Samuel Shem - The house of God

She slept. I lay awake, afraid of my tomorrow, my upcoming first night on call.

When I went to wake up Chuck the next morning, he looked wrecked: his afro smushed down over one side of his head, his face scarred from the wrinkles of the sheets, the white of one eye red, and the other eye swollen shut.

"What happened to your eye?"

"Bugbite. Bugfuckinbite, right in my eye. There's some fierce kind of bug in this on?call room."

"Your other eye looks terrible too."

"Man, you should see it from this side. I called Housekeeping for some clean sheets, but you know how it is. I never answered calls neither, before those postcards started arrivin'. There's only one way to handle Housekeeping, man, and I'm gonna do it."

"What's that?"

"Love. The boss of bedmaking is named Hazel. She's a big Cuban woman. I know I could love her."

In the cardflip, Potts asked Chuck how it had gone.

"Great. Six admissions, the youngest seventy?four."

"What time did you get to sleep?"

"Midnight."

Amazed, Potts asked, "How? How'd you ever get the writeups done?"

"Easy, man, shitty write?ups, man, shitty write?ups."

"Key concept," said the Fat Man, "to think that you're doing a shitty job. If you resign yourself to doing a shitty job, you go ahead and get the job done, and since we're all in the ninety?ninth percentile of interns, at one of the best ternships in the world, what you do turns out to be a terrific job, a superlative job. Don't forget that four out of every ten interns in America can't speak English."

"So it wasn't so bad, Chuck?" I asked hopefully.

"Bad? Oh, it was bad. Man, last night I was used"

My worst warning was the Runt. As I'd walked into the House that morning, deflated by the transition from the bright and healthy July to the diseased neon and a?seasonal stink of the corridor, I'd passed the room of the Yellow Man. Outside it were the bags marked "Danger?Contaminated," now full of bloodstained sheets, towels, scrub suits, and equipment. The room was covered with blood. A special?duty nurse, wrapped like a spacewoman in sterile clothes, was sitting as far from the body as possible, reading Better Homes and Gardens. The Yellow Man lay still, absolutely still. The Runt was nowhere to be seen.

It wasn't until lunch that I was to see him. He was cigar?ash gray. Eat My Dust Eddie and Hyper Hooper led him to the lunch table like a dog on a leash. As he put his tray down, we noticed there was nothing on it but silverware. No one pointed that out.

"I'm going to die," said the Runt, taking out his pillbox.

"You are not going to die," said Hooper. "You are never going to die."

The Runt told us about the exchange transfusion, about taking the old blood out of one vein and putting the new blood into another: "Things were going pretty well, and then, I'd taken a needle out of the groin and was about to put it into the last bag of blood, and that porpoise, Celia the nurse, well, she held up this other needle from the Yellow Man's belly and . . . stuck it in my hand."

There was a dead silence. The Runt was going to die.

"All of a sudden I felt faint. I saw my life ebb past me. Celia said Gee I'm sorry and I said Aw shucks it's all right it just means I'm going to die and Mellow Yellow's twenty?one and I'm twenty?seven and I've already lived six more years than him and I've spent my last night doing something I knew was completely worthless and we'll die together, him and me, but it's OK, Celia." The Runt paused, and then screamed, "HEAR ME, CELIA? IT'S OK! I went to bed at four A.M. and I was sure I'd never wake up."

"But the incubation period is four to six months."

"So? So in four months one of you will exchange-transfuse me."

"It's all my fault," said Potts. "I shoulda hit him with steroids."

After the others had left, the Runt turned to me and said he had a confession to make: "It's about my third admission last night. In the middle of all this crap with the Yellow Man, this guy comes into the Emergency Room and I . . . I couldn't handle it. I offered him five dollars if he'd go home. He took it and left."

Prodded by my fear of its arrival, my time to be left alone on call arrived. Potts signed out his patients to me and went home to Otis. Scared, I sat at the nursing station, watching the sad sun die. I thought of Berry, and wished I was with her, doing things that young ones like us were supposed to be doing, while we still had our health. My fear mushroomed. Chuck came up, signed out his patients and asked me, "Hey, man, notice anything different?"

I did not.

"My beeper, man, it's off. They can't get me now."

I watched him walk down the long corridor. I wanted to call out to him, "Don't go, don't leave me alone here," but I did not. I felt so lonesome I wanted to cry. The Fat Man, earlier in the afternoon, as I'd gotten more and more nervous, had tried to reassure me, telling me that I was lucky, that he'd be on call with me all night.

"Besides," he'd said, "tonight's a great night, it's The Wizard of Oz and blintzes."

"The Wizard of Oz and Blintzes?" I asked. "What's that?"

"You know, the tornado, the yellow brick road, and that terrific Tin Man trying to get into Dorothy's pants. Great flick. And at the ten?o'clock meal, blintzes. We'll have a ball."

That hadn't helped me much. As I tended to the chaos of the ward, handling the now?hydrated and violent Ina Goober and tending to the feverish Sophie, who by now was so out of it from the LP that she'd attacked Putzel, I almost trembled with fear of what was to come. And then, when my time came, I choked. I was on the toilet and from six flights down, in her communications bunker, the page operator scored a direct hit:

DR. BASCH CALL EMERGENCY WARD FOR AN ADMISSION, DR. BASCH . . . Someone was dying in the E.W. and they wanted me? Didn't they know not to come into a teaching hospital in the first week of July? They wouldn't see a doctor, they would see me. What did I know? I panicked. Olaf's Potato started to zing through my mind again, and, heart pounding, I sought out the Fat Man, who was in the TV room immersed in The Wizard of Oz. Nibbling at a salami, he was singing along with the flick: "Because because because because because of the wonderful things he does. We're off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Ozzz . . ."

It was difficult to interrupt him. I thought it peculiar that he'd take an interest in something as playful as Oz, but I soon found out that his interest was, like many of his interests, perverted:

"Do it," Fats muttered, "do it to Dorothy with the oil can. Spin her around on your hat, Ray, spin her around on your hat."

"I've got something to tell you," I said.

"Shoot."

"There's a patient, an admission, in the Emergency Ward."

HZ SAMUEL SHEM

"Good. Go see her. You're a doctor now, remember? Doctors see patients. Do it, Ray Bolger, do it to her STAT!"

"Yeah, I know," I squeaked, "but I . . . you see, someone's going to be dying down there, and I . . : "

Taking his eyes off the tube, Fats looked at me and said in a kind voice, "Oh, I see. Scared, huh?"

I nodded and told him that all I could think of was Olaf's big potato.

"Right. OK, so you're scared. Who isn't, his first night on call? Even I was scared too. Let's go. We gotta hurry. We've only got half an hour till the ten o'clock meal. What nursing home is she from?"

"I don't know," I said as we walked to the elevator.

"You don't know? Damn. They've probably already sold her bed, so we won't be able to TURF her back there. One of the true medical emergencies, when the nursing home sells the gomere's bed."

"How do you know it will be a gomere?"

"The odds, just playing the odds."