Weekends at Bellevue (7 page)

“Hi?” He stared at me quizzically, in a tone that implied,
Do I know you?

I hurried into the bathroom and leaned against the door as my heart pounded.
Pull yourself together, girl
. I waited a few minutes for my racing pulse and breathing to normalize, and left the bathroom.

I spent the rest of the evening chatting up every single person at the party, bar none. I shared a joint with Terence, then had a great stoned conversation with a brilliant young author, Doug Rushkoff, as I distractedly admired a young woman’s behind, perfectly round and pert, unlike my own. But at all times, I always sensed exactly where He was in the room.

After the party, a group of us made plans to head down to Chinatown for dinner. As we gathered in the street, waiting for everyone to
assemble, I asked Dan Levy to introduce me to Him. “This is Jeremy, my esteemed colleague,” he said, and He and I chatted a bit as we walked to the restaurant. I arranged it so that Jeremy and I were seated together, and further, I separated him from the girl with the nice butt. I rubbed my leg against his. I flirted shamelessly, as did he. We began to speak to each other exclusively, as if no one else was around us. When I dared to look right at him, face-to-face, the Cher song in my head became deafening. “Take me home, take me home.”

After drinks at a neighborhood bar, we walked back to his place, a fifth floor walk-up in Little Italy. The apartment was a classic cold-water flat, with the bathtub in the kitchen. I leaned against it as we kissed. Freedy Johnston’s “Can You Fly” was playing in the background. The music, his kisses … it was all perfect.

“Well, good night,” he teased, but I wasn’t going anywhere and we both knew it.

In the morning, after a diner breakfast, he walked me to the corner of White and Church, and we leaned on my car as we kissed good-bye. When I got home, he had already emailed me his phone number. We talked on the phone for the better part of that night.

The next morning I went back into Bellevue, but it was as if I had been away for a year, I was so changed. I was in a parallel universe, orbiting around my new sun, obsessing grandiosely about our impending life together.

The manic patient I admitted to CPEP on Monday was still there. I was disappointed to see he was still quite disorganized, despite the heroic doses of mood-stabilizer he’d received, which had left him a bit unsteady on his feet but seemed to have had no other effect. He remembered me from two days before, though, and flashed me a huge grin, seeming awfully glad to see me again.

“How are you feeling, pally? Any better?” I asked him.

He was watching the TV in the ER waiting room. The Oklahoma bombing had just occurred, and the television coverage was exhaustive. He looked up at me, beaming. “I’ve been hit by the love bomb,” he said proudly.

“Me too!” I replied.

A
fter my Bellevue elective ended, I went back to Mount Sinai to finish my residency, and I continued to date Jeremy, the artist, photographer, writer, and my best boyfriend ever. Soon it was my fourth and final year, and I needed to decide what to do next. I applied for a schizophrenia research fellowship at Columbia and was accepted. I would be doing neuroimaging studies, analyzing PET scans of schizophrenics to try to discern the status of their serotonin receptors. I had been involved in schizophrenia research for most of my residency, had won an award from the National Institute of Mental Health for my protocol, and it was my assumption that this was my calling, my life’s work. I was on the path I was meant to tread.

And then I got a phone call from Bellevue. Dr. Lear, the CPEP director, was offering me a job. “You made quite an impression when you rotated through here. We’d love to have you aboard.”

I was flattered, to say the least. I hadn’t applied for the job; they were calling me.

“So, here’s the thing, Julie. It’s not your typical schedule. We just need you to work weekends. Two overnights, Saturday and Sunday. And you’d need to come in for a few hours on Thursday mornings for faculty meetings.”

“Just weekends?” I asked, incredulous. It was too good to be true. I could have all week off. To do what? Hang out with Jeremy and play guitar in the park? Take up ballet? Pottery? My mind was racing with
the possibilities. It was more free time than I’d had in years, probably since summer vacations when I was a kid. And Bellevue was offering me significantly more money than Columbia. “But I already told Columbia I’d take the fellowship,” I told him.

“Call them back and tell them you’ve changed your mind,” he said casually, like this kind of thing happened all the time. “I need to know soon.”

