The View from the Vue (9 page)

One afternoon during the last week of my internship, as I was sitting on the ward, Mrs. Abramowitz swept in in full sail carrying a gift box, which she proudly unwrapped in front of me. It was a tape recorder, “So you should heff summin to remembeh me mit.” I soon saw exactly what she meant; she hooked up the microphone and began to sing into it!

The audience began to applaud, but she waved, them into silence. There was more:

I thanked Mrs. Abramowitz as profusely as I could. She left, and I went around the corner to bang my head against the wall again. “Curing mein ill-ness.” Jesus Christ!

I didn’t realize until several years later that Mrs. A. simply could not accept the fact that her heart was in such bad shape that it needed medication every day for the rest of her life. When she felt well, she stopped the pills, thinking this time maybe it wouldn’t come back. Maybe this time they really got rid of it.

Mrs. Gross was an L.O.J.L. who made a very lasting impression in a very short time. She was a scrawny, filthy, incredibly malodorous old lady who was presented to me one Saturday night in the Emergency Room. I walked up to her bed and gagged quietly. Her admitting slip said, “Yetta Gross—? CVA” (that’s “possible cerebrovascular accident”—or in plain talk, a stroke). I introduced myself and asked her what had brought her to the hospital.

The little lady looked me square in the eye, inhaled deeply, and let out the most Godawful, piercing shriek I have ever heard:

“MEY-YEH!”

I just stood and stared at her. I guess she thought I needed further explanation, because she then hollered, “MEY-YEH! Y’ doity sonuvabitch, y’ diditagain! MEY-YEH!”

That’s all she said, repeatedly. That was the answer to every question I or anyone else asked her. So we stopped asking her questions. After I had examined her, I got a nurse to help me turn her over to do a spinal tap. As I put the needle in, she let go for what had to be at least the twentieth time: “MEY-YEH! Y’ diditagain; y’ doity sonuvabitch, y’ diditagain. MEY-YEH!” The last syllable lasted fifteen seconds and could have shattered drinking glasses.

A minute later, one of the surgical interns pulled back the curtain around the bed and peered in at Yetta and me. He’d been up all night, his eyeballs looked like a road map of metropolitan New York and I could almost see his nerve ends quivering.

“Karp!” he groaned.

Without looking up from Yetta’s dripping spinal fluid, I said, “What?”

“Karp, you listen to me. That screeching is driving me nuts. If you don’t shut her up, I’m going to kill her. You understand?” Without waiting for a reply, he snapped the curtain shut and disappeared.

The spinal tap didn’t provide the reason for her confused mental state, so I still couldn’t tell whether she was sick, senile, or both. As I sat wondering what to do next, she let loose another blast at Meyer. That gave me an idea. I got up and walked out to the waiting room. There sat a guy who could have been Mr. Abramowitz’ twin, even to the snot on the shapeless coat. Except for the eyes. They weren’t hostile, but rather large, sad, and frightened.

“Is your name Meyer?” I asked.

“Yiz, yiz. Meyeh Guhross.”

“Look, I want to ask you about your wife.…”

“Kin I see her, plizz?” He grabbed me by the lapels, and I thought he was going to cry. I figured, what the hell, he could answer my questions later. Meanwhile, maybe he could shut her up. I led him into the E.R., at which moment Mrs. Gross was once again calling her beloved. We went to her bedside, and Meyer leaned over and patted her head. “I’m here, honey,” he murmured.

Yetta turned and gave him a look that turned my blood cold. Her filthy gray hair flew around her white face, and her eyes shot sparks. She sank her nails into his cheeks, and let out with “I’ll honey yer ess, y’ besstid.” With this, Meyer let go a holler, turned tail, and disappeared down the hallway, coattails flying behind him. Yetta sent after him an effort worthy of a goosed Banshee: “MEY-YEH! Y’ doity sonuvabitch, y’ diditagain. MEY-YEH!” She tried to climb over the bed rails to get her hands on him, and it took two nurses and me to keep the little woman in bed.

At this point the nurses told me that if I didn’t have Yetta sent to the psych ward, they’d have me sent. I looked at the two-inch-long, five-track gouge on the hand of one nurse, and called the shrink. He took one look at and one listen to Mrs. Gross and signed the paper. The orderly wheeled her off strapped into a chair, and we all sank into seats and listened as the echoes and reverberations of “MEY-YEH” became gradually fainter, and finally disappeared forever.

