Weekends at Bellevue by Julie Holland Read Free Book Online Page A

other hand, needed to know where on his body. Misunderstandings like these abounded. (The classic medical school joke is to ask a patient if she’s sexually active, to which she will reply, “No, I usually just lie there.”)
    My surgery rotation was part ER, part surgical wards, and part operating room. I developed a love-hate relationship with the adrenaline and the hours. I would repeatedly envision Hawkeye Pierce (this was before
Grey’s Anatomy)
each time I scrubbed-in at the sink with the other surgeons and then pushed my back through the OR door, my arms at ninety-degree angles. I spent most of my time feeling like I was in eithera gory movie or a well-written medical drama.
I am playing the part of a doctor
, I told myself,
and hopefully, eventually, I will feel like one
.
    Philadelphia in July was a festival of mortality: car accidents, gunshot wounds, stabbings, muggings. A man with his initials in gold on his top two teeth stumbled into the ER literally holding his guts. He had been shot in the belly and his intestines had “avulsed” outside of his skin. I was invited to join in his surgery. Instead of using a scalpel to open his abdomen, they used the bovie, the device typically used to cauterize bleeders, something like a hot poker. As the surgery commenced, there was a small explosion as the escaped intestinal gas ignited the bovie. “Okay, that means he’s perfed his intestines somewhere,” the resident explained to me calmly, in contrast to my jumpiness. We examined what seemed like miles of his intestines, passing them through our hands trying to find the perforation. He had been shot with a shotgun, and the chief resident made the same joke repeatedly as he dropped endless pieces of buckshot into a silver bowl held by the nurse. “Send this to ballistics,” he quipped as one clinked. “This one too.” “Ballistics.” He thought it would never get old, and for some reason, he was right. It’s all in the delivery.
    It was during these first few months of my third year that I learned something crucial about myself: I couldn’t stand to see people writhing in pain. I felt horrible that they were suffering and I wasn’t yet in any position to stop it. Broken bones sticking out of skin or fractures grinding against themselves when the limb was moved (a sound called crepitus) creeped me out more than anything. But give me someone in psychic pain, whose soul was aching, and I felt fully equipped to involve myself.
    The surgical residents sensed this in me, and I was frequently pulled along when one of them had to deliver bad news to a patient or family member.
    On the Fourth of July weekend I was helping to cover the ER. I was very excited, and a bit nervous, because a trauma call had come in. EMS was five minutes out, bringing us someone from a car accident. The members of the trauma team converged on the ER from various parts of the hospital—the surgeon’s lounge, the wards, the call-room. We “gowned up” in yellow plastic robes, gloves, and goggles. We were gathered around a gurney waiting for the ambulance when I heard the chief surgeon of the trauma team say, “Remember, it’s not a traumacall, it’s a trauma code.” I had no idea what the difference was but I stayed mum as she explained to the third-year resident, “She’s already coded. All we can do is try to revive her.”
    I realized then that we were all dressed up and waiting for a dead girl.
    When EMS wheeled the patient in, they gave their report. “Sixteen-year-old girl, unknown medical history, unrestrained, driving a Suzuki Samurai which flipped multiple times. She was thrown from the car. CPR started in the field.” As she was transferred from the ambulance stretcher to our gurney, I noticed her small, light-blue running shoes, the razor stubble on her legs, her turquoise terry-cloth shorts, and her chipped fingernail polish.
    We began our efforts at resuscitation. Her eyes were open and staring at the ceiling as her