You know, I might have been able to do all this a few months ago, but I sure wouldn’t have felt right about it. Now I feel like I know what I’m doing. Watch, I’ll come back and something horrible will have happened by Monday.
I played Santa Claus on the ward the other day. I put on the red suit and the hat and the big beard and the hair and stuffed a pillow under there and strapped it on with some kerlix [rolls of gauze bandages] and said, “Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho! Merry Christmas!” about three hundred times. I danced around on my toes. Everybody told me what a wonderful Santa Claus I was. And John Mason [a four-year-old boy who is a long-term occupant of the AIDS section of 8 West], who usually runs away from Santa Claus, thought it was a lot of fun this year and was totally thrilled. Filled with happiness. I was glad I could do that, make little John happy for a while.
Amy
DECEMBER 1985
Sunday, December 1, 1985
This internship is really rotten. There’s nothing about it that I like. The only thing that gives me any kind of enjoyment right now is Sarah, and I can’t even really enjoy being with her because in the back of my mind I always know that I’m going to have to be back at the hospital soon. And when I’m in the hospital, I spend my time with all these nice children who have terrible things wrong with them, and I know I’m going to have to watch them get sicker and sicker for thirty-six hours at a stretch. I don’t know, I have pictures of about a half dozen of these children burned into my mind. I haven’t been able to forget the little girl I saw in the ER last week who was sexually abused; I’ve been thinking about her constantly. There’s her, that leukemic who died on Adolescent, and a couple of others.
I’ve been thinking this weekend that if I knew then what I know now, I never would have done this internship. Everything’s so hopeless; I’m so hopeless. It isn’t even half over yet, I just got back from vacation, and I’m already so tired of all of it! I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know what I can do.
Mike Miller called me into his office last week. He told me some of the people in the department were kind of upset with my attitude. Screw them! He said there were some people who thought I wasn’t taking the job seriously enough. Terrific, just terrific! I asked Mike how many of these people had to take night call every third night with a baby at home. How many of them had to neglect their responsibilities as a parent in order to work in the hospital? I told him I was doing the best I could and if he or anybody else didn’t like it, he should just fire me! He said it wasn’t him, that he understood what was going on, but that this had come up at some meeting they had had and he had been the one who was supposed to have a talk with me about it.
He also asked if I wanted to come back as a junior resident next year. He said he needed to know within a few days. I told him I’d have to think about it. After what he’d said to me I was pretty damned angry and I seriously thought of going in and telling him to go fuck himself, that I wouldn’t be coming back next year or ever again. But after I cooled off a little, I finally told him on Friday that I would be back. I don’t know. I could have taken a year or two off; Larry was encouraging me to do whatever I thought was best, and for a while, taking some time off made a lot of sense. But then, after I’d been working in the emergency room for a while, I figured this wasn’t too bad and I thought I could stick it out. I still have the feeling that if I were to decide to take some time off, I’d have a lot of trouble getting myself motivated enough to get back into it. But this whole weekend, I’ve been thinking, maybe I made a mistake. Maybe staying isn’t such a good idea. The problem is, I don’t know what I can do about it now.
I’m doing Children’s at Mount Scopus this month. It was good to get out of the Jonas Bronck ER. The actual work there isn’t so bad; it’s just that there are so many bad things that happen to the kids who come in, like that sexually abused girl. Seeing kids like that every day gets to be too much pretty quickly.
Coming to Mount Scopus isn’t great either. It seems like everybody has an attitude, all the nurses and the clerks. They all seem to resent having us around, like we’re getting in the way of their work or something. This week, Harrison [Harrison Boyd, the other intern on the Northwest 5 Children’s team] wrote a q4h order for Demerol [an order for the pain killer Demerol to be given every four hours, around the clock] for this five-year-old with sickle-cell disease who was in with a painful crisis. One of the nurses came up to him while we were on work rounds and said, “We don’t give pain meds q4h on this floor.” Just like that; she simply refused to do it. Harrison told her that the child was in a lot of pain and he thought she required medication around the clock. The nurse told him it didn’t matter, the rules are that they can only give pain meds on a prn basis [prn: as needed]. So now this little girl has to feel pain and beg for her medication before someone will give it to her. The nurses say they’re afraid a q4h order will make the patient addicted. They say they’re afraid they’ll wind up turning the child into a drug addict. Turn a five-year-old into a drug addict? That’s a lot of nonsense. But that’s the way things are done at Mount Scopus, and there’s nothing you can do to change it.