up by Ollie, we'd find that despite our preparations, an aberrant beat would have landed at the vulnerable period and?BLEEP?ranting, arrogant, in strutted death.
All of us were shocked. The families of the dead, set up with hope and then smashed with despair, suffered beyond words. Blitzed, their own hearts cut from their moorings and rolling and floating in their chests like balls of wool in empty bags, they washed us with their tears. Jo, the perfectionist, was hard hit. By Day Four of Passover, she was frantic. Fighting the specter of what she took as a personal failure to keep her patients alive. Jo adopted a sort of phlogiston theory, deciding that there was something contaminated somewhere in the Unit. When Pinkus arrived, she assaulted him with this idea and insisted that the Unit be torn apart, top to bottom, to find the noxious agent that was killing her patients. Pinkus, phlegmatic, told her she could do as she wished, although he didn't think that was it. He asked me to feel his legs, and I did, and said, 'Amazing.'
'The Marathon's only six days away. Carbohydrate loading starts today,'
'Pinkus,' said Jo with great intensity, the circles under her eyes even blacker, 'I want to make one thing perfectly clear: we are going to win this war against; death.'
The penultimate setback for Jo, was at four o'clock in the middle of the Fifth Night. Jo usually stayed up most of the night, but the stress of being the first woman resident to wrestle directly with the Angel of Death had worn her out, and with things seemingly under control, she'd gone to bed for an hour. Shortly thereafter, all hell broke loose, with a man named Gogarty, a spanking?fresh virgin MI, having a cardiac arrest. Jo was called, and with a fanaticism hardly ever seen in the Unit, spent an hour 4?plussing the victim back toward life. Unfortunately, Gogarty turned out to be a smokescreen, for as Jo and the nurses left room what sight should greet their eyes but Old Lady Zock spread?eagled nose?down on the tiled Unit floor-stone dead. It turned out that, having heard the commotion in Gogarty's room, Old Lady Zock, in a fine philanthropic gesture, had wished to pitch in at the arrest, and following the most heart?rending of House LAWS: GOMERS GO TO GROUND, had done so, in the process dislodging the cardiac pacemaker which was prodding her generous heart, and had died.
The final irony, of course?the story of Jo's life?that Jo's insisting all nurses tend to Gogarty had caused the neglect of Zock. When a Zock gets neglected, it shakes God's House.
The next morning, there was much commotion. It was Zocks versus Medicine. Recrimination City. Although in the confrontation the Leggo restrained himself from asking for a postmortem, Jo did not, and things got sticky. The Leggo told Jo to 'get the hell back inside,' and we watched as the caravan led the flock of Zocks away to one of the green plush 'function rooms' donated by the Zocks and used only for the stroking of philanthropists of the House of God.
Fed up with Jo's 'contamination' theory, I announced that I was going another route. Jo asked what it was, and I said, 'Fight fire with fire.' I picked up the phone and told the operator to page the Rabbi on call, STAT. Alarmed that his beeper had gone off, and STAT at that, huffing and puffing, young Rabbi Fuchs arrive. I told him about the Reign of Death, and about my conviction that this was, in some way, a Visitation of the Lord God, over Passover, mistaking us for Egyptians.
'I don't understand,' said Rabbi Fuchs.
'Isn't it just possible that God is punishing us with these deaths, and that we should do everything within our power to follow his Passover Laws? Like paint the doorposts of the Unit, use special Passover dishes, leave a cup of wine for Elijah the Prophet, and so on?'
The black?bearded intellectual Fuchs looked puzzled, peered through his granny glasses at Ollie's sempiternal flickering console, and said, 'The Haggadah, the Passover Story to which you refer, is not literal, it's homiletic. Yes, that's it: the exigesis of the Haggadah, since the eleventh century, has produced commentaries that are mostly homiletic, although sometimes mystical, in character.'
'Did you understand that, Pinkus?' I asked.
'Nope.'
'Me neither. What do you mean, Rabbi?'
'Don't take it literally. It is myth. God doesn't work that way anymore. These deaths have to do with physiological fact, not with the whims of Deity. Body, not soul, is what's dying here.'
Leave it to the House of God to produce some red-hot Theology student as its Rabbi. I turned to him and asked, 'What denomination are you anyway, Rabbi Fuchs?'
'Me? Why, Reform.'
'Figures,' I said, picking up the phone. 'Thank you very much. I'm calling the Orthodox boys, the Hasidim.'
The Orthodox Rabbi was an aged, white?bearded patriarch from a half?abandoned synagogue in the black ghetto. Excited by my idea, he quoted cabalistic writings about 'the homes of the sick during the Exodus,' telling me about the timeliness of the Passover teachings, as in the Mishnah: 'In every generation let v each man look on himself as if he came forth out of Egypt.' Unfortunately, this Rabbi suffered from congestive heart failure, and before we could get on,, with the chanting and painting, he wanted some
'Herring,' he said to the nurses, 'piece herring.'
'I thought you were low salt?' I asked.
'Yeh, I em. Would you believe: the whole low salt for one day is in this tiny piece herring?'
Finally, Maintenance delivered the can of bloodred paint, and with the Rabbi belching herring, beginning to pray, chanting and
For a night it worked. The main threat that night was Dr. Binsky; a middle?aged Private, who'd suffered a serious MI. I knew that he knew he might die, despite the pull of being colleagues, my fear of getting involved pulled me away from him. During the night Dr. Binsky served up most of the cardiac arrythmias known to man. Luckily, miraculously, each responded to my efforts, and dawn saw Binsky, and vice versa. The Orthodox boys had come through.
The next morning, the Seventh Day, Jo was ecstatic. Seeing none dead, she beamed from ear to ear, clasped my hand, and affirmed that, 'by God, we're going to win, and if it takes painting the doorposts, why of course we'll paint the doorposts, in the interest of patient care.' We want to see Dr. Binsky, and Pinkus, his old friend, said, 'Hi, Morns. How's Morris today?'
'I feel OK, Pinkus. What's it been now, forty hours?'
'Just about.'
'How's my rhythm strip today?' asked Morris.
'Dr. Binsky,' said Jo, putting her hand in an olderbrother fashion on his shoulder, and with a crinkle in her voice, 'it's normal sinus rhythm again. NSR, at last.'
'What a relief,' said Dr. Binsky, 'what a gigantic relief.'
Ten seconds later he had a cardiac arrest and despite our efforts, within the half?hour he was dead.
Jo broke. She sat in the staff room with Pinkus and me, crying, repeating over and over, 'He couldn't have died, he was in normal sinus. Normal sinus rhythm and now he's dead? It doesn't make any sense, statistically. I can't take this absurdity anymore.'
'People do die in NSF,' said Pinkus calmly. 'It shows that we did all we could, right, Roy?'
I nodded my agreement. Of course Pinkus was right.
