Doctors (74 page)
Authors: Erich Segal
“That’s right,” Sylbert interrupted. “They just saw the color of your skin and took for
granted
you were in the wrong. That, to my mind, is the most virulent form of racism. This is a chance to call them to account.”
“The story’s in the press already,” said the other advocate.
“Well, then,” Bennett commented, “I’d say the point is made.” He looked at Herschel and inquired, “How much would it cost to take a suit like this to court?”
“Ben, money is no object here. I’ll pay as much as necessary.”
“Okay,” Bennett replied, the strain of talking making him more uncomfortable than ever. “Don’t waste the dough on scoring legal Brownie points. Send whatever it would cost to the Southern Christian Leadership—in memory of Dr. King.”
T
o prepare himself for his unprecedented exploration into the physician’s mind, Barney composed a questionnaire, which he sent out to all his friends and Med School classmates. Clearly, they would have witnessed behind-the-scenes dramas inaccessible
to him. Naturally, he promised total anonymity. The respondents were even given the option of omitting their own names.
Lance Mortimer was one of the first to reply and did so at some length, prefacing his contribution with a personal letter.
Dear Barn
,
I think you’re on to a brilliant idea (I kick myself for not having thought of it first). As a matter of fact, I’ve seen so many unbelievable things that I started keeping a diary about two years ago, and I will go through it carefully and send you the juiciest bits. (I can’t just xerox the entire thing—I don’t tell even my shrink about my sexual exploits.)
I enclose my record of an incident that occurred in the early morning of June 6th 1970. Obviously, I have disguised the names—not to protect the innocent, but to save my own neck.
Now, obviously
, you
know these incidents took place in Los Angeles, but I have invented a private hospital called St. David’s at Newport Beach. And I’d be grateful if you kept my little fiction. You could blow the whole profession sky-high—if they don’t destroy you first.
Regards,
Lance
P.S.
Your
Champions
book was reviewed in the
Los Angeles Times
by Vera Mihalic a couple of years ago. I didn’t think it was something you would want to see, so I didn’t send it along.
As Barney first began to peruse Lance’s initial contribution, he smiled at the Hollywoodisms. But by the time he had finished, he felt deeply unsettled. Obviously, he had opened up Pandora’s box.
After reading the report for the third time, he felt the need to share his anxiety with someone. And since Dr. Baumann would hardly be amenable to a midnight call from a former analysand, there was no alternative.
“Hi, Castellano. Did I wake you?”
“Not really, I’ve given up sleep for Lent. What’s up?”
And then he read the document aloud.
No one will ever forget the masterful Oscar-winning performance of Luke Jamison (not his real name) in Stanley
Walters’ (not his real name) production of (let’s call it)
Starless Night.
Nor will the performance of June Sommerville (not her real name)—in real life Mrs. Jamison—as the deaf-mute girl ever fade from memory.
It was thus that to an obbligato of excitement the hospital received the news that June was on her way in a private ambulance with a suspected ruptured appendix.
Surgeon Steve Ross (not his real name) woke me from an exhausted sleep in the on-call room and told me to be ready for the procedure stat. I barely had time to run a razor over my face and comb my hair, before dashing to the O.R.
For those who have never seen June Sommerville in real life, let me tell you that her beauty was not the result of makeup or trick photography. She was gorgeous.
As we were rushing her in, I couldn’t help but notice that our hospital director himself had appeared, to invite her husband Luke to wait with him in the comfort of his own office.
After injecting Miss Sommerville with sodium pentothal to relax her, then quickly inserting a tube into her trachea and pumping the ambu bag to inflate her lungs, I began to induce her into “comfortable sleep” with the usual mixture of Halothane and oxygen. I asked her to name her ten favorite film roles. She had barely gotten to
Ben Hur
when she was in the second stage of anesthesia, a Nirvana-like dreamland. I signaled to Dr. Ross that the patient was “under.”
He then asked for his trusty scalpel and made a flawless incision in her ivory-white abdomen. In a matter of minutes—Ross is a superb craftsman—the offending appendix was removed and paracentesis (the draining of the infected fluid) of the abdominal cavity had begun.
