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book, “If you listen”
Boom! Boom! Boom!
“to this American upstart,”
Boom!
“I will not be held responsible!”
BOOM!
    The sounds ricocheted through the somber conference room like gunshots, and in that moment I looked into the eyes of the courtly, elegant Indian doctors, and they had lost respect for him. They asked us to wait outside as they considered their options. I sat there with my vinyl knapsack and my socks with sandals. He sat next to me elegantly attired with two equally elegantly attired attachées from the Italian Consulate. They called us back in and said, “We’ve decided to go with Dr. Lombardi.” The pope’s doctor silently packed his bag, left the hospital, went directly to the airport, and flew out of the country.
    I said, “Let’s get that pacemaker out.”
    And they looked at me and said, “You want it out, you have to take it out.”
    I said, “I’ve never done that before.” They gave me this wonderful nonverbal Bengali head waddle.
    So I went down to her room. I banished the nuns. I got a charge nurse and a basic tray, and I prepared the patient. The pacemaker box came out readily, but the wire, the wire that had been sitting in her right ventricle for several months, was tethered into place, and it would not budge. I twisted and turned and did all kinds of little body English. This thing was stuck. I started to sweat, my glasses fogged over. There had been stories that if you pull hard enough you can put a hole in the ventricle, and she could bleed into her chest and die within a matter of minutes.
    So in the most surreal moment, I said a prayer
to
Mother Teresa
for
Mother Teresa, and the catheter came loose.
    I took it out, I cultured the tip, and I proved that this pacemaker was the cause of her infection. She got better. Her fever broke. She woke up. A couple of days later she was sitting in a chair eating.
    My work was done, but they wouldn’t let me leave. I stayed another two weeks as I was the only doctor who could start her IVs, who could thread those catheters into those tiny, fragile elderly woman’s veins. It’s a skill I had picked up in the mid-1970s as a medical student at NYU Bellevue Hospital, where I learned to start IVs in the hardened veins of IV drug addicts. It’s a skill I honestly thought I would never ever need again. When it was my time to leave, they held a press conference and they publicly thanked me, and that’s why I’m able to tell this story. I flew back to my life and to my two sons.
    She lived another eight years, and I saw her periodically. But the best part of this for me is that I have an ongoing relationship with the Sisters. They’re a wonderful group of women;they truly do God’s work, however you may want to define that. And I take care of whatever their medical problems are.
    Several months ago, the mother superior came in. I had to fill out some paperwork, and she brought two young novitiates with her, and she asked me, “Dr. Lombardi, can we go to the back? Can they see the pictures?” I have some pictures on the wall that memorialize this trip, and they like to see the faces of the other sisters when they were so young.
    I said, “Of course.”
    And we go to the back, and they’re oohing and ahhing, and one young novitiate squeezes my arm, and she says, “Dr. Lombardi, you represent a link to our past.”
    And I say, “I’m deeply honored by that.”
    And the other sister says to me, “Dr. Lombardi, in the convent we think of you as a rock star.”
    Dr. George Lombardi is a lifelong New Yorker and a graduate of City College of New York and New York University School of Medicine. He is in private practice in New York and his practice consists of saints and sinners. He has two sons, of whom he is enormously proud, and a fabulous Czech girlfriend. He credits his love of stories to his father, who raised his gift for lamentation to an art form.

ANDREW SOLOMON
Notes on an Exorcism
    I ’m not depressed now—but I was depressed