Heart: An American Medical Odyssey by Cheney Dick & Reiner Jonathan

Author:Cheney, Dick & Reiner, Jonathan [Cheney, Dick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2013-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

Treating the Vice President

DR. REINER

The summers in Washington are long, but on this early September morning, the cooler air and crystalline light offered a whispered promise of the fall to come. I had an appointment at the White House with Vice President Cheney later in the day, so I dressed in a dark suit, a bit more formal than usual, and headed off into the dense DC morning traffic.

It had been about three months since Sung Lee implanted the defibrillator. Lew Hofmann had arranged for one of the WHMU nurses to draw blood from the vice president early in the morning and messenger it up to the lab at Bethesda Naval Hospital that day, so the results would be available when we met with him. We planned to arrive about fifteen minutes before our 5:00 p.m. appointment and review the labs with Lew before we saw Cheney.

At 9:00 a.m. a small crowd gathered around a television mounted on a wall in the hospital’s first-floor radiology waiting room.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

Someone said that a small plane had crashed into the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. I stood with a growing group of patients and staff and watched as smoke poured from the North Tower.

There is always something happening in New York.

I remembered the story of the B-25 bomber that struck the Empire State Building at the end of World War II. On that day, there had been dense fog in New York, but on this morning, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. A few minutes later, United 175 hit the South Tower, setting that building ablaze. The crowd of hospital staff and visitors stood in silence as the buildings burned; there were screams when they fell.

“Nothing will ever be the same,” I said to no one in particular.

• • •

It wasn’t long before we heard that the Pentagon had also been hit. From the upper floors of our office building, we could see smoke billow from across the river, and rumors began to circulate that another plane was headed for DC. The White House and the Capitol were evacuated, and the streets filled with thousands of people, some running, all trying to get out of town. I called Charisse and told her to go pick up the kids from school. Charisse asked me to come home, but I told her that the hospital had mobilized for casualties, and I was going to stay. Even if I wanted to leave, there was gridlock everywhere and no way to get out of town.

I heard from Lew in midafternoon. He was with the vice president; they were okay and soon to be on the move. He told me he would be in touch when he could.

Lew called again later. Despite the chaos of the day, the vice president’s blood had somehow made it to the lab in Bethesda and the results were back. The blood had been drawn early in the morning, and after everything that had happened during the day, I had forgotten all about it.

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