Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital by Eric Manheimer

Author:Eric Manheimer [Manheimer, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Medical
ISBN: 9781455503889
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2012-07-10T00:00:00+00:00

That was the last time I saw her before Irene’s death. I still could not believe it. Marta’s aged mother had gone home, against all odds. And now the joy of Marta’s life, her real amor, was gone. Thinking back on our earlier conversation, I realized how much higher the stakes were than either of us could imagine.

I, and half the hospital it seems, went to Irene’s funeral. A cortege of vans, school buses, official cars, Dial 7 limousines, and private vehicles snaked our way down Manhattan’s spine past the Essex Street Market and over the Williamsburg Bridge. Magnificent views south onto the gentrifying warehouses and tugboats pushing their huge loads against the rapid East River current sprawled out beneath a gray sky melting into the infinity of Brooklyn. The car was silent except for the regular clicks like a railroad car from the metal braces slicing across the asphalted road. We were all lost in our own thoughts about the senselessness of so much of what we saw every day. The carnage of wasted lives from violence, bad decisions, carelessness, drugs, alcohol created a mobile shell that we carried with us through the days and years of work. It was a semi-permeable membrane that allowed small doses of the raw pain and suffering to penetrate but effectively kept most of it out. When a senseless death occurred within the protective force field, we were all vulnerable. We were very exposed. The pain of our own immediate losses, a spouse’s life-threatening illness, a drug overdose of a beloved cousin, the jealous rage that took a life ruffled the silence with a barely suppressed scream. Irene’s death had spread a low-lying cloud of agitation and vulnerability through everyone.

We turned off in the heart of the Orthodox Jewish barrio. Storefront synagogues and matzoh bakeries, shuls, and hundreds of new red-brick apartments with metal grilles covering the windows and tiny porches were salted through the neighborhoods for the rapidly expanding community and their large families. A clot of young women gathered on the front steps surrounded by dozens of kids jumping rope and playing tag. We wound our way deep into East New York. We passed chicken wings, Pedro’s Pollo and Pollo Campero, “the best” pizza shops, mofongo Dominican takeout, Jose’s Churritos, Hamburger Heaven, Hamburger Paradise, Hamburger Joe’s, and every national chain plus an infinite assortment of tiny bodegas selling lottery tickets and baloney. Thousands of small shops eking out a precarious existence in no-man’s-land.

A huge granite Catholic church loomed into view when we turned down Myrtle Avenue. Hundreds of our colleagues and friends and relatives from the Sahagún neighborhood network were lined up around a corner slowly feeding into the building. The women wore black dresses and large floppy hats that they held on to as a gust of wind kicked up. The men were in suits of different colors with shiny black shoes. Pockets of people stood in the street, between triple-parked cars, chatting and hugging. Traffic was backed up; a couple of cop cars were pulled onto the sidewalk, and cars were diverted through the red lights.

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