Despite the fact that they were little, the L.O.J.L.’s packed big wallops. One of them was responsible for the most magnificent case of brainwashing I’ve ever seen: ethnic brainwashing, no less.

She was Mrs. Rosenblatt, an eighty-year-old woman, brought in with (what else?) heart failure. However, she was also suffering from cancer of the vagina, and for this reason she ended up on the gynecology ward. At The Vue, this was a repository for about forty women, many of whom were in varying stages of abortion or suffering from pelvic infections. At least half of them were Puerto Ricans. Amiable and chattery all day, they underwent personality transformations at night. When the lights were shut off, they lay in their beds and realized that they were uncomfortable, lonely, and frightened. Therefore, they’d spend the night softly moaning “Ay!” over and over. When I was-called onto the ward at night, it was eerie to walk down the rows of beds while upward of twenty disembodied “Ay’s!” converged on me from all directions.

Mrs. Rosenblatt lived for two nights and one day before the combination of the cancer and heart failure did her in. During this time, as she struggled for breath, she uttered only one word: “Oy.” Not plaintive like the Puerto Rican Ay, but piercing and demanding, and repeated at about forty-five-second intervals.

During her second night on the ward, while I was giving attention to a Mrs. Gonzales, who was completing her abortion, I realized that the Oys had stopped. I told Mrs. G. I’d be right back, and went over to find the reason for the silence. The reason being apparent, I went right back to Mrs. Gonzales.

After she had finished miscarrying, I returned to the front of the ward to get the name and number of Mrs. Rosenblatt’s next of kin. At that point it suddenly occurred to me that something was wrong. I stopped and listened. From every corner of the room came soft, plaintive Oys. Not Ays. Oys. By the next night though, all was back to normal, and Spanish again replaced Yiddish as the official language of the Bellevue gynecology ward.
Sic transit gloria! Sic semper tyrannis!

My most memorable L.O.J.L. was Zelda Katzman. Mrs. Katzman was sixty-eight years old. Her frontal balding, small thick neck, huge bulging eyeballs, and pot belly combined to give her the appearance of a gigantic frog. This was reinforced by her grating, guttural voice. Her hair—natural gray interspersed with dyed orange-red—simply added a grotesque fillip to her presence.

Mrs. Katzman was a frequent visitor to our wards. She invariably came in complaining of chest pain and shortness of breath. Physical examination, X-rays, and cardiograms were always normal, with the exception of some minor findings consistent with bronchitis and emphysema. So she’d be kept in the hospital for three to ten days for observation and tests. The observations were monotonously normal and so were the tests. No heart disease was ever found. Because of her obesity, dry skin, hair loss, and constipation (the latter a symptom without which one could not be properly labeled an L.O.J.L.), every new set of interns worked her up for hypothyroidism. This workup also was invariably normal. She must have been the only lady in the history of The Vue or any other place with twenty negative workups for thyroid disease.

Mrs. Katzman had one especially annoying quality. As are most patients with emphysema, she was a chronic smoker. Therefore, on admission, her cigarettes were always confiscated. That meant war.

During the day, Zelda made her mooching rounds, managing to collect five or ten cigarettes from the other patients. Then she’d stash them away. We never could find her hiding place. But when the midnight-to-eight shift rolled around, Zelda would creep past the dozing aides, go into the bathroom, and make like a furnace.

From that point on, the sequence was absolutely predictable and totally repeatable. About a half hour after going in, she’d stagger out of the bathroom with her nicotine nerves pacified, but wheezing and gasping for breath. She’d make it as far as the nursing station, and there collapse to her knees. With what would sound like a terminal effort, she’d lift her pop eyes to the nurse or the aide and announce in her Andy Devine baritone:

“Call d’dokteh! I’m gunna
faint
!”

This call usually would awaken the intern after about an hour’s sleep. He’d stagger crankily down to the ward and revive Zelda with a few whiffs of oxygen and a dose of phenobarb. Then, lifting her protuberant eyes in deepest gratitude, she’d offer thanks and homage to her savior physician and promise never, never to touch the vile weed again. Which vow she would keep for the remainder of the night. You could say that much for Zelda: she never woke up a dokteh more than once a night. Undoubtedly because she’d run out of cigarettes on the first go-round.

