A Season in Hell Read Online Free PDF

death sentence; I had not kept up with the fact that this is no longer the case. For instance, my nurses assured me that most babies with cancer are cured.
    In time, I got in the habit of not looking at people, so as to keep myself calm. Unlike most hospitals, S-K has attractive, comfortable waiting rooms, and its halls are filled with art. For initiates (patients and their visitors), there is a large room at roof level with comfortable couches, a piano, a pool table, worktables and materials for arts and crafts, and access to a garden. Familiar with hospitals as I have become, I judge them by waiting and emergency rooms as well as by their doctors and nurses. A hospital must deal not just with patients but with long-suffering families and friends. And these spaces are far better at Sloan-Kettering than at St. Luke’s–Roosevelt or Mount Sinai, the other New York City hospitals I know. The emergency room at St. Luke’s is truly shocking, crowded and shabby, especially given its pretentious new lobby, a huge empty space designed to intimidate. Mount Sinai is shocking because its lobby, too, is, like the building itself (whose architect aspired to assert himself so forcefully over the city that he ruined the East Side skyline), pretentious and overbearing, while its actual working spaces—operating, waiting, and X-ray rooms—are cramped, ugly, and uncomfortable.
    But on this day, July 23, 1992, I was not aware of any of this; I was shocked into silence by the host of people on every floor, waiting, waiting, all caught in the same epidemic as I.
    Sloan-Kettering is a research hospital; each department is devoted to a particular system of the body and has its own staff of physicians, called “attendings.” The highest-ranking doctors, they take monthly turns supervising patient care. The gastrointestinal service had five attendings, each “on duty” one month out of five. (Before I was finished, a sixth doctor joined the service.) Each month, one attending was responsible for morning rounds (in which he was followed by a group of younger physicians, still learning), visits to all the patients being treated by the department. At the end of his stretch, that doctor was freed to do research for the next four months. I think all attendings see outpatients two mornings a week; but the system may have changed somewhat since I was there. The young doctors assist the attendings, not only following them on rounds but helping in the research projects, and they gain status from the association with eminence. I have never seen more craven servility than some of these assistants exhibited. I blamed not the youngsters but the arrogant creatures they served. The assistants who dared to talk to me on their own were the pleasantest doctors in the hospital. Humanity had not yet been beaten out of them. But judging from their elders, it would be.
    There are many other ranks of doctors at S-K; an entire set works long hours, staffing the hospital at night and on weekends and holidays. Perhaps they are called residents: I am not sure of their formal title. Some older doctors in practice elsewhere seemed to have S-K privileges; I saw them only in Urgent Care (the ER), tending patients who came in with emergencies. Many appeared to be surgeons who practiced in New Jersey or Long Island.
    The oncologist I was assigned was not arrogant. He treated his assistant (a warm young woman I would never see again, and missed) kindly and with respect. But he had some characteristics that made him less than an ideal doctor. He was extremely negative. This characteristic took the aspect of dourness or depression, which is understandable in a field in which most patients die (he told me once that his department receives eleven thousand new patients every year, and of those, over ten thousand die). Still, this trait is not especially helpful to patients. Part of his problem could have been his youth. He may not have been as young in years as he looked, but