I called the intern upstairs and it took her about a half hour finally to get down to the ER. It was Amy Horowitz. I sent her out to the waiting room to find the kid but she came back a few minutes later and said, “They’re gone. Do I still get credit for the admission?” [Admissions are distributed evenly to the two interns taking call on the inpatient wards at Jonas Bronck; they alternate, admitting every other one.] I went out to look and I couldn’t find them either. It looked like they had vanished into thin air. Bob Marion was the attending and he told me to try to call the woman at home using the number listed on the ER sheet. So I called and I got some woman who claimed not to be able to speak any English. I asked for the kid’s mother by name and this woman on the phone said something about “no speeka de English.” So I got one of the nurses to translate and she told me that the woman was saying that she had never heard of anybody by the name that was listed on the sheet. I figured I dialed the wrong number, so I hung up and tried again. I got the same woman on the line and we went through the same routine again. I was sure I was talking to the mother of the patient; I was positive she had decided that she didn’t want the kid admitted, that she had never believed me in the first place, and that she had gone home and would deny that she had ever been to Jonas Bronck. It made me crazy! I told Bob about this and he got angry, too. He called the number himself and told the woman in Spanish that the baby could be very sick and if she was lying about it and the kid did die, it wouldn’t be his responsibility, it would be on the mother’s head and not his. Amazing! I had never heard anybody using the concept of Jewish guilt translated into Spanish. It didn’t work, so it may have lost something in the translation, because the woman told him he was crazy, that she had never heard of the people he was talking about, and if any of us tried to call her back again, she’d call the cops and have us all arrested.
Bob hung up, and his face was bright red. He yelled that I’d better call the police and have them go out to the address listed on the ER sheet and bring the baby back, dead or alive. That is, if the address listed was correct. So then I started trying to contact New York’s finest. Jesus, what a day!
I called the precinct house in the neighborhood they lived in and spoke to the desk sergeant. He took all the information but didn’t know what to do with it so he tried to connect me with his supervisor but somehow the phones got disconnected. So I called back and got somebody else, who reconnected me with the desk sergeant who again tried to connect me with the supervisor. While I was on hold, the senior resident came up to me and said, “The charts are starting to back up. When are you going to be done with this nonsense?” I started to answer but then someone picked up and I never finished my sentence. I had to give whoever was on the phone the information all over again, and he said, “Well, you understand we can’t just go out there and arrest them. We can’t drag them in against their will. If the woman doesn’t want to come, we can’t force her.” I told him just to do his best; he said he’d try and asked for their address. When I gave it to him, he said, “That’s in the projects, isn’t it?” I didn’t know, so he looked it up and said it was. Since it was the projects, it was out of the city cops’ jurisdiction. He told me I’d have to call the Housing Police.
So I’m sitting in the emergency room, the patients are starting to pile up in the waiting room like the planes over Kennedy International Airport on a Sunday afternoon, and I’m getting a civics lesson in the structure of the New York City Police Department bureaucracy. I was pretty pissed off about all this. I called the number of the Housing Police and went through the same business again but finally a sergeant told me he’d send out a squad car to see what they could do.
I figured that phase of this mess was over and I went to pick up a new chart from the triage box but before I could even make my way to the microphone to call the next patient in from the waiting room, one of the nurses came running up to me and told me to follow her. She led me into the adult ER and there, in the holding area, lying on a stretcher, was the woman with the baby in her lap, both dead asleep. She had lost her way out to the waiting room, had come across this nice, cozy, empty stretcher, and had decided to use it to catch up on some sleep. I couldn’t believe it! I went back to the ER, called Amy, and told her to come down and pick up her patient.
Then I remembered that a crack unit of the Housing Police was preparing to swoop down and make a raid on the woman’s apartment. I figured it was my civic responsibility to try to prevent them from going on this wild-goose chase, but when I called, I found out I was too late; a squad car had already arrived at the projects and they couldn’t be called back. About ten minutes later, two huge Housing Policemen marched into the ER leading this panicked little eight-year-old kid. “He said his mother wasn’t home,” one of the cops said. “He said she was still here with the baby.” Bob and I explained the story to them very nicely. They weren’t even upset. They didn’t threaten to slug us in the mouth or anything. They even volunteered to take the boy back home. So the story had a happy ending. What a strange job this is!