Doctors (37 page)

Though Laura received a daily letter from the ever-faithful
Palmer, finally past basic training (“and with more muscles than Tarzan”), the letters did not relieve her pangs of loneliness. What “social life” she had consisted of fending off the parade of hot-pants interns, residents, now and then even a married attending physician looking for a little action. She wondered how the sensuous Miss Andersen could deal with the priapic pressure of it all.

Barney certainly was of no assistance. If anything he had joined the enemy camp. For unbelievably, there were a record
six
young females in the first-year class, one of them a radiant Chinese girl named Susan Hsiang.

Barney knew a good thing when he saw it. For Susan had an attitude toward men that harked back to the traditions of the East. What a change from all the ruthlessly ambitious Med School types. To say that he was smitten was an understatement. He was high on the scent of lotus and jasmine.

Laura—though with an ambivalence that she herself did not recognize—agreed that her friend had found the “perfect partner.”

As Barney himself was the first to tell her, “She’s different, Castellano. She really looks up to me—”

“Of course. She’s barely five feet tall.”

“Don’t joke. I’ve never known a girl so—I don’t know—so feminine. Do you know how to say ‘I love you’ in Chinese?”

“No, Barney, but I’m sure you do.”

“Damn right.
Wo ai ni!
And Susan says it at least thirty times a day. She makes me feel like Adonis, Babe Ruth, and Einstein all rolled into one.”

“That’s quite a group to carry around, even with your self-image, Barney. But then I suppose whenever your ego gets tired she massages it for you.”

But Laura felt a kind of envy not just of Miss Hsiang’s unquestionable grip on Barney’s psyche, but especially of Susan’s ability to find a man she could worship.

By contrast, Laura had grown up with ambition to transcend her gender, to improve her status, to be admired for
herself.

That did nothing to alleviate her loneliness.

The lovely Miss Hsiang purchased a hot plate, so that after she and Barney had finished their long days in the lab and classroom she could cook dinner for him.

And yet her conversation was seldom concerned with bamboo shoots and the nutritional value of soya beans. Susan could discourse for hours on the medicine of her tradition, which had
begun more than two thousand years before Hippocrates with the
Nei Ching
, a classic work on internal medicine.

She also explained to Barney the principle of
I-Ching.
All nature, she said, was composed of two opposing cosmic forces: Yin—female, soft, receptive, dark, empty; and Yang—male, illuminating, firm, creative, constructive. Yin is the earth, Yang is the heavens. Yin is cold, darkness, disease, death; Yang is warmth, light, strength, health, and life. If these forces are in harmony in our bodies, then health prevails. Imbalance brings dysphoria, disease, and death.

And Susan told him about the most mysterious aspect of it all, the phenomenon called
Qi
—which differentiates life from death.

Barney took another sip of rice wine, looked lovingly across at her, and said, “You know so damned much medicine you could already be practicing.”

Susan smiled shyly. “In China, perhaps. But now I am here I must learn your ways—and they are very strange. Today I spoke to your Professor Lubar about acupuncture and he told me to ‘forget about that sort of nonsense, it had no anatomical basis.’ How could he explain the millions of people that are cured every year?”

“I don’t know,” Barney allowed. “Maybe because they don’t teach
Qi
at Harvard.”

Her family had arrived in San Francisco from Shanghai via Hong Kong in 1950. But almost immediately her father found a flourishing practice among the Chinese community, which respected his wisdom and did not demand to see his diploma. Since his medicines were herbs and plants, he didn’t need a license to prescribe.

Susan, the eldest of three daughters, had inherited her father’s desire to heal but wanted to extend her horizons beyond Grant Avenue, the hub of the Chinese settlement in San Francisco. She had gone first to Berkeley whence she’d graduated
summa
in Biochem and then to Harvard and, more specifically, into the kingdom whose self-appointed emperor was Barney Livingston.

He had his sporting reflexes to thank for nailing her before potential rivals could react. He had been in the entrance hall of Vanderbilt listening to Bennett Landsmann rhapsodize about diving for lost treasure when he had glanced across to where the freshmen were signing up and caught a glimpse of the diminutive Miss Hsiang struggling with a large suitcase. Without so much
as a word he pivoted and sped across the hall and offered his assistance as a porter.

