Beat the reaper： a novel - By Josh Bazell Page 0,2
they don’t keep their residency directors happy. Another good word for them would be “slaves.” He hands me a printout of current patients—he’s got one too, though his is marked up and heavily creased—and talks me through it. Blah blah Room 809 South. Blah blah colostomy infection. Blah thirty-seven-year-old woman for regularly scheduled chemotherablah. Blah blah blah blah blah. It’s impossible to follow, even if you wanted to.
Instead I’m leaning back against the nursing station desk, which is reminding me that I’m still carrying a handgun in the inside pocket of my scrub pants.*
I need to stash the gun somewhere, but the locker room is four floors away. Maybe I should hide it behind some textbooks in the nurses’ lounge. Or under the bed in the call room. It doesn’t really matter, as long as I can focus enough to remember where I put it later.
Eventually Akfal stops talking. “Got it?” he asks me.
“Yeah,” I say. “Go home and get some sleep.”
“Thanks,” Akfal says.
Akfal will neither go home nor get some sleep. Akfal will go do insurance paperwork for our residency director, Dr. Nordenskirk, for at least the next four hours.
It’s just that “Go home and get some sleep” is intern for “Goodbye.”
Rounding on patients at five thirty in the morning usually turns up at least a handful of people who tell you they’d feel fine if only you assholes would stop waking them up every four hours to ask them how they’re feeling. Other people will keep this observation to themselves, and bitch instead about how someone keeps stealing their mp3 player or medications or whatever. Either way, you give the patient the once-over, keeping a particularly sharp lookout for “iatrogenic” (physician caused) and “nosocomial” (hospital caused) illnesses, which together are the eighth leading cause of death in the United States. Then you flee.
The other thing that sometimes happens when you round early on patients is that none of them complain at all.
Which is never a good sign.
The fifth or sixth room I enter is that of Duke Mosby, easily the patient I currently hate least. He’s a ninety-year-old black male in for diabetes complications that now include gangrene of both feet. He was one of ten black Americans who served in Special Forces in World War II, and in 1944 he escaped from Colditz. Two weeks ago he escaped from this very room at Manhattan Catholic Hospital. In his underpants. In January. Hence the gangrene. Diabetes fucks your circulation even if you wear, say, shoes. Thankfully, Akfal was on shift at the time.
“What’s going on, Doc?” he says to me.
“Not much, sir,” I tell him.
“Don’t call me sir. I work for a living,” he says. He always says this. It’s some kind of army joke, about how he wasn’t a commissioned officer or something. “Just give me some news, Doc.”
He doesn’t mean about his health, which rarely seems to interest him, so I make up some shit about the government. He’ll never find out differently.
As I start bandaging his reeking feet, I say, “Also, I saw a rat fighting a pigeon on my way to work this morning.”
“Yeah? Who won?”
“The rat,” I tell him. “It wasn’t even close.”
“Guess it figures a rat could take a pigeon.”
I say, “The weird thing was that the pigeon kept trying, though. It had its feathers all puffed out and it was covered with blood. Every time it attacked, the rat would just bite it once and throw it onto its back. Go mammals, I guess, but it was pretty disgusting.” I put my stethoscope on his chest.
Mosby’s voice booms in through the earpieces. “That rat must have done something pretty bad to that pigeon to make it keep on like that.”
“Doubtless,” I say. I push his abdomen around, trying to elicit pain. Mosby doesn’t seem to notice. “Seen any of the nurses this morning?” I ask him.
“Sure. They been in and out all the time.”
“Any of the ones in the little white skirts, with the hats?”
“Many times.”
Uh huh. You see a woman dressed like that, it’s not a nurse, it’s a strip-o-gram. I feel the glands around Mosby’s neck.
“I got a joke for you, Doc,” Mosby says.
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“Doctor says to a guy, ‘I got two pieces of bad news for you. First one is, you got cancer.’ Man says, ‘Lordy! What’s the second one?’ Doctor says, ‘You got Alzheimer’s.’ Man says, ‘Well, at least I don’t have cancer!’”