The View from the Vue (29 page)

The hatred of the bums for the mice was epic. One particular fellow harbored an especial loathing for the beasts, and as he became stronger and consequently was moved progressively farther to the back, his anger became more and more vocal. The end, as far as he was concerned, came one night when one of the Rodent Raiders not only had the temerity to make off with the chunk of cake he had left on his night table, but actually made his getaway across the sleeping man’s face and then down the bedclothes. By the time we made rounds the next morning, our livid patient informed us that that was the absolute end, that he had not the least intention of putting up with any more murine indignities. We shrugged and went on to the next bed. Any attempt to rid Bellevue Hospital of mice would have been comparable in effect to emptying one’s bladder into the Pacific Ocean.

That night, my friend Harvey Brown was working on that ward. Harvey was a good-natured ectomorph who maintained his skinny habitus by constantly worrying about what misfortune was going to befall him next. Harvey went through life dreading the adversities that he was certain were in store for him, and when they did come, he lavished all his love and attention on them. This being the case, you may be certain that the night something bizarre happened, Harvey Brown would be there to enter fully into the experience.

This particular night, it happened to be pretty quiet, so not quite believing his good fortune, Harvey put his head down on the nurses’ desk and went to sleep. It was 2 A.M. He hadn’t slept long when he was awakened by a tremendous clatter. Harvey leaped from his chair, certain that the old building was falling down around him. Flicking on the ward lights as he came down, he heard a raucous, “Hah! Take that, yuh sonavabitch. I gotcha!” The Lord never saithed “Vengeance is mine” with more feeling. Harvey looked toward the back of the ward, where the vengeful one sat triumphantly in bed. Five yards away lay the bloody corpse of a fat gray mouse, the remains of a candy bar lying just beyond its paws, the whole scene representing a living (in a sense) testimonial to the fact that excess weight is bad for your health. The lethal weapon lay where it had bounced and finally come to rest, all the way across the ward. The patient then proudly told Harvey the story of how he had left the piece of candy bar on the night table, and then had sat up, motionless, for three hours. When the thief had appeared and then had made off with the goodies, his malefactor—on the run and in the dark, may I remind you—cold-cocked him and laid him low with a bull’s-eye pitch of his metal bedside urinal. This having happened in 1962, I wondered what the New York Mets would have given to have had this guy on their mound staff.

From time to time, other patients provided a little violent diversion. One night during the year I was a resident in gynecology, I was taking a history from a patient. She was a fortyish, fattish little lady with pale reddish hair and a pale whitish face. She was to undergo a hysterectomy and bladder repair. After I had gone through all the details of her incontinent behavior, I proceeded on to the general medical history. This is an assortment of questions which patients often find irrelevant and unrelated to their problems. Sometimes they’re right. We like to think we’re checking for previously unrecognized conditions that would, for instance, make the proposed surgery needlessly hazardous. I questioned the woman as to her previous illnesses and operations. Then I checked into the possibilities of heart or lung diseases. All answers were negative. The patient assured me that she felt just fine. She was most congenial, and we were having a nice talk. Then I got to the gastrointestinal system. “Do you have any trouble with your bowel movements?” I asked.

The woman paused and thought for a moment. “Well, Doc,” she said, “Only thing ’at bothers me at all is them green worms.”

This only took me back a little bit. I figured that she happened to have some pinworms. Pinworms, however, are not green, and I so informed her.

“Oh no,” she said. “These worms are green. Little and green. And they’re always crawling out of my rectum.” She looked intently at me and I began to feel a little uneasy. My God, what kind of intestinal parasites could these be? I asked the patient whether she had any idea as to how the green worms had come to take up residence in her nether regions, at the same time thinking that it would be a cold day in hell before I’d ever do a pelvic examination on her.

The woman seemed exasperated by my question. She put her hands on her hips and gave me a quizzical look. My discomfort mounted. “Well, Doc,” she said, “they’re not only down there.”

“Where else are they?” I faltered.

Now she began to get excited. “When I brush my teeth, they crawl out between my teeth and my gums. And then when I clean out my ears, they crawl out from there.”

