The Doctor Stories by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 1962-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

Jean Beicke

DURING A TIME like this, they kid a lot among the doctors and nurses on the obstetrical floor because of the rushing business in new babies that’s pretty nearly always going on up there. It’s the Depression, they say, nobody has any money so they stay home nights. But one bad result of this is that in the children’s ward, another floor up, you see a lot of unwanted children.

The parents get them into the place under all sorts of pretexts. For instance, we have two premature brats, Navarro and Cryschka, one a boy and one a girl; the mother died when Cryschka was born, I think. We got them within a few days of each other, one weighing four pounds and one a few ounces more. They dropped down below four pounds before we got them going but there they are; we had a lot of fun betting on their daily gains in weight but we still have them. They’re in pretty good shape though now. Most of the kids that are left that way get along swell. The nurses grow attached to them and get a real thrill when they begin to pick up. It’s great to see. And the parents sometimes don’t even come to visit them, afraid we’ll grab them and make them take the kids out, I suppose.

A funny one is a little Hungarian Gypsy girl that’s been up there for the past month. She was about eight weeks old maybe when they brought her in with something on her lower lip that looked like a chancre. Everyone was interested but the Wassermann was negative. It turned out finally to be nothing but a peculiarly situated birthmark. But that kid is still there too. Nobody can find the parents. Maybe they’ll turn up some day.

Even when we do get rid of them, they often come back in a week or so—sometimes in terrible condition, full of impetigo, down in weight—everything we’d done for them to do over again. I think it’s deliberate neglect in most cases. That’s what happened to this little Gypsy. The nurse was funny after the mother had left the second time. I couldn’t speak to her, she said. I just couldn’t say a word I was so mad. I wanted to slap her.

We had a couple of Irish girls a while back named Cowley. One was a red head with beautiful wavy hair and the other a straight haired blonde. They really were good looking and not infants at all. I should say they must have been two and three years old approximately. I can’t imagine how the parents could have abandoned them. But they did. I think they were habitual drunkards and may have had to beat it besides on short notice. No fault of theirs maybe.

But all these are, after all, not the kind of kids I have in mind. The ones I mean are those they bring in stinking dirty, and I mean stinking. The poor brats

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