We tried every available technique to break Mrs. Katzman of her habit: persuasion, argument, threats, tearful pleas, but all had the same effect. Zelda would fill her frog eyes with all the innocence she could muster, avow total agreement, and promise obedience from then on. Then we’d go off on our rounds and she’d go off on hers. We were grateful that her stays on the ward, though frequent, were brief.

The last time I saw Zelda she was gasping in the emergency room while another intern, who had not yet met her, was frantically pushing oxygen into her with one hand and taking an electrocardiogram with the other. When Zelda saw me walk by, she waved and yelled, “Yoo-hoo. Dokteh Kahp!” I grinned at her and went over. “I’m beck,” she said. “I vuz heffen trubble mit breeding again.”

“I see, Mrs. Katzman.” Then I added, “I’ll tell your new doctor about you, so he’ll know your case.”

“Ah…dot vould be nice.”

Her new doctor had stopped in mid-cardiogram, and stood staring at her in utter disbelief, the cardiogram paper continuing to roll out and onto the floor. I told him that Mrs. Katzman was a frequent visitor to his new ward, that she had severe episodes of shortness of breath that came and went without apparent cause or explanation, that no one yet had been able to find any disease other than her emphysema, and that she smoked too much.…

“Now, Dokteh Kahp (the forefinger waved a la Molly Goldberg), you dunt heff to tell him effryt’ing,” she interrupted.

… and that for a few days he would have to make sure there was nothing new, and then he could, with clear conscience, discharge her. I also told him that he could save a lot of his time and even more of her blood by forgetting about her thyroid gland. Then I bid Mrs. K. good-bye.

A few days later I was eating lunch when this same doctor came up to me and asked me whether I remembered Mrs. K. I assured him I did.

“Well,” he said, “I worked her up and couldn’t find a thing wrong with her, except for the emphysema, like you said. But she drove us all crazy with this damn habit she had of sneaking smokes at night.…”

“What do you mean had?” I asked. “She’ll have that habit till she dies.”

“She
is
dead,” he said.

“She’s
what
?”

“I sent her out this morning, all chipper and cheerful. She got as far as the front steps, Larry, and she just keeled over. She was D.O.A. when they brought her back in.”

I pushed my plate away and just sat for a whole minute without moving. Finally I muttered, “Well, that’s one autopsy I’m going to watch. I’ve got to know what the hell she had.”

“No autopsy, Larry.”

“Why not?”

“Family wouldn’t allow it. One of the daughters grabbed me by the tie and began to scream that first we had killed her mother and now we wanted to cut her open and make her suffer more.”

I angrily left the table and went up to my room to kick my wastebasket. Then I went back to work. The next day they buried Zelda with her secret, and all I could do was gnash my teeth.

So it went, on and on, seemingly without end. Fourteen years ago the L.O.J.L.’s were a basic part of patientry at The Vue. However, attrition and medical insurance plans will soon take their full toll, and the Bellevue L.O.J.L. will have to be declared an endangered species. In not too many years, an intern may actually have to walk down the street to Beth Israel Hospital, just to see one. Evolution is a harsh process, and its inevitability cannot be denied.

In recent years, homosexuals and homosexuality have begun to come out into the open. Although many people still clear their throats uncomfortably when the subject arises, the increasing candor may be starting to diminish the persecution that homosexuals have long suffered.

In the early 1960’s, however, gay had not yet become beautiful. As a matter of fact, homosexuals hadn’t even become gays. They were still called queers and fairies, and in the Bellevue neighborhood, one usually heard them referred to as doity fags. It was considered great sport among the local bucks to beat them to bloody pulps, and then take their money and valuables.

Homosexuals have always had special medical problems, but the prejudice against them frequently militated against then-obtaining care. They knew that they were not welcome in most private doctors’ offices: it would have given the places a bad name. Hence, as was the case with the alcoholics, the bums, the prostitutes, and the penniless, Bellevue became the homosexuals’ last resort. No one was ever turned away at The Vue, and most of the young house-staff members could be counted on to be considerably less judgmental than older members of the medical fraternity.