One night in 1973, home from school for Thanksgiving, my brother Doug and I had a conversation about Johns Hopkins, where he’d graduated from in 1969, and was prime Vietnam draft bait, but escaped with #356 in the 1969 lottery. We were moderately sloshed on some mid-priced German wine my mom kept in the basement, and I said, vehemently, “I can’t stand the pre-meds at Hopkins, they’re a bunch of clueless nerds.” Taking advantage of my naïve outburst, he quietly replied, “One day you’ll be in a hospital room and you’ll be thankful for drawing a Hopkins doctor.” I sloughed that off, but reconsidered in 1987, when, at my 10th anniversary JHU reunion, I ran into several guys that I couldn’t stand as a student, and marveled at how enjoyable—and interesting!—our interactions were. I was 31, and on good behavior—though not “mellowed-out”—and thought about Doug’s common sense 14 years earlier.
(Incidentally, Johns Hopkins has announced that tuition will be free for families whose income is $200,000 or less, a dramatic move in higher education that’s received little attention.)
It’s long been a reality of modern life that two equalizers in America are airports and hospital emergency rooms. It’s where people are thrown together like cattle, and there’s no difference between an affluent banker and scared immigrant who hasn’t yet met the ICE man. Fine by me: checking out the crowd—what used to be called “people-watching”—beats looking at an iPhone. I bring this up because recently my wife, while mopping the kitchen floor one Saturday morning, got too energetic, took a spill and suspected she’d broken her right wrist. She trundled off to an Emergency Care outlet and the diagnosis wasn’t good: a bone was fractured in four places.
I met her at Union Memorial Hospital near our home in Baltimore, and, no surprise, endured seven hours of x-rays, purposely jolly nurses (dressed in sweats, instead of those pointy caps seen in old movies) and a smart 34-year-old physician’s assistant who eventually dressed her in a cloth “cast.” The personnel at the hospital were friendlier than in the past; it was the tedium in between procedures that was a bear. Next to our cordoned-off patch, we could hear a young woman crying and screaming, and she was the talk of that wing. Once sedated, it turned out she’d fallen from the third rung of a ladder trying to upend a wasp’s nest. A little worn-out, I’d assumed she was knifed or shot, and was ready to take notes. That she was in the foot/arm wing didn’t occur to me. Anyway, my wife (in moderate pain; no serious pain killers were prescribed, just Advil) and I got home and I chopped some vegetables and fruit for her, and then she conked out.
It was determined by a top-rated doctor (or so we were told; I doubt a nurse would say, “he’s a shitty physician.”) that she needed an operation and several days later we returned to Union Memorial to start all over. The doctor (pushing 40, young to me) was excellent, and after shooing me away to the waiting room, he applied a “twilight anesthesia” and an hour later called to give me detailed instructions of what medicine to buy at the in-house pharmacy (waiting time: 45 minutes, with some very ornery patients) and how to administer it. He said the Percocet should be popped every three hours that night, a grim prospect, but then the nurse modified that to every six hours, which was confusing but more tolerable.
It’s a minor point, for the treatment and “bedside manner” was tops, but I thought, can’t these professionals get on the same page? My hunch was, considering the decades-old litigious fear in the medical community, that all bases were covered, since an individual’s pain tolerance can’t be divined from breathing in-and-out. This is my wife’s cross to bear—I’m just the “helper”—and while it’s inconvenient and at times frustrating, with some fortune, she’ll be, if not “new,” at least restored to a mostly-normal state in four weeks or so. (Everyone, once past the age of 55, is a “fixer-upper,” whether at a hospital, optometrist or dentist.) Our health insurance plan is pretty good—but not comparable to the 1990s—but I haven’t yet received the inevitable packet of bills, which might list some once-unimaginable “out of pocket” charges. Maybe $130 for that bottle of still water: kind of kidding, I don’t think the medical industry is taking cues from the Pentagon just yet, although I’m aware that legitimate hospital nightmare stories are as common as The New York Times “doctoring” its content to fit the paper’s we-know-better-than-you worldview.
The illustration above is by my JHU classmate and friend Craig Hankin (a pre-med for one semester), for a News-Letter article I wrote about various scumbags in the student government, some of them doctors today.
Take a look at the clues to figure out the year: Donald Coggan becomes the Archbishop of Canterbury; first appearance of Davros in Doctor Who; the first episode of Fawlty Towers debuts on BBC Two; Colin Dexter’s first Inspector Morse novel, Last Bus to Woodstock, is published; Linda McCartney is arrested in Los Angeles for cannabis possession; The Bee Gees have a smash hit with “Jive Talkin’”; The Ramones sign with Sire Records; The Mothers of Invention break up; Herbie Hancock’s Man-Child is released; Bradley Cooper is born and Fredric March dies; Donald Barthelme’s Dead Father and Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation are published; Gary Snyder wins the Poetry Pulitzer Prize; and Avatar wins the Belmont Stakes.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023