Tuesday, May 20, 1986
They did it to me again! I can’t believe it! Yesterday was the day my father had his surgery. I had been trying since last Wednesday to get the day off. I thought it would be easy. I should have known better.
There were lots of problems from the beginning this time. First of all, I have clinic Monday afternoon, so I went to the director of the clinic and asked if I could switch my patients to another day just this once. I’d never asked her for a single favor in the past and I’d done lots of things for her like covering for other doctors who were sick. She hemmed and hawed for a couple of minutes and then when I explained that I needed to go to be with my father who was having an operation, she said she’d see what she could do. She called me on Thursday to say that she’d tried everything but there was no way she could cancel or reschedule the patients.
Fine. I understood what that meant. What that meant was that I wasn’t going to be able to approach this whole thing as a grown-up. I was going to have to call in sick and lie about it. And because of that, I didn’t even go to talk to the chiefs about switching my night call. I’d just call in sick and leave them hanging in the wind.
Well, yesterday came, and that’s exactly what I did. I called everyone I had to, the chiefs, the clinic, and the emergency room, and I told them I had gastroenteritis and I couldn’t make it in. Then I got dressed and got ready to leave for New Jersey. But just as I was about to leave the apartment, the phone rang. It was Mike Miller. He asked me if anything was wrong. I thought for a minute: Should I tell him the truth, or should I continue the story I made up? I decided to tell him the truth. It was obviously the wrong decision, because after I got finished telling him about my father, he said that they were strapped today, that a lot of people had called in sick, and if I didn’t come to be on call at least that night, there would be only one person in the emergency room from five until midnight. So he made me a deal: He told me he’d let me take that day and the next day off if I came in to be on call that night. He said they were depending on me. He was so nice and so straight about it, I didn’t see that I had much of a choice. So I went out to New Jersey and sat outside while my father had the surgery and stayed in the recovery room. I had to leave to come back to the Bronx just as he was going back to his room. It was so stupid; I didn’t get to spend any time with him at all.
At least I knew he had done well during the operation. But all during the night, while I was seeing patients in the emergency room, I kept thinking how stupid this was. I mean, my father’s not a young man; an operation like that can cause complications. And he had nobody else in the world to stay with him except me. So what was I doing while he was waking up from the anesthesia? I was seeing kids with runny noses and ear infections. I didn’t need to be there; Evan Broadman, who was the senior resident, could have seen everyone by himself.
Well, I spent all day today at my father’s bedside. He’s in a lot of pain. The surgery’s very uncomfortable. He didn’t say anything about my not being there last night, but I knew he would have liked me to have been there. And I would have liked to have been there, too.
Monday, May 26, 1986
I was trying to think last night if I’d learned anything this year. I was taking care of a six-year-old girl who had been hit by a car. She had about a five-minute loss of consciousness but seemed to be fine by the time she reached us. I handled the entire case myself. I started an IV and sent off a CBC and a set of lytes [examination of blood electrolytes]. I got skull films, which were negative; I did a UA and found some blood in her urine, so I arranged for an IVP, which also was negative [any patient who has had significant trauma and is found to have blood in the urine must have an intravenous pyelogram, an X-ray evaluation of the kidneys, to make sure that no damage has been done to the kidneys]. I cleaned out her forehead laceration and sutured it myself. Then I called the intern up on the floor and admitted the patient for observation. I think that was pretty amazing! Considering I couldn’t start an IV or put in a suture when I started last July, I think you’d have to say I’ve come a long way. It’s funny, though; you never see it that way while you’re doing it. While you’re working, you’re only aware of the things you don’t know, not the things you do know.
Mark
MAY 1986
Thursday, May 1, 1986
My mother told me I should always try to find something nice to say about a situation. I started my rotation at University Hospital last Monday, and ever since, I’ve been trying to figure out something nice to say about the place. I finally came up with something: The food is good. No, that’s not even exactly true. It’s not actually good, it’s just plentiful. Plentiful and easily available and free; they give us meal tickets so we can eat three meals a day. And that’s it. Outside of the food, I haven’t found anything I’ve liked at University Hospital.