But then disaster struck. So dazzled had we been—or most specifically Dr. Ross—that a star of Miss Sommerville’s magnitude was making a guest appearance in our operating theater that an appropriate medical history had not been taken prior to the procedure.
Thus it was not realized that she was allergic to penicillin until she suddenly went into anaphylactic shock. As I was struggling to get her oxygenated, there was yet another catastrophe—cardiac arrest.
Here again Ross wasted no time and opened her magnificent
thoracic area to massage her heart. The moments ticked by, she was still out—her perfectly chiseled features becoming bluer and bluer.
After several minutes I suggested to Ross that we stop our efforts, as it was a lost cause.
“No, you a–hole,” he shrieked at me. “We can’t let Luke Jamison’s wife die on our table—it would kill the hospital’s rep. And I’ll be socially blackballed all over town. Keep f—–g pumping!”
I protested that even if we did revive her now there would be irreversible brain damage. He again told me to intensify my ventilation and shut the f—up.
After eighteen minutes and thirty-three seconds, June Sommerville’s heart began to beat again.
“Thank God,” I heard Ross exclaim to himself. Bad career move, I myself said to the Almighty.
As soon as her breathing had stabilized, Ross tore off his mask and headed at a sprint for the director’s office to convey the news to Mr. Jamison that the operation had succeeded.
But if anybody wonders why June Sommerville has not made any films recently, it is not—as the press agents have put out—that she prefers the privacy of her Bel Air rose garden. It is because she is in a very exclusive nursing home where she is too brain-damaged even to recognize her award-winning husband.
I was kind of upset—especially when Steve Ross demanded that I give my write-up to him personally. Not being a total innocent I realized that Ross realized that even a first-year med student knows that after five minutes of cardiac arrest brain damage is inevitable. And there was no point in adding to Mr. Jamison’s grief.
Subsequently I learned that he comes regularly to worship the living effigy of his wife, bringing her each time a bouquet of red roses.
But for some reason, however, Steve Ross never asked me to be his gas-passer again.
As Bennett was wont to remark in moments of levity, which—except when Barney was visiting—were becoming rarer, his progress toward health was similar to the peeling of an onion. For every time they took a bandage off, there was another one beneath, and plasters covered plasters, so that it almost seemed there was nothing left of Bennett at the core.
After the fifth week of recuperation, the pain began to be less physical than mental. It was torture for him to be inactive and to worry about what was happening to his muscles under those casts.
“I’m atrophying into nothing,” he told Barney during one visit.
“Listen, Landsmann,” Barney joshed, “you’re the envy of the surgical residents’ world—you’ve already spent more time in bed than most of them do in ten years.”
“I’d trade, you know I’d trade,” Bennett murmured, irritated, annoyed, and frustrated. “That’s why I’ve used my irresistible charm on the orthopods to get me started on physiotherapy right away.”
“Now? In all that plaster? What sport are you gonna go in for—parachute jumping?”
“No, Dr. Livingston,” Bennett replied, “I’m just starting with two balls.”
“Well,” quipped Barney, “so do all the rest of us.”
“If you don’t mind, I’ll start with squash balls.”
One day Jeffrey Kirk, Professor of Orthopedic Surgery, came to visit bearing instead of chocolates something else that Bennett had long been yearning for: his x-rays. They went over them together.
“Well, Jeff,” Bennett pronounced jauntily, “I can give you my professional opinion that this patient’s bones are healing beautifully.”
But then he came to the last set, pictures of the seven vertebrae that form the spine between the head and shoulders.
“Hello there,” he remarked, “I’ll bet this was a sticky wicket, Jeff. But the ‘reduction’ you performed looks perfect. Now how soon till you let me out of here and back into the O.R.?”
The answer took him by surprise.
“Is tomorrow morning soon enough?”
Except that both his legs were bandaged, Bennett would have skipped for joy.
“I’ll be there with bells on, Jeff.”
It was then that Kirk announced the one proviso.
