Tales from the Emergency Room Read Online Free PDF Page A

prone on their wind-driven sailing sleds and achieve remarkable speeds over the ice. Great fun until one of the shore landowners decided that he didn’t want the boaters near his property. He strung three lengths of barbed wire across the ice to keep the boaters out. An ice boater, a man of about 21 years of age, sailed right into the wires which caught him across his neck, face and scalp.
    We were in a full-class session when the Chief of Plastic Surgery came to lecture. His first slide showed a red, ball-shaped arrangement of unknown, to us, identity. Urged to look closely, we all eventually spotted a tooth imbedded in the mass. Then followed a long selection of slides documenting the reconstruction of the boater’s face. One hundred and twenty five long and short operations later his face looked normal with scars barely visible along his jaw lines. It took two and one-half years to complete the reconstruction which included saving about 20 of his teeth and most of the nerve functions. To think that the original injury could be repaired to the result we saw was a source of awe to all of us then and at least to me, still is today.
    DVM
    It was pharmacology class. We had already voted to learn how to write prescriptions in English instead of Latin. At each session we were given blank prescription pads to use in our exercises. The professor would hand our practice prescriptions back at our next session so that we could learn from our mistakes. At the bottom of each prescription was a line which ended in “MD”. We all got a kick out of signing on this line. One day we were given an exercise in which the dose involved a large amount of powder. We had a chart of capsule sizes to work with. I finally managed to get all the powder into four very large capsules. Most of my classmates did the same. When we got the prescriptions back, the professor had crossed out the “MD” and written, in red, “DVM”. This of course means Doctor of Veterinary Medicine and these then were prescriptions for “horse pills”. None of us has ever forgotten, I’m sure, that sometimes one must use many small pills or capsules to get the whole the dose into the patient.
    BCG
    Since I grew up in suburban Westchester County, New York, I did not have the same exposure to diseases that someone in the middle of a big city might. So, when I got to medical school, my TB skin test was negative. It wasn’t long, however, before my class was recruited into a study of the reversibility of the test. We all went to have our BCG vaccinations (protection against tuberculosis) done. Then, after some time, we were retested and lo! my TB skin test was now positive. No problem so far. When I went into the service, my test had converted back to negative. However, in the service I was exposed to a ward where active tubercular patients were treated. Not only did my TB test become positive again, but I also developed a Ghon complex (evidence of prior tuberculosis infection) in my chest which showed up sometime later in a routine chest X-ray. That was that until I began working in a clinic in the south Bronx. I was to be tested for TB about once every two years. Treatment would be instituted if I had a positive test. I was not happy about that, but my test was no longer clearly positive and so I avoided the treatment. What my TB test is now I have no idea and no one can quite follow the changes in it anyway.
    Remus Roll
    Anatomy lab came as a shock to most of us. The odors, the bodies and our ignorance all seemed too much to cope with. We began with the dissections as the very first class in medical school. The course was Gross Anatomy and the humor was gross, too. This story is not now acceptable—it wasn’t then either but we were young and naïve. There were four people per body, but we all had to learn male and female anatomy as well. Our body was a light-skinned black man. We all named our specimens. Ours we called Remus. He was very well endowed as we say.