Two hours later he had introduced Susan to the best in Boston Chinese cooking, namely, Joyce Chen’s just across the Charles near M.I.T.

And by the time they had returned to Vanderbilt he was determined to be the Yang to her Yin—or die trying.

This was to be the year that every member of the class contracted a fatal disease. Lance Mortimer was the first to succumb.

“Barney, can I talk to you?”

“I’m sort of in the midst of dinner, Lance.” With a gesture he called his neighbor’s attention to his Oriental companion, serving dinner from a steaming wok placed on his desk.

“Oh,” said Lance, “I’m sorry to interrupt you, Suzie, but would you mind terribly if I had a word with Barney? It’s very important.”

She nodded as, with an exasperated sigh, Barney shuffled into the hall where Lance blurted out his terrifying problem.

“I’ve got it, Barney. What am I going to do?”

“Got what? Make sense, will you?”

“How can I make sense when I’m about to die?”

“You look pretty healthy to me,” Barney replied in what he hoped would reassure—and dismiss—him.

“But I’m not, I’m not,” Lance protested. “I’ve got testicular teratoma.”

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“I don’t have to. I’ve got every symptom in the goddamn textbook. And what clinches it is that the condition peaks in twenty-four-year-old guys. My birthday was only last week and I felt the first twinge when I was cutting the cake. And I’ve checked it. Shit, I’ll probably have to have an orchidectomy and maybe a scrotectomy—even then it may be too late. Livingston, you’ve
got
to help me.”

“Lance, if you’re asking me to slice off your gonads, I can’t—till you get a second opinion. Anyway, have you thought of going to the Health Service?”

“Christ, no. It’s too embarrassing. Shit, if I had to have cancer couldn’t it have been something unsexual? I mean, by tomorrow night everybody in Boston will know I’ll be singing castrato. That is, if I even live.”

Though legally still unlicensed to practice, Barney nonetheless felt competent to deal with this particular malady.

“Okay, Lance. I want you to go back to your room, take two Bufferin, and keep a cold compress on your scrotum at all times.”

“I haven’t got Bufferin. Will Excedrin do?”

“No, no,” Barney objected. “It’s got to be Bufferin. The Charles Street Pharmacy is open late. I suggest you buzz down there and get yourself a large jar. I’ll be in to see you about eleven. Okay?”

Lance was overcome with gratitude. “Livingston, if I die I’ll leave you all my worldly goods—and if I live I’ll give you one of my cars.”

As his classmate dashed down the corridor, Barney returned to his room and closed the door.

“Sorry about that, Suzie,” he apologized, “but Lance had a little medical problem that I had to deal with.”

“And he comes to you?” she said with a touch of awe. “You must be very wise. My father also—”

“I appreciate the compliment,” Barney interrupted. “But the truth is I read about Lance’s disease over the summer. It’s called ‘nosophobia.’ ”

“I have never heard of such a thing,” Susan said, her admiration for Barney’s sagacity intensifying.

“It’s very common among medical students. Nosophobia literally means ‘fear of diseases.’ It’s caused by having to memorize
The Merck Manual
, which has every kind of bizarre illness that ever existed. We’ll all of us have a touch of noso during the year. In fact, the way my chest’s been feeling lately, I think I’m showing the symptoms of silicotuberculosis.”

He shrugged. “I mean, there’s an epidemic in our whole class and the most amazing part is that no two people have the same complaint. For example, Laura believes she’s suffering from endometrioma, which shows she’s got more sense than Lance because it’s benign and can be cured by surgery. In fact, this noso craze has made everybody in the goddamn class a hypochondriac.

“Actually, the only guy with a remotely plausible pathology is Bennett. He thinks he’s got Albert’s disease, which is an inflammation of the connecting tissue between the Achilles tendon and the heel. Considering the fact that he’s still limping slightly from last year’s friendly game with the lawyers, he just
might really have it. Anyway, if
I
don’t get rid of this damn cough by next week I’m going to have my lungs x-rayed.”

Susan merely smiled.

“Laura, you’ve got to help me. You’re the only friend I have.”

