Coyote Medicine by Lewis Mebl-Madrona M.D

Author:Lewis Mebl-Madrona, M.D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fireside
Published: 1997-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Luke had come and gone quickly, barely long enough to get his face in the 1982 faculty photo. The reality of how quickly he had gone from welcomed expert to persona non grata was daunting. Luke could have grabbed Mount Sinai’s administrators by their necks and pinned them against the wall. I was disappointed that Luke, for all his combativeness, was walking away from such a righteous fight. And if he could get axed so quickly, what was going to happen to me?

LUKE WAS GONE by the end of the week. The following Monday morning the director of the residency program called me into his office to ask about my threat to break Mrs. Bowers’s leg. Luke had heard about the incident the morning after it happened, and he had laughed and congratulated me for getting medication in the woman without the nasogastric tube. He criticized the night nurse and the orderlies for letting the situation get so ugly, and that was the end of it. Or so I thought.

Now that Luke was gone, one of the reprimanded orderlies had filed a formal complaint accusing me of brutal and inhumane treatment. The situation was brutal and inhumane when I arrived, I argued, describing the eight orderlies hovering over a woman lying in her own waste. I had a fleeting notion of calling Mrs. Bowers in to defend me, but that was of course impossible. Instead, I told the residency director that I’d seen the woman a number of times since that night, and that we were on friendly terms. Whenever we saw each other we talked about the headlines of the morning Chronicle and how the Giants were doing. I told him she said I was her favorite doctor. I should have known better than to say such a thing to a Freudian psychoanalyst.

“Only because you stimulated her masochistic fantasies of self-abuse,” he promptly replied. “‘Take your medicine or I’ll break your leg’—that’s quite a choice.”

“That was just to get her attention.”

“Oh, it got her attention, Dr. Mehl. Her attending says you awakened her unconscious fantasies of dismemberment and annihilation. She’s now struggling to suppress a fear of doctors, for which you are directly responsible.”

If so, she was struggling successfully. When I passed her in the day lounge after the meeting, Mrs. Bowers interrupted a monologue she’d been directing at a catatonic woman and rushed over to me waving the Chronicle. “We beat Nolan Ryan last night,” she said. “What do you think of that, crazy doctor?”

Whatever she told her attending, I was sure she had been pulling his leg. Sylvia would say anything to get a rise out of someone. She was whip-smart, and could figure out just what buttons to push. Her attending had used her verbal bantering as the evidence he needed to say that I was a bad doctor. I realized the meeting I had just left had very little to do with Sylvia Bowers, or the deeper question I needed to answer—was it right for

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.