Well, it didn’t take long for them to figure it all out. Once they woke up to the fact that we were planning to admit the kid and slap a BCW hold on him and that their chance of ever getting him back again was about the same as my chance of being elected president of the United States, they let their best qualities come to the surface. The father picked up the baby like he was a football and started to move toward the exit. The city cops, who were still hanging around, knew the mistake had been the hospital’s and not the parents’. They also knew that the parents hadn’t done anything wrong, at least not at that exact moment, and so they didn’t try to stop them. The cops left, and that’s when the hospital security guards stepped in. They caught the guy, brought him back, put them all in a room, and watched them for the rest of the night, but they weren’t exactly happy to do it. They acted as if they had better things to do than baby-sit for a couple of ranting junkies.
I tried my hand at talking the parents down. I told them that putting the baby in the hospital was the best thing for him, that if he was hooked we could give him medication to make him better and slowly wean him off. It sounded great to me, but of course the parents, who were pretty crazed, didn’t buy it. Then the social worker showed up and she talked to them for about a half hour. Obviously she made just as great an impact on them as I did, because when they came out, the mother was still holding on to the baby. We didn’t know what to do next, so we had a priest come down and talk to them, we had some friend of the family’s who had shown up talk to them, but nothing seemed to do any good. Finally, after about five hours of this nonsense, the mother said she had to get home right away because she needed something to steady her nerves. She handed the baby over to the social worker and she and the father kind of ran for the door. So we got the baby back. Her fix was more important than the baby in the long run.
We got out this morning at four-thirty. I didn’t get home until after five, and I fell right to sleep. I didn’t even get out of my clothes. I had two and a half hours of sleep. But it was quality sleep, so that makes a big difference. Yeah, right! And when I woke up, I was still wearing my smelly, dirty clothes. What a wonderful experience this internship is!
At least I got to go to my grandmother’s for dinner tonight. My grandmother’s good, she’s doing fine. I’m sure she thinks I’ve lost my mind or something because I can’t keep up even boring conversations with her and I keep falling asleep every five minutes. But she doesn’t say anything. She just keeps the food coming.
I’m going to sleep now. Maybe when I wake up, I’ll realize this has all been a dream.
Monday, November 11, 1985
I’m suddenly not feeling very well. I think I’m coming down with something. I’ve had this stomach ache and a sore throat since this morning. I have the chills, too, so I probably have a fever. I can’t understand why I’m getting sick. After all, all I do is hang around an emergency room, working twenty-hour shifts, seeing sick children who sneeze on me, cough on me, pee on me, shit on me, and vomit on me. What possible means would I have of getting sick?
My mother came to visit on Saturday. She walked into my apartment, took one look, and said something like, “Oh, dear, I hadn’t heard anything about a nuclear attack in this part of the Bronx.” (I get my sense of humor from my mother’s side of the family.) I have to admit, I have kind of neglected the housework over the past few months. So my mother rolled up her sleeves, got to work, and spent the next six hours cleaning up my apartment. I had all sorts of great things planned; I was going to take her to lunch at the Jonas Bronck coffee shop. I figured she’d love those mock-turkey sandwiches. Oh, what the hell! We did go out for dinner at a nice Italian restaurant. It was nice to see her. And now I can be sick in a nice, clean apartment.
I took some Tylenol, but it hasn’t done any good. I think I’m really sick.
Wednesday, November 13, 1985, 9:00 P.M.
I’m dying. I didn’t expect it to be one of the patients who would finally get me, and I never thought they’d use germ warfare. But there it was, the most virulent GI [gastrointestinal] bug ever to exist, and now I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.
I fell asleep Monday night at about seven. I wasn’t feeling well Tuesday, but I made it to work and somehow I made it through the day. I took my temperature in the ER at about one in the afternoon. It was over a hundred. But hey, I’m an intern, and interns can do anything, including working a full fourteen-hour day when they’re sick. I came home yesterday and fell asleep right away. I slept until 11 P.M., and when I woke up, I had the worst cramps in the history of the human race. I ran to the bathroom and stayed there for the next four hours. I got back into bed sometime after three and I fell asleep for a while. Then I woke up with worse cramps than before and tried to get up to run to the bathroom. My brain was strongly in favor of the idea but my body just wouldn’t budge. I managed to crawl out of bed and make it to the bathroom just in time and I fell asleep in there until my alarm went off at seven-thirty. I still could barely move. At that point, something told me that I probably wasn’t going to be able to make it to work.