The main reason I liked Children’s this month, though, was because of the resident. The resident was wonderful. She’s just totally wonderful in all ways. She’s smart and she’s an excellent teacher. She’s calm and she doesn’t get upset no matter what happens or how many mistakes I make. And she’s great-looking, too, which certainly helps. It’s just too bad I won’t get the chance to work with her again this year. And I swear to God, if she weren’t married . . .
Bob
JANUARY 1986
We’re getting into the seriously depressing part of the year now. New Year’s Day marks the beginning of Intern Suicide season, the time when we really have to start worrying about the house staff’s mental health. There are a number of reasons why January and February are so bad. First, exhaustion is cumulative, and the interns have now built up a six-month supply. They’re chronically overtired and can’t get themselves too enthusiastic about anything. This exhaustion affects all aspects of their lives: They don’t have energy to socialize, so they completely lose contact with family and friends; they eat too much junk food and get little or no exercise, so they wind up gaining a ton of weight. This causes them to feel down about themselves and to lose confidence.
Second, although everybody around them is celebrating the end of one calendar year and the beginning of the next, the end of the internship year hasn’t even yet appeared on the horizon. There’s just about nothing for these guys to look forward to right now other than another half year of the same shit over and over again. So they develop a feeling of desperation, and that feeling is compounded by the fact that they know there’s nothing they can do to make the time move any faster.
Finally, the environment seems to be conspiring against them. The weather this time of year is horrible. It’s constantly freezing cold, and the city is frequently getting pelted with snowstorms. It gets dark so early that the house officers can go for weeks without ever actually seeing sunshine; they get to the hospital so early that it’s still dark and they come home again at night, after the sun has set. So the house officers live in a constant world of cold and darkness, and there’s nothing more depressing than that.
Although January is bad, it’s nothing compared with February. In January, there’s still some semblance of a “spark” left within the bodies of the interns, the last vestige of the excitement that accompanied the holiday season. The department’s Christmas party did the whole staff a lot of good; there were a couple of weeks during which everyone seemed a little happier and a little calmer. But it was really short-lived. And usually by February 1, any spark of excitement has been snuffed out.
A fair number of pretty strange things happened during January. The strangest involved Andy Ames, one of the interns who’s in Andy Baron’s circle of friends. The story started like this: At the beginning of January, Andy Ames and one of the female senior residents were working together on the Jonas Bronck wards one night and admitted a six-week-old girl with fever. Because a significant percentage of these infants will be shown to have a serious bacterial infection in their blood or spinal fluid, it is policy that all babies under two months of age who come to the emergency rooms with fever routinely get admitted to the hospital. Blood, urine, and spinal fluid cultures are taken, and the infants are started on intravenous antibiotics.
Anyway, Andy Ames and the senior resident were trying to get a sterile specimen of urine from this little girl by doing a straight catheterization, a procedure in which a plastic tube is inserted into the urethra and passed up into the bladder. The cath went pretty well, and they managed to get an adequate sample of urine for culture and urinalysis. But the mother, who was standing in the treatment room the whole time, went nuts when she realized what Andy was doing. She accused him of sexually molesting her daughter and of “ruining” her for life. The mother yelled and screamed for most of that night, becoming more and more agitated as time passed. Early the next morning, she went to Alan Cozza and the hospital administrators to complain. When the situation was assessed, it was carefully explained to the woman that what Andy had done was completely aboveboard and standard treatment and did not in any way constitute sexual molestation. The mother continued to yell that Andy had “ruined” her daughter and that no man would ever want her after what he had done. The administrators continued throughout that day and the next to try to calm her and explain the anatomy of the procedure to her. When it finally became clear to the woman that she wasn’t going to get any satisfaction from the hospital employees, she decided to take matters into her own hands: She began to threaten Andy Ames with bodily harm.