When I called Columbia to discuss it with the fellowship director, he was stupefied. No one had ever turned down a research fellowship at Columbia, it seemed.

I agonized over the decision for a few days, and drove Jeremy insane in the process. Even Dan Levy called it a “No-brainer! More money and more free time … what’s the dilemma exactly?” I seriously weighed taking both jobs and working seven days a week. Finally, I called the Columbia director back and sheepishly left a message on his machine, thanking him for all his help, but letting him know that I was taking the Bellevue job.

I
t is Monday, July 1, 1996, when I walk into the faculty offices of CPEP. Dr. Lear, my new boss, introduces me to some of the other doctors. And lo and behold, there is Lucy. I had actually forgotten all about her in the seven years since I’d brought her those wontons, but as soon as I hear her name and see her face, it all comes rushing back: the shirts, the stories, her balls, my blunder. (“Do your parents know?”)

“And so we meet again!” I greet her. I wish that she would remember me immediately, but I have to mention the
mondu
before she does. I am thrilled to know we will be working together, and eager to attempt, once again, to befriend her.

I take Lucy as the ultimate good omen. If she likes it here, I know I will too. I idolized her at Temple, resonating with her energy so similar to my own. She was my doppelgänger, six years ahead of me in our training, but now our vectors have merged, and we are on the same playing field, both CPEP attendings. No longer an awed medical student and a strutting chief resident, we are now colleagues. Now I know I’m in the right place.

Over the next few weeks, Lucy and I become fast friends at CPEP. As I get to know her better, she again lets me into her private inner sanctum, as she did that night in the Temple ER.

“Make sure you have good disability insurance,” she says to me one day, pretty much out of the blue. “Get it now while you’re young and healthy, and don’t let it lapse.”

“What are you talking about?” I ask.

“I’m going to let you in on a little something I haven’t told everyone here. At my last job, before Bellevue, I had breast cancer. Radical mastectomy, chemo, radiation, the whole nine. I was thirty-one.” We are standing in line at the coffee shop, getting breakfast. She tells me how incredibly sick she got, how even now anything orange, the color of the chemotherapy meds in the IV bag, can make her gag. How her white blood cell count got so low, her fevers so high, her oncologist didn’t think she was going to pull through, but she did.

As if she weren’t enough of a mythic figure in my eyes, Lucy Jones has beaten cancer. I call her accountant and get the pricey disability insurance.

Our faculty meetings are a smaller version of the weekly staff meetings: just the attending physicians are included. We meet on Thursday mornings after Lucy’s overnight shift. She is giddy from lack of sleep and even more disinhibited than usual. It’s my favorite time to be with her. She is wearing scrubs and is usually in need of a shower. There are times when I lean into her, seeing if her scent does anything for me, the way Jeremy’s does. I love his smell; I can feel something stir in my pelvis when I breathe it in. I stare at her armpit hair, transfixed as it peeks out from her tank top. She doesn’t shave there, like I do, like a man doesn’t. She smiles at me and I blush. She has caught me, I think, but she lets it go. I am experimenting with an idea here, and I appreciate the latitude. We huddle in the corner, whispering and cracking wise. Dr. Lear has to separate us during the meetings as if we were schoolgirls. On Monday mornings, when I come in for rounds, I often say, “Good morning, Dr. Jones…. Good morning, everyone else.” I do, on some level, separate her (or maybe it’s us?) out from the rest. She rises easily above and beyond the other staff members, the cream above the crop. And I’m not the only one who places her on a pedestal. There are many of us at CPEP who speak of Lucy in blatantly worshipful language. She has a large group of idolizers, but the thing that I love best, that makes me feel special, is that she also admires me.

“Julie, sometimes I lie awake at night afraid you’re smarter than I am,” she says to me one morning. She smiles, and I know she’s teasing me, but not totally. There is truth in her jest, and I lap it up like milk in
a saucer. Soon we are a team, a mutual admiration society, and partners in crime.

