Michael Crichton - Five Patients

The woman shook her head. "My husband's here," she said, pointing down to the treatment rooms.

Ralph Orlando was then wheeled out on a stretcher. A woman who had just arrived in the EW for treatment of a rash on her elbows stared at the body. "Is he dead?" she asked. "Is he dead?"

Someone said yes, he was dead.

"Why do they cover up the face that way?" she asked, staring.

In another corner of the room, a woman who had been sitting stolidly with a young child got up and took her child out of the lobby while the body was wheeled out.

The emergency ward then received word that there would be no more people coming, that it would get no more than the six it already had. By now equilibrium was returning to the ward. People were no longer running and there was a sense that things were in control. The state troopers had for the most part gone, but the relatives were still arriving.

Mrs. Orlando, a stout woman accompanied by two teen-age children, was one of the many who immediately tried to leave the lobby and get back to the treatment rooms. All relatives were being prevented from doing this, because the area around the patients was already badly crowded with hospital personnel. Mrs. Orlando was insistent, however, and the more resistance she met, the more insistent she became. The EW administrators tried to coax her out of the lobby and into a more private waiting room. She demanded to see her husband immediately. She was then told that he was dead.

She seemed to shrink, her body curling down on itself, and then she screamed. Her daughter began to sob; her son tearfully swung at members of the staff, his arms arcing blindly. After a moment of this, he began to pound and kick the wall and then, following the example of his sister, he tried to comfort his mother. Mrs. Orlando was crying, "No, no, I won't let you say that." She allowed herself to be led into another room. There was a short silence, and then she cried loudly. Her sobs were heard in the lobby for the next hour.

An MIT undergraduate, working in the emergency ward on a computer study project, watched it all. "I don't know how anybody can stand to work here," he said.

Dr. Martin Nathan, a surgical resident who had also seen it, said to him, "There are good ways to find out, and there are bad ways to find out. That was a bad way."

"Are there any good ways?" the student asked.

"Yes," the resident said. "There are."

A few minutes later, a nurse went into the private room with sedation for Mrs. Orlando and her family. Soon thereafter, the emergency ward received confirmation that the remaining casualties had been treated at other hospitals. The five in the emergency ward were being cared for; three would go to surgery in the next hour. The extra personnel began to leave, in twos and threes, and things slowly returned to normal. One hour and ten minutes had passed since the first patient arrived.

At 6 p.m., a forty-six-year-old insurance salesman arrived after vomiting up blood; twenty minutes after that, a man came in with his sixty-one-year-old mother, who had suddenly lost her ability to speak and seemed to have trouble keeping her balance; then came a nineteen-year-old graduate student who had broken a glass while washing dishes and cut her ankle. At 7 p.m. a thirteen-year-old boy arrived who had been side-swiped by a car and had suffered a scalp laceration. At seven thirty, a child who had fallen out of bed and cut his forehead; at eight, a fifty-year-old man suffering from a heart attack; moments later, an unresponsive twenty-year-old girl who had swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills, brought in by her roommates; a two-year-old child who cried and tugged at his ear; a nineteen-year-old boy with appendicitis; a thirty-six-year-old woman who had driven her car into a telephone pole and was unconscious; a fifty-nine-year-old alcoholic who said he had been beaten by two sailors and had facial lacerations; a man who was thought to be in a diabetic coma; a linotype operator who had burned his left hand; an elderly man who had fallen and broken his hip; a forty-eight-year-old man with abdominal pain and rectal bleeding.

At midnight, a woman arrived complaining of squeezing chest pain; at 2 a.m., a sixty-two-year-old man with known cancer arrived with a high fever; at two thirty, a schoolteacher who had had abdominal surgery two months before was admitted with symptoms of small-bowel obstruction.

The last resident got to bed shortly before 5 a.m., lying fully dressed on a stretcher in one of the treatment rooms. On his door was tacked a sheet of paper which said "Wake me at 6:30."

"However great the kindness and the efficiency," wrote George Orwell, "in every hospital death there will be some cruel, squalid detail, something perhaps too small to be told but leaving terribly painful memories behind, arising out of the haste, the crowding, the impersonality of a place where every day people are dying among strangers."

That is a reasonable description of Ralph Orlando's death, and the unfortunate way his family learned of it. Yet one cannot imagine those events taking place anywhere in the hospital except in the emergency ward. The EW is the place where the haste, the crowding, and the impersonality are seen in their most exaggerated form. And in many ways, the EW is the place where one can see most clearly the work that the hospital performs, in all its positive and negative aspects; the EW is a kind of microcosm for the hospital as a whole. Its growth in recent years has been phenomenal. Its patient load has been increasing steadily at a rate of 10 per cent per year for nearly a decade. It now treats more than 65,000 patients a year. Half of all hospital admissions come through the emergency ward, and many aspects of hospital life are now arranged around that fact: for example, elective admissions in medicine and surgery may have to wait as long as twelve weeks for a free bed, because emergency cases receive priority. If an elective patient has, for example, surgically treatable cancer, the delay may be difficult for everyone to accept.

Yet the trend is clear. The hospital is oriented toward curative treatment of established disease at an advanced or critical stage. Increasingly, the hospital population tends to consist of patients with more and more acute illnesses, until even cancer must accept a somewhat secondary position. And there is no indication that the hospital has fallen into this role passively; on the contrary, this appears to be the logical outcome of many aspects of its evolution.

Massachusetts General Hospital now consists of twenty-one buildings along the banks of the Charles River. Included within this complex are the first structure, the Bulfinch Building, and the most recent, the Gray Building and Jackson Towers, still under construction. All together, the hospital has more than 1,000 beds, and is one of the largest hospitals in the United States.

Invisible is a complex of equal size, consisting of all the buildings that have been erected and then torn down during the last hundred and forty-six years-the isolation wards, the Building for Offensive Diseases, the laboratories and operating rooms that have come and gone as the demands of medical practice and the patterns of disease have shifted.

The hospital is now so large and so busy that it is difficult to grasp the magnitude of its activity. In 1961, it admitted 27,000 patients, performed 16,000 operations, treated 62,000 people in its emergency ward, examined 115,000 patients by X ray, saw 226,000 clinic patients, and dispensed 176,000 prescriptions from its pharmacy. These figures are so large as to be almost meaningless. A better way to look at the job the hospital does is to view it on the basis of a twenty-four-hour day, three hundred sixty-five days a year. On that basis, the hospital sees a new patient in the emergency ward every eight minutes. X rays are taken on a patient every five minutes. A new patient is admitted every twenty minutes. And a new operation is begun every thirty minutes.