“I don’t want all my beautiful reduction work to go for naught, Ben. You’re going to have to wear a halo apparatus.”
“No. You’re kidding. I’d look like a man from Mars.”
“That won’t matter,” Kirk replied, “your colleagues think you are already.”
* * *
He did indeed look like a creature from another planet. They had put a metal band around his head and screwed it into his cranium. Another rigid metal strip went down to his shoulders. All this would immobilize his neck to keep him from reinjuring what Jeffrey Kirk had so expertly restored.
“I tell you,” Bennett remarked to Barney when they spoke that evening on the phone, “I’m like a copper replica of Tonto.”
“I hope you’re taking pictures to send but as Christmas cards,” Barney suggested.
“No, my man, the Christmas card you’ll get will show me standing tall in Texas in a cowboy hat.”
Curiously, Bennett did not notice people staring at him in his halo apparatus. For by now he was inured to people looking oddly at a black man in a white man’s territory.
Until the brace was removed, he would have to be content with high-class scutwork: suturing—at best, perhaps a simple appendectomy incision. His squash-ball exercises had paid off for, if anything, his forearms looked more muscular than they had before the incident.
Finally, he demanded his reward. “Take this stupid thing off my head, or I’ll unscrew it by myself,” he told Professor Kirk. “I want full flexibility so I can get back to some serious procedures.”
Kirk frowned. “From what I hear, you’ve passed the red light anyway, Ben. Walls have ears—even through the noise of the emergency room.”
“Yeah,” Bennett confessed with a sheepish grin. “There was a bus crash and they really needed me. Well, can I do it with a green light now?”
“Yes,” Kirk smiled, “as far as I’m concerned, you’re perfect.”
“Come on, Doc,” Bennett retorted, “nobody’s perfect.” And then added, “but I’m sure as hell trying.”
Bennett was so elated by his clean bill of health that he found himself whistling a happy tune as he donned his surgical blues.
His first “real” assignment was an extremely complex portacaval shunt, a procedure in which the portal vein in the liver is joined to the vena cava inferior—the principal vein draining the lower portion of the body.
As Bennett approached the operating table, he noted that there seemed to be an unusually large number of surgical personnel present. In addition to his first assistant, Terri Rodriguez, he saw two senior surgeons, one the Chief of service.
He knew full well why they were there. They wanted to see if he still had it. Whether the severe trauma he had suffered had caused any loss of skill—or of nerve. Bennett told himself that it was just like a crucial athletic challenge—where the game would be won or lost by the guys who could keep their cool.
He was determined to give no outward sign of anxiety. And make no mistakes.
He smiled at his spectators and said breezily, “Good morning, all. This is going to be a long procedure, so I suggest we begin right away.…”
After the first half hour, the Senior professors nodded to each other and unobtrusively left the room. They had seen enough.
Feeling triumphant, Bennett told Barney all about it on the phone that night.
“Christ, Landsmann, you must have nerves of steel. I would have been shaking in my boots. How the hell can you say you actually enjoyed it?”
“Dr. Livingston,” Bennett replied affably, “be sure you put in that book of yours that most of us crazy surgeons actually
groove
on pressure.”
This book is one of the most important contributions to psychoanalytic thought in at least a generation. Surely it will occupy an important place in the literature of the entire discipline.
Barney perused the words excerpted from the most recent edition of the
American Journal of Psychiatry
—a publication not normally given to superlatives. The encomium had been reprinted on a poster in the entrance hall of the Psychiatric Institute announcing the forthcoming lecture of its distinguished author, Maurice Esterhazy.
“Have you read it yet?” asked Brice Wiseman, peering over his office mate’s shoulder.
“It’s almost impossible to get hold of a copy,” Barney replied, “and I’m dying to see it—that guy was my neighbor in Vanderbilt Hall.”
“Oh, come off it, Livingston. Harvard can’t claim
every
genius in the field. The flyleaf explicitly says that Esterhazy did all his training at the Maudsley Hospital in London.”
“Okay, I’ll quit waving the flag. But I do know the guy. Anyway, have you read his book?”