We double-date with Sadie, her girlfriend, and Jeremy, inviting each other over for dinner to our apartments, or going down to Chinatown for Vietnamese food. Lucy and Sadie eventually buy a house together in the Hamptons, and they go there on the weekends. Jeremy and I can’t hang out with them since that’s when I work, but they generously offer us the use of the house during the week. The light in the late summer afternoons is like nothing I’ve ever seen. We go biking, windsurfing, kayaking. We eat lobsters and corn. We break their hammock with our combined weight, and I replace it, owning up to it when I see Lucy on Monday morning.

I
thought I knew what crazy was. Then I came to Bellevue.

I had already seen plenty of insanity, insinuating myself among the sickest psychiatric patients whenever possible during my eight years of training. I’d interviewed a guy at Temple who was hearing the Devil’s voice while smelling burning flesh and seeing the flames of hell; I’d talked to a man at Mount Sinai with tinfoil under his hat to deflect the messages sent by the aliens; at the VA, I’d convinced a Vietnam veteran wearing a dead rat around his neck that we had better ways to protect him from his enemies.

These patients and their symptoms all pale in comparison to the pathology that parades through Bellevue’s doors. The depth and breadth of madness on display at CPEP is like nothing I’ve ever experienced, and because of that, going to work is fascinating, illuminating, and exhilarating, week after week.

It’s not until I start working at Bellevue that I finally appreciate what sets psychiatry apart from the rest of medicine. Medical illness has an endpoint: death. Psychosis is boundless; the degree to which someone can lose their mind is infinite. Most nights at CPEP, I’ll think I’ve just seen the craziest patient ever, and then inevitably, a week later, a new patient will best the last.

Walking into my workplace is a bit like taking a hit of acid. I know all kinds of weird shit is going to go down, and I steel myself to handle it, because I also know that fifteen hours later I’m going to walk out the
“other side.” I just have to hold on tight and trust that it’ll end with me still in one piece. One night I arrive at CPEP, and two patients in the observation area are both sweating and grunting. We have not one, but two women who believe they are giving birth. One of them swears it is the baby Jesus who will soon be delivered unto us. Those are the good nights, when the lunacy is funny, and going with the flow is painless. The nurses and psych techs (the staff in the nondetainable area, who have the most patient contact) strive to keep things light as we go about our business. All of us have chosen this line of work because we want to help others, but we learn over time that we have to set some limits. Most of us cauterize our bleeding hearts by using humor as a shield, so there is plenty of laughter erupting behind the scenes.

After just a few weekends at my new job, I see it’s not going to be quite that easy. Treating everything as a joke will only get me so far. The problem is, I have a hair-trigger empathy switch, and because I am emotionally incontinent, my tear ducts leak with little provocation. If I see war, disasters, or orphans on the evening news or in the paper, my gut tightens and a lump forms in my throat. I can’t abide the unfairness of it all. If I’m going to make it at CPEP, I have to find a way to tolerate hearing about the experiences of the mentally ill, the addicted, the unwanted. Maybe most people’s lives are equal parts hope and despair, but at Bellevue, grief trumps optimism every time. There are sad stories everywhere. Pretty much every shift, if I let it get to me, there’s at least one patient’s story that will tear me up inside.

So I start to toughen up. I can’t allow myself to get bogged down in the darkness, so I choose to have a little bit of a negative charge around me to keep it at bay. I adjust my filter a bit, tweaking the EQ so the sympathy frequency is turned way down. I pretend I don’t care, and after a while, I start to believe it. I pretend nothing fazes me, and pretty soon, it seems like nothing does.

To prevent the misery from overwhelming me, I strip away the pitiful details and focus on the bottom line. Where does this patient need to go? Is he a keeper? Will he survive if I send him back out to the city streets? Or will someone else be in danger if I release him?

To the outside observer, I appear hardened, uncaring. Maybe other people would play it a different way, but this is my game plan. I am all business, except that I go for the cheap laugh whenever I can, whether with the ambulance drivers and cops or the Bellevue police, nurses, and
psych techs. But on the inside, if you could hear my interior monologue, it is pure Kurtz … “The horror.” I am aghast at the indignities these patients endure, and there are occasionally times I am afraid for my own safety.

I can laugh all I want, just like a teenager on acid, but I’m kidding myself if I think I’m going to walk out of here unchanged.