Internal Medicine: A Doctor's Stories by Terrence Holt

Author:Terrence Holt [Holt, Terrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2014-09-07T20:00:00+00:00

I HAVE A CLEAR MEMORY from this period, although what day exactly this might have happened I no longer recall, of the attending emerging from Marie’s room and stopping to brush at her eye before sitting to write in the chart. I remember it so vividly, like something glimpsed from a speeding train, because at the time it had no meaning. I could make no sense of it. It may not have happened at all. After three weeks of q3 call, dream and memory had become indistinct, the one unwelcome as a distraction from sleep, the other unwelcome always, the dead and discharged claiming time beyond any I had to give.

The next day we were on call again, the cycle starting to feel unbearably compressed. When the PA announced a code at the start of rounds we ran, but it was a sore, hobbling kind of progress we made, Alex and the intern and the medical student and I traversing the length of the hospital and up the old main stairwell to 5 West, where we found the usual melee in progress. Owing to our slow pace on the stairs (at the fourth floor we stopped running), the MICU team had gotten there first. From the doorway, over the crowd of nurses, techs, and assorted hysterics, I couldn’t even see the patient: just the rhythmic up-and-down of whoever was doing compressions. The MICU team waved us off. We walked slowly back to the CCU.

Marie’s room was crowded when we reached it on our rounds, three or four figures gathered at the bedside, their backs screening her from us as we stood outside the door. At a glance they were clearly nonmedical, probably family, and I tried to shut the door before I presented her, but after thirty years the doors in the CCU do not close. So I presented the data on Marie in a low monotone that no one but the attending could hear. No one else was paying much attention, the fellow and Alex fiddling with the radiology monitors, the intern slumped in her morning fog, the med student staring at his clipboard as though it held portents of his own impending death. There was little to report. Her ins and outs had been barely negative overnight, and her creatinine continued to climb. The Swann numbers were a random sprinkling of figures that I reported without conviction. As I trailed off, the attending simply shook her head, and swept into the room.

A laugh was ringing through the air as we intruded on the bedside, the sound of it bouncing unnervingly loud off the walls. A woman at Marie’s right elbow straightened, pushing back a stray curl, and smiled at us, a bright, airline hostess’s smile. She turned to Marie.

“Your doctors are here, honey. We’ll just be going along.”

“I’d like you to stay,” the attending said, and turned to Marie. “We need to have a conversation.”

Marie, floating in the bed like some enormous whipped dessert, gestured weakly at the two women at her sides.

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.