Travels Read Online Free PDF Page B

station.”
    He grabbed my arm again, and he pulled his face close to mine. “
I’m not touching those spiders any more!
”
    “Good idea,” I said. “I’ll be back later.”
    He released me. I went to the nursing station. There were some nurses and a pinched-faced man of thirty-one who was incredibly turned out, sharp creases in his trousers and jacket, pressed tie, immaculate haircut. He glanced at his watch. “Dr. Crichton? Or should I say,
Mr
. Crichton? I’m Donald Rogers, the visiting chief resident in neurology, and you’re late. When I say I want you here at six, I mean six and not six-oh-three. Is that understood, mister?”
    “Yes sir,” I said.
    That was how my rotation in neurology began.
    It never got better.
    Clinical neurology is basically a diagnostic specialty, since relatively few severe neurological disorders can be treated. The clinical neuro ward at the Boston City reflected that depressing state of affairs; in essence, cases were admitted simply so the young doctors could see them. The thirty-seven patients on the floor all had different diseases. The staff never admitted a patient to the floor if there was already one with the same disease. It wasn’t a hospital ward—it was a museum. Most people referred to it as the Squash Court, or the Gourd Ward.
    But we pretended it was a normal hospital floor with treatable patients. We did all the regular hospital things. We made rounds, we drew bloods, we ordered consults and diagnostic tests. We carried out the charade with great precision, even though there was little we could do for anybody.
    Besides myself as the sole medical student, there was an intern named Bill Levine from New York, a first-year resident named Tom Perkins, and Dr. Rogers, the visiting chief resident. He was a Southerner from Duke who did everything by the book. Rogers was always immaculately turned out; his “presentation,” as he called it, was awe-inspiring. One day Levine, who loathed Rogers, asked him about his ties.
    “You like these ties?” Rogers asked, in a soft Southern accent.
    “Well, I was wondering how you managed to keep them so smooth and unwrinkled, Don.”
    “My wife does that. She irons them.”
    “Does she?”
    “Yes. She gets up with me at five in the morning, and after I have dressed and tied my tie, she irons it for me. While I am wearing it. She does that.”
    “No kidding,” Levine said.
    “Yes, she’s okay,” Rogers said. “Only once she scorched my shirt, and then I had to get dressed all over again. But she’s never done
that
again.”
    “No, I’ll bet,” Levine said.
    “No. She learned her lesson that time,” Rogers said, chuckling.
    Rogers was a bit of a sadist. He kept a series of straight pins in the lapel of his jacket, near the buttonhole. On rounds he liked to stick these pins into the patients, “to check their responses.” There was a kind of insane pretense in all this. None of the patients were getting any better. None of them were changing at all, from day to day or week to week, except for the two who had inoperable brain tumors. They were slowly dying. But no one else was changing at all. The patients were indigent, extremely ill patients who were shuttled from one state institution to another. As we made rounds each morning, there wasn’t really that much to discuss. But Rogers stuck pins into them anyway.
    Levine had to spend only a month of his internship rotation on the ward. Levine was a heavyset, smiling guy of twenty-five who was almost bald. A warmhearted soul, he despised Rogers and the ward. He expressed his distaste by lighting a joint every morning before rounds.
    I didn’t find out about this until the second day. I passed by the men’s room, smelled the smoke, and went inside. “Bill, what’re you doing?”
    “Having a toke,” he said, sucking in his breath. He passed the joint to Perkins, the resident, who took a long drag, then held it out to me.
    I pushed it away. “Are you kidding? What