Matt Richtel Thriller Collection by Matt Richtel

Author:Matt Richtel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

9

It’s no wonder most people think of the emergency room as the ER. The initials fit and, perhaps more powerfully, the TV show spread the popular misconception. Most physicians actually think of it as the ED—emergency department. I think of it as something altogether different: Reason Number 4 I quit medicine.

I’m sitting in the ER/ED in a yellow plastic chair waiting to get the cut in my scalp checked. I’m flashing back to my second year of med school, on rotation right here, when I learned a painful lesson that helped redirect my professional aspirations. The teddy bear is a trap.

A seventeen-year-old redhead with pale skin, attended by her mom and clutching a stuffed brown bear with deep green inset eyes, comes in wailing from hip pain. The girl says it’s been brutal since she careened off a mogul at Squaw Valley and hurtled into a tree. A surgical repair four months earlier left pins and a small metal plate securing her femur to her pelvis. She’s run out of her opiates. She says the surgeon is located in Marin and not available to see her for a few days to refill her prescription.

The emergency-room doctor overseeing my rotation calls me aside and tells me we’re witnessing classic behavior of an addict. As evidence, she points to 1) the teddy bear; and 2) the mother’s arms.

The doc tells me that when someone over the age of about twelve carries a teddy bear, it’s an unusually accurate sign of an attention-getting effort, or an emotional problem, or a prop. She also instructs me that if I study the mom, I’ll find the thin skin, scarecrow teeth and, she speculates, the tracked arms of a heavy drug user. The doc says the girl is either sharing opiates with the mom or fronting for her.

The doc turns down the drug request and gives the girl a strong dose of over-the-counter pain-killers.

I excuse myself and I stealthily follow mother and daughter to the parking lot. They have a terrible shouting match. As I stand in the shadows, mom tells daughter she wasn’t acting sympathetic enough, then slaps her offspring.

I feel an arm on my shoulder. It’s the attending doctor. She gently admonishes me for invading patient privacy, inviting a lawsuit, not trusting an attending physician, and wasting time.

She explains the emergency-room ethos: We stop the bleeding. She asks me what I’d have recommended we do with the mother-and-daughter drug seekers. I don’t have a good answer.

I hate the ED. It’s the coldest place on Earth, the reductio ad absurdum of a medical profession, populated by generally well-meaning but worn-out doctors who in the name of expediency make tough calls, one after the next. It’s the extreme version of why I left medicine, which I took to be too black-and-white, and so instead embraced the grainy and blurry world of journalism, where black is one side of the story and white is the other. I don’t make the tough decisions anymore; instead, I comfort myself, fairly or not, that I give other people the information to decide.

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