The House of God by Samuel Shem

Author:Samuel Shem [Shem, Samuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: intership, Medical, school
Publisher: Dell Books
Published: 2010-12-23T21:53:33.587000+00:00

I did. I brought my patients to the Fat Man's affair.

In the E.W. as well, the jolt of feeling human refused to fizzle. I felt good, proud of my skills, excited, I didn't resent going to work, and outside the House, I could bear to think about inside the House. Sitting in the E.W. was like sitting on a bench in the Louvre: a human tapestry, ever unraveling under my eyes. Like Paris, the E.W. was a place unlimited in time: I'd leave it, and it would go on without me until I returned. An immense, humbling eternity of disease. With the luxury of the TURF, I began to live the fantasy "doctor" of my father's letters, competent to handle whatever unraveled at the end of the ambulance ride and came at me through those doors.

One Saturday afternoon before Christmas, in the lull before the Saturday-night storm, Gath and I sat at the nursing station. Crazy Abe had disappeared for two nights, and everyone was a little discouraged about his absence. The nurses were snappier, and even Flash, the orderly, used old parts of his brain, in irritation. Heavy wet snow had fallen, and I'd already treated the first of several expected myocardial infarctions, as the middle-aged out-of-shape suburban fathers shoveled their driveways clear. I told Gath that he looked kind of down, and he said, "Yeah, I am. It's Elihu—he don't know his ass from his elbow, so I'm supervisin' all his work. Suturin'. A man of my skills, suturin'. But if I let Elihu loose, it'd be a slaughterhouse down here. It'd be like when we had the old Chief of Surgery, Frannie. You know what they said about him?"

"What?"

"Killed mo' Jews than Hitler. Ah we're not gettin' the big stuff in heah anymo'. No gunshots, accidents, it's all belly pain, suturin', and twats. Makes me sick."

The nurse handed us each a clipboard. Gath glanced down, and wearily covering his eyes with his hand, said, "You know what's on heah, boy? A twat. A sick twat. I may be a racist 'Bama cracker, but for Chris-sakes, Lord, give me some big stuff fo a change. All this sick twat is ruinin' this po' boy's sex life."

On my own clipboard was a thirty-three-year-old white toothpick brought in from the streets outside the public library where he'd gone to use the toilet. Zalman was six-four and weighed in at eighty-two. Looking concentration-campish, he was all buttock, rib, and jaw, too listless to do anything but talk: he didn't want to eat meat because animal souls transmigrated like humans, he was an unemployed philosopher, the world was full of incompetence, his typical dinner was a single seedless grape. Fascinating. TURF to psychiatry. My call to the psych resident was interrupted by my second snow-shoveling MI, about to die. Gath and Elihu and I trundled him back to life.

During the time it had taken to save the snow shoveler, the clipboards had piled up. The first nonswimmers, caught in the incoming Saturday-night tide.

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