Now I was beginning to get the message. This was a case for the boys with the white coats and the butterfly nets. I motioned to the nurse who was standing nearby, taking in the scene with wide eyes and mouth. She quietly moved to the phone and put in a call to the hatch.

This was a very good thing to have done, because now, suddenly, there was no holding down our patient. She was up on her feet, hair flying, eyes bright and glazed, and arms flapping. She began to scream at the top of her lungs, “And that’s not all—they’re all over my apartment. They come out of the water taps when I turn them on. They crawl around on the walls. They come in under the doors.” She turned and looked into my eyes. “I can’t get rid of them, do you hear me, I can’t get rid of them no matter what I do.”

It was really the most amazing transformation I’ve ever seen. From a pleasant, apparently rational woman to an out-and-out raging lunatic in all of three minutes. I tried to calm her down by changing the subject, but she’d have none of that ploy. She ranted on and on about the green worms, how she figured that her husband had planted them on her before he had left, and how she couldn’t rid herself of them.

At this point in walked the two psych attendants with a wheelchair and a strait jacket. My patient took one look at them, recognition dawned, and then she looked back at me. “You son-of-a-bitch,” she screamed. “You dirty, no-good son-of-a-bitch.” She lunged across the desk at me. The attendants grabbed her as I dove under the desk.

You can’t imagine how that woman fought. While she held off two burly psych-ward attendants, she still had strength enough to call me names I blush to remember, let alone repeat. Finally the nurse had to call for two of d’ gahds to come up and help get her restrained before she killed the attendants. At length they got her strait-jacketed into the wheelchair, and the four of them wheeled her off down that long, dark corridor to the hatch. I could hear her yelling and the wheelchair bouncing all the way down the hall.

The chief resident was a bit unhappy the next morning when he found that his hysterectomy had vaporized. When he heard the story of the night before, he gave me the fish eye.

“Go on down to the hatch and operate on her if you want,” I said. “Just don’t blame me when you come back covered with green worms that you can’t get rid of.” He wandered off, muttering about the impossibility of running a service where the residents were nuttier than the patients. I didn’t see him again all day.

Another memorable violent patient was the J-O Lady. J-O Rat Paste was a commonly used pesticide in some New York homes. Among our Puerto Rican clientele, it also served another function. They used it for suicide attempts. They spread it on bread and ate it as sandwiches. I’m not kidding; they really did. The active ingredient was white phosphorus, a lethal liver and kidney poison which takes about a week to reduce these organs to functionless masses of pulp. Hence, attempts at suicide with J-O were uniformly successful. This was really very sad, because most of these suicide attempts were just gestures, employed to frighten a husband, lover, son, or parent.

The J-O Lady came in one Friday night. In a fit of pique against her boyfriend, she had dissolved her rat paste in a glass of orange juice and swigged it down. Later on, when we asked her why she had chosen this method (she freely admitted she had done it “just to teach my boyfriend a lesson”), she said it was because that was what her sister had used to do away with herself (for a similar reason) three years previously. You go figure it out.

In any case, when the J-O Lady came in, she was in no mood to be cooperative. When I approached her to try to empty her stomach, she spat in my face. Let me tell you, phosphorescent spit burns. To evacuate her stomach contents we used a wide, red rubber tube whose real name was the Ewald tube. It was popularly known as the Garden Hose. She took one look at that and clawed my hand, leaving five red tracks.

At this juncture I figured I’d better call in the reserves. An explanation by a Spanish-speaking aide got the aide a faceful of phosphorus-laden saliva. So we resorted to finesse. Two two-hundred-pound female Emergency Room aides, known as the Bookends, sat on the patient and restrained her arms and legs while I slipped the Garden Hose down her gullet.

As the tube hit the stomach, thick white fumes began to come out from it. It was as though the woman’s stomach were on fire. In fact, it may have been. The more she struggled, the thicker came the fumes. We tried to pass materials down the tube that might have neutralized the phosphorus before it could be absorbed into her body, but the fumes only came thicker and faster. Then I began to notice that the fumes had a particularly acrid character. Still, they issued forth.

Of course, none of our work did any good, and the woman died ten days later, yellow all over and not producing any urine. She turned out to be a very nice person, and we all felt very unhappy as we watched her die. Her boyfriend allowed as how he had been taught a good lesson, but he claimed not to have been able to figure out the reason for the whole thing.