She looked up from her desk to see an uncharacteristically disheveled Grete standing at the doorway, terror in her eyes.

“What’s the matter, what’s happened?”

“Laura,” she repeated plaintively. “I’ve got to have a mastectomy.”

“Oh, Grete, that’s terrible. When did they find the tumor?”

“I discovered it just now when I was taking a shower. Oh God, Laura, it’s like a nightmare come true.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions, Grete. I mean, we all find little lumps now and then and almost always they’re benign.”

But Grete sat on the bed and continued her lament. “Oh God, oh God. What man’s going to look at a girl with only one tit? I mean, face it, Laura, what am I if not a body?”

“Look, Grete, why don’t you see the doctor first thing tomorrow morning. If you like, I’ll come with you.”

“I can’t,” she answered. “I mean, I’ve got a really important lab.”

“More important than a malignant tumor?”

“Well, like you say, it might only be benign. Maybe I ought to wait awhile to see how it goes.”

Laura was furious. Didn’t that selfish big-boobed brat realize that she was talking to someone who herself had a serious ovarian condition? At least I don’t go bothering everybody on the corridor and the only person I’ve told is Barney, so he’ll know what to do if I don’t survive surgery.

Nor did the morbid fantasizing stop at the gate of Vanderbilt Hall.

On the contrary, it was perhaps at its most severe in the Dwyer household where Hank’s disease, along with normal parental anxiety, combined to create a condition of nocturnal frenzy.

Every time he heard one of the twins cry, cough, or sneeze, he leapt out of bed with his flashlight and pediatrics handbook, fearing the worst. And, on those rare occasions when there was no noise, things were even worse, for he was then certain they had succumbed to crib death and would race to their room carrying a small oxygen tank. He would even call home between
classes to make absolutely sure Cheryl had checked the twins’ vital signs.

When the mass hysteria had finally abated, the students drew a lesson from this experience. But unfortunately it was one that would actually harm them in later life. For they, whose primary training would be in the observation and detection of signs and symptoms in others, had blunted their own powers to perceive true illness in themselves.

Besides, a real physician almost never seeks another doctor’s help. For they all are painfully aware of just how little
anybody
understands about curing the sick.

Their first patient was a Florida orange (California produces less suitable substitutes for human tissue). But this was only for a day.

After their second session in the art of using a syringe they wished there was a specialty exclusively restricted to citrus products. How bold they had become in that first hour, plunging needles into the Sunkist patients without qualms or hesitation; drawing juice or zestfully inoculating the stoic fruits with Boston water.

In session two—the drawing of blood—they had to pick a partner from among their number and take turns being victim and tormentor. Bravado was conspicuously absent that afternoon. Even the masochists and sadists were in short supply, for no one really wanted to inflict and then in turn be inflicted with a needle.

The class, though still a hundred and twenty strong, had come to know, if not one another’s personalities, at least where their important talents lay. Seth Lazarus could have auctioned himself off. Everybody wanted to team up with him.

The second choice was the women, because in reality the fledgling male doctors did not conceive of them as anything but glorified nurses—and in fact this exercise was normally a staple of nursing school education.

Laura refused all invitations till she offered to exchange stabs with Barney. But he could not bring himself to accept her generosity.

“I just can’t, Castellano,” he said with regret. “I mean, I can’t stand the thought of hurting you.”

“I’m not afraid of hurting Laura,” Bennett volunteered. And then he gallantly inquired, “May I have your arm, Miss Castellano?”

Laura smiled. “Absolutely. This is my only chance to check the rumor that you have blue blood.”

The ever-buoyant Barney found a partner in Hank Dwyer, joking, “Why don’t we two stick together?”

This second exercise, venipuncture, was more important for them all, since a substantial part of their medical education would involve scutwork like drawing blood for lab tests.

Barney approached it as a kind of sporting exercise: look eagle-eyed when you see your prey (in this case the vein) and then move in decisively. It helped that Dwyer was fair-skinned and had a forearm streaked with blue like Roquefort cheese. Or, putting it another way, a veritable hypodermic road map. But poor Hank, still the saintly soul, could not do unto others as his nimble partner had done unto him.