The Intern Blues(8)

Well, all of these are reasons for having a baby, but they don’t explain why I decided to have one two months before I started internship. I guess the reason I didn’t want to wait until after I finished my internship and residency was that you can’t tell what might happen; there are people who wait and something happens to them medically and they find out that they can’t have a baby. I didn’t want to take a chance. I had thought for a while that maybe I’d take this year off and spend my time just being a mother and wait until next year to do my internship. A lot of people advised me against that. I was told it would be hard to get back into medicine after I’d been away from it for a whole year. And Larry encouraged me to go ahead with my internship; he told me he could manage the baby when I was on call. So here I am.

But I didn’t think it was going to be this hard to be away from her. From the day Sarah was born until orientation started last week, I spent every minute with her. I took May off as vacation time. In the beginning of May, we put an ad in the paper for a full-time baby-sitter. We chose the woman we finally hired because she seemed really nice and she had great references. Her name is Marie; she’s a Jamaican woman who’s about forty. She has full-grown children of her own. She started two weeks ago, while I was still around. She’s going to come every morning, Monday to Friday, at seven-thirty and stay until Larry or I get home at night. Larry and I will be alone with Sarah on weekends. Marie seems to like the baby a lot, but then again what’s not to like? There are a couple of little problems, though: She spends all day carrying Sarah around, she feeds her every two hours because she says she’s afraid the baby will cry and get colic. I guess I’ll eventually have to talk with her; I’ll have to be more assertive. I know Marie’ll do a great job and everything’ll turn out okay. It’s just that . . . I’m worried she might turn Sarah into a wimp!

So far, being an intern isn’t any worse than being a medical student. I’m in the OPD [Outpatient Department] at Jonas Bronck this month. I was on call last night for the first time and I got out of the ER at about a quarter to three. There was a lot of trauma, plenty of lacerations and head wounds, but since I don’t know how to do anything yet, I wound up seeing the more basic medical problems. For some reason, most of the kids I saw were four-month-olds with fevers. There’s something going around, I guess. I felt bad for Evan [the senior resident who had been on call that night]. He was the only person who knew how to suture, so he wound up spending the entire night sewing lacerations. Since the attending went home at ten o’clock, the other interns and I had to keep interrupting him every five minutes to discuss patients with him. I felt bad doing it, but I wasn’t about to send anybody home without clearing it with a senior first!

When I got home, something weird happened. I went to bed and I must have fallen into a deep sleep because Sarah started crying at around four and I thought I was still in the ER getting ready to see another screaming kid. Larry told me he heard me say, “Please God, let me go home.”

Monday, July 8, 1985

I’ve been on call three times now. Last Friday was the worst so far. Everything had been going pretty well until about eight o’clock, when a thirteen-year-old girl who had been raped came in. I wound up seeing her.

She was a young thirteen; she looked more like eleven or ten. She was really broken up, but I got her to tell me what had happened. She had been alone in her family’s apartment when a knock came on the door. She looked through the peephole and saw her fifteen-year-old brother’s friend. He told her he had left a book in the apartment, and she let him in. They went into the brother’s bedroom and started looking around. Suddenly the girl felt something around her neck. The boy had pulled out an electrical cord and he kept pulling it tighter until she got down on the bed and took off her clothes. He then proceeded to rape her.

He was there a total of about an hour. A little while later the girl’s family came home and found her hysterical. They immediately brought her to the ER.

The attending and I went over what had to be done. I did a complete exam and got all the samples that would be needed as evidence when the case went to court. There’s something called a rape kit that has to be used, with directions that have to be followed exactly or the whole thing can be thrown out of court. I made sure I did everything right. I was working like a robot all through it, trying not to think about anything except getting the job done. After I finished, I handed the rape kit over to the cop. The social worker came in to talk to the girl and her parents, who were crazy at that point. The father wanted to go out and kill the kid slowly, really make him suffer. The mother just cried. The girl didn’t speak much, she was in shock. The cop called a little while later to say the boy had been caught. The parents took the girl home at about midnight. As soon as they left the ER, I just fell apart. I spent the next hour crying. We were still busy, so when I pulled myself back together I had to start seeing patients again. We didn’t get out until nearly five in the morning. It was a terrible night. Terrible.