From then on, things became exceedingly weird. While the baby was in the hospital, the mother told Andy every time she saw him that she was going to sneak up behind him when he wasn’t expecting it and stick a butcher’s knife into his back. She also told this to everyone else who was hanging around the ward, the house staff, the medical students, the nurses, even some of the other parents. Since the baby was better and no sign of bacterial infection had been found, Alan Cozza decided to discharge the child a day earlier than usual. He hoped that with the baby and her mother out of the hospital, some of the pressure would be removed from Andy, who, needless to say, was feeling quite persecuted by all this. But discharging the baby didn’t help; the woman managed to find other ways to drive Andy crazy.
After discharge, the baby’s mother began to call the ward asking for Dr. Ames. When Andy got on, she’d repeat the threats. She somehow got the number of the residents’ room and left cryptic messages for him with Lisa, the house staff secretary. She even managed to get Andy’s home telephone number and left messages on his answering machine.
At about this time, Alan Cozza, concerned about what was happening to his intern, began investigating this woman’s background. Not surprisingly, he found that she had a long psychiatric history and had been diagnosed as having paranoid schizophrenia. Then, about a week after the baby was discharged, a call came for Andy in the residents’ room. The person identified himself as the woman’s psychiatrist. He explained that the woman had told him exactly what had happened and had laid out in explicit detail exactly what she was going to do to get back at “that intern who ruined my daughter.” He told Andy that he was concerned about his well-being because she was angrier and more agitated than he’d ever before seen her.
This was all Andy needed. If he hadn’t been worried about all this before, the psychiatrist’s call certainly pushed him over the edge. And apparently there was very little at that point that anybody could have done. The woman wouldn’t voluntarily consent to hospitalization in a psychiatric facility because she didn’t think of herself as sick. Her psychiatrist, although truly concerned about Andy, was unwilling to proceed with forcing her into institutionalization against her will. He said he simply hadn’t accumulated enough evidence yet to justify such a move. And so, during January, after work every day, one of the other members of the house staff had to walk Andy out to his car in the parking lot. The interns took turns staying over at his apartment. He had his phone number changed and made sure the new one wasn’t listed. And all of this certainly took its toll on him. He began looking terrible: He was already exhausted from the usual intern routine, and he barely had enough strength to get through a typical day. But now he was no longer able to sleep even on the nights when he wasn’t on call because he was so worried.
The story finally came to a head in early February. The baby’s mother showed up in the residents’ room at Jonas Bronck one day, demanding to see Andy and wanting to know why he wasn’t on the ward where he belonged. Lisa, the secretary, told her that at the end of January he had rotated onto another service and was no longer at the hospital. The woman demanded to know where he was, and when Lisa, who was well aware of the situation, refused to tell her, the woman pulled a big knife out of her pocketbook. One of the residents who had been sitting in the outer office ran to get the security guard who was stationed on the pediatric floor. The guard ran into the room, surprising the woman. In the confusion, he was able to overpower her and force her to release the knife. No one was hurt, thank God, and the woman was taken to the psych emergency room in handcuffs. She was ultimately admitted to Bronx State Psychiatric Hospital. Andy, who was working on the Infants’ ward at Mount Scopus, was relieved to hear this news, to say the least. He went home that night and had his first good night’s sleep in weeks. And within a week or two, the whole incident was forgotten.
This melodrama is certainly not an everyday occurrence. But when something like this does happen, you can be sure it’ll occur in January or February.
Andy
FEBRUARY 1986
Sunday, February 23, 1986
All in all, the two weeks I spent in the Jonas Bronck OPD were pretty good, even though it was so frustrating. My prior ER experience at Jonas Bronck had been horrendous, and I had expected the same. But it was much quieter this time; the asthma room wasn’t constantly packed, it wasn’t constantly filled with screaming, wheezing children who were vomiting all over the floor, making the place smelly and sticky and making the whole emergency room so noisy because of the sound of the oxygen coming out of the wall tanks. Instead, it was much quieter, and on call nights we’d get out of there at twelve or one o’clock, instead of at four or five in the morning. And the chiefs, thankfully, were really nice to me for some reason. They gave me no Friday nights [the night without a night float] and the only even slightly hard thing I had was neurology clinic, which is bad only because there always are so many patients.