Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital Read Online Free PDF Page A

admitted, we fed him ice cream, candy bars, McDonald’s hamburgers, Rice Krispies, and anything else he wanted. Then he was sent to the ACS, Administration for Children’s Services, for disposition to a family that would look after him. That was it.
    Today he would be forty-six years old. I was twenty-four when I met him. I have never gotten the image of his baby face out of my mind. Every time I see a bruise, I see his face. Was he in the prison ward? Was he in a unit like this somewhere, having orange juice? Was he alive?
    Many if not the vast majority of the individuals in the psych unit were subjected to extremities of violence themselves as children. If there is a laboratory experiment in how to create people at the margin of functionality by eliminating all resources and social supports, education, medical care, and community involvement, these are the guinea pigs who have been dumped out of their cages and turned loose on the streets. The prosecuting attorneys lock them up in the city’s penitentiaries, and we treat them for the medical and psychiatric problems that flourish in the hothouse atmosphere of a prison system. In forty years, that system has gone 180 degrees from rehabilitation to punishment, without regard for the long-term self-inflicted collateral damage.
    My cell phone rings, and Budd’s name appears on the screen. “Nothing yet. The Guerra family is getting agitated.”
    “Okay. We’re working on it.”
    I decide to go back up to the prison unit until I hear from Patty. I want to be useful to Guerra and his family and smooth over the discharge. Plus, I remind myself, I have other patients there that I need to talk to.
    I see Marlene Scott, the head nurse for over twenty-five years,bending over a file at the nurses’ desk. A middle-aged, diminutive Afro-Caribbean woman, she emanates calmness and authority. The escalating curses of a patient being wheeled to his room/cell down the hall behind her do not even seem to register. She looks up and smiles at me. “Budd’s in with a patient.”
    We reminisce about the old prison unit in the administration building at Bellevue, before the new hospital was built. No one wanted to go there. It was made of wide-open wards typical of the time. Kings County, where I trained, had the same setup. Everyone was in one big room with only curtains to protect their privacy. And the curtains didn’t work! On my first day as resident, I was on rounds and tried to pull the curtain shut. Dozens of baby cockroaches fell on the patient’s huge cirrhotic abdomen filled with tense ascites, fluid from a scarred and marginally functioning liver. His yellow hue was the same as the stained sheets. He didn’t move when the roaches scrambled off him onto the bed.
    I ask her about Guerra. “No news,” she says, “but they’ve got a whiff of the problem. It’s hard for them, after everything they’ve been through. The possibility now that he won’t get out seems more than they can bear.”
    “I’m going to see him now.”
    She decides to walk with me through the unit to the waiting room. As we go, she tells me about a retirement party a few weeks earlier at Bellevue where a woman spoke of her first job on the prison unit when she was eighteen. She had called a prisoner by a number. Her supervisor asked her to step outside. He told her this was a human being and to call him Mr. Jones. She never forgot that lesson. She used it as an example of the many contradictions that crop up in trying to treat people as human beings in systems that degrade their humanity.
    I see Guerra’s wife speaking intently to her son. I wonder for a second who comforts her.
    I put my hand on Guerra’s shoulder and assure him we’re working on the release. Guerra just shrugs. “I was an idiot to hope. What a
pendejo
!” He looks old. In prison, everyone looks ten to twenty-five years older than they are, except the teenagers.
    I check my watch and go to the nurses’ station to call Patty.