There are these two kids, I see them all the time, the mother calls me every week, she comes into clinic every week. She’s a really good mom, maybe a little neurotic. She has a Down’s baby; the other kid’s normal. And she’s really great. Seems like there are so few other patients and families I’m happy to see, though. That can’t be right; you can’t just like one family out of the hundreds who come through.
The streetlights are still on. It’s the middle of the day but it’s so dark that the lights are still on. I’m supposed to go shopping to get my brother and his wife a wedding present. I don’t know what the fuck to get them.
Wednesday, November 13, 1985
It’s cold outside, it’s turning into winter. You can see your breath in the air. I’m still in the OPD. And I’m feeling better.
My depression has gone, for the most part. At least the acute exacerbation. I’m still left with the chronic, smoldering depression I’ve had since August. It turns out I was also getting sick. Got this goddamn viral syndrome from some kid and now I’ve got this residual cough.
Monday, November 25, 1985
I haven’t talked into this for a while. Karen left yesterday, and when she’s here, I usually talk less. I’d rather spend time with her than this machine.
Today’s the end of the fifth month. I finished outpatient this afternoon. Tomorrow I start on 8 East at Jonas Bronck. And while part of me is relieved to get the hell out of that ER, which has just been a madhouse, I’m kind of dreading tomorrow because I’m on call and I have my clinic, so it’s going to be a dreadful night. I’ll be up all night. I’m already sure of that.
But I’m also looking forward to being back to the somewhat protected environment of a floor where I know what my work is. The work’s cut out for you, and even if what most of the other interns have said about Jonas Bronck wards is true, that there are too few nurses up there and the nurses who are there don’t want to work, in a lot of ways it’s better than being out in the unprotected emergency room.
I’ve been paying more attention to some of the other interns lately. Some of them are a lot worse off than I am. Take Peter Carson, for instance. I’ve been working with him in the ER. My God, is he an angry man! He makes the rest of us seem like laughing hyenas. I’ll give you an example. Saturday we were both on call. It was a horrendous day in the emergency room. The third year resident was Larry Brooks, and he said it was the worst day he’d ever seen in that ER. It wasn’t because we had so many terrible things happening. We did have a few kids in the back [the back: the trauma area of the Jonas Bronck emergency room], but there weren’t any real tragedies that took up a lot of time. It was because of the volume; it just never let up, and there were only three of us working until four in the afternoon when the evening float resident showed up four hours late (ooops). I literally had only ten minutes to eat during the entire nineteen hours I was there. It was exhausting. By 4:00 A.M. I was just going cross-eyed. I couldn’t concentrate for shit.
Anyway, at 4:00 A.M. we were ready to get out of there, but the triage box wouldn’t empty. Finally it got down to two charts. The night float was there, he was all alive and peppy, and we were getting ready to leave, but Larry came in and told us there were a couple more to see and I heard the night float say, “Just give them to the interns and go home yourself.” Well, when Peter heard that, he went completely berserk. He started screaming, “That fucker! Let the interns do it? Let me at him! I’ll rip his testicles off, one by one!” He was screaming so loud that everybody in the emergency room could hear him. A nurse came knocking on the door in a second saying, “You know, not everybody out here wants to hear about testicles being torn off!” But Peter was beyond help; he was so incensed, he just kept screaming. We were saying, “Peter, Peter, shut up or we’re going to have to call security on you,” and then he kind of calmed down, but only a little. He was wild. And then what ended up happening was that Larry told us to go home and he wound up seeing the last patient himself.
Peter and I split a cab back to our apartment building, and all the way there he was just cursing, saying how much he hates being an intern and how much he hates the ER. He was just absolutely infuriated. But he’s back there every day, somehow or other. I guess I’m not the worst off, but I think I’m getting a reputation as being one of the depressed interns.
Amy
NOVEMBER 1985
Saturday, November 16, 1985
I’m not very happy about being back from vacation. We had a wonderful, relaxing time in Israel. I must have been in pretty bad shape before we went away. The frightening thing is I didn’t even realize it until I had a chance to get away from it for a while.