As for me, I woke up the morning after having lavaged the stomach of the J-O Lady and coughed. It felt as though my entire chest were on fire. Then I tried to call down by phone to the ward and discovered that I couldn’t talk. Since I never had had bronchitis or laryngitis before, this all struck me as odd. Then I remembered the smoke of the night before. That was it: I had a beautiful case of chemical bronchitis. Those phosphorus fumes must have done some job on my windpipes. Every winter, now, almost as soon as I catch a cold, I become voiceless. I guess I’ll carry my souvenir of Bellevue for some time to come. My wife tells me I shouldn’t complain, that I might have caught syphilis. The logic of the argument leaves something to be desired, but the sentiment is unmistakable.

Not only the patients caused violence on the wards. Sometimes their relatives did. New York has always been the nation’s leader in style-setting and, as such, long before race riots had become a national way of life, it was not uncommon for an intern in the middle of examining a Negro patient to be interrupted by an angry relative warning that the patient had certainly better improve forthwith if the doctor knew what was good for him, and that the era of white doctors giving short shrift to black patients was now over. One night in the Emergency Room, I was sewing up a laceration on a black woman’s scalp when suddenly the door to the room burst open, and in ran the patient’s boyfriend. “Git yo’ god-damn white han’s offa her,” he shrieked. “I wan’ a
black
doctuh t’ take care a her. No white doctuh’s good enough t’ take care a her, y’ unnerstan?”

I moved to get out of the room while my epidermis was still intact when the lady let loose at her boyfriend with, “You shut up you’ mouf! Dis doctuh’s sewin’ up mah haid real nice wif his white han’s, an’ it don’t even hurt none. So if you don’t shut up you’ black mouf, ah’ll turn it red fo’ you.” With this, the young militant sagged his way back out the door, looking about half as big as when he had come in. Thanking God that there was a back door to the treatment room that I could use later, I finished the job quickly and quietly.

The most outlandish story of violent relatives involved the time that a gypsy queen suffered an attack of heart failure in the neighborhood and her followers brought her to The Vue. The internists checked her out and discovered that she had rheumatic heart disease and that she would need surgery to open one of the valves so that the blood might pass through unimpeded. So she was transferred to surgery and the operation was scheduled.

Meanwhile the entire caravan set up encampment on the front lawn (such as it was) of the hospital. Shortly thereafter, a story began to circulate through The Vue. Supposedly, a couple of d’ gahds, noticing the gypsies’ infringement, had sauntered out to request that the troops vacate. The gypsies listened politely; when the speech was finished, two of the young gypsies held knives to the throats of d’ gahds while other gypsies held them immobile and incommunicado. Upon being released a few minutes later, the guards decided it would be only humane to permit the poor people to remain on the premises.

And so, in any case, they stayed. Somehow or other, these illiterate nomads were able to pick out on sight all the many doctors who had seen to the health and well-being of their queen. Furthermore, whenever any of the doctors entered or left the building, he’d be greeted by one of the men, who would say, “Gypsy Queen die, doctor die.” Then he’d make a slashing motion across his throat with his knife blade.

The doctors found this behavior disconcerting, especially when they considered that a middle-aged woman undergoing heart surgery is not exactly an insurance salesman’s dream. So they began to try to leave the building via alternate doors. No dice. It took the gypsies one day to figure out they were being evaded. From that point, they began to post guards at each doorway. What’s more, they didn’t distinguish among internists, surgeons, and medical students. Any guy in a white suit who had examined the queen was given full coverage. Needless to say, this became a bit nerve-racking.

Finally one of my friends who was an intern on the ward figured out what to do. By going up the inside stairway and across the roof, he could cut down a corridor into the kitchen and sneak out the delivery door that was used for food and garbage. He was also smart enough not to tell anyone else involved about his technique; the gypsies seemed not to miss just one doctor. This whole thing went on for six weeks, until the Queen of the Gypsies, her cardiac pathways having been successfully Roto-Rootered, was discharged from the hospital. Then the caravan packed up and left, never to be seen again.