The house of God

"I think I do love Angie, but I don't think I'll marry her. See, she hates Jews and she hates doctors and she says I whistle too loud and that I follow her around too much when we're not in bed. I think I might . . . Oh, hi, Angie?Wangie, I was just tell?"

"Runt," said Angie, "you know what"?gesture toward self?"I think?" Gesture toward Runt. "You; talk too"?gesture toward cosmos?"Goddamn much, Roy, Mr. Bloom wants to"?gesture toward mouth "talk to you. We need"?gesture toward heaven-"help."

Chuck and the Runt left, and left me to the shocks and thrills of my first solo night in space. Walking a tightrope with Bloom and the other patients, balancing over their catastrophies, I passed the evening. At eleven came the striptease, the nursing change of shift: smooth leading thighs, a black lace panty rolling down as the tight dungarees came off, flashing pubic hair, the side slope of a jiggly breast, the full frontal of two firm ones, errant nipples, the works. Testosterone storm. Who had each been abed with, how had each been abed with, before coming to work, to me? When I'd calmed down, I went to bed. A nurse awoke me at four A.M.: new admission, age eighty?nine; small MI; no complications.

"We don't take them that old," I said, "she goes to the ward."

"Not if her name's Zock. Not if it's Old Lady Zock."

Old Lady Zock turned out to be a typical gomere except for her money, which was three bags full. I was impressed. I would be nice to this Zock, she would give me a bag of money, I would leave medicine and marry the Thunderous Thigh and promise not to whistle, ever, or follow her around. I wheeled Old Lady Zock?whose shriek was MOO?ELL MOO?ELL?up to the Unit. If Bloom and Zock were to have clamored over the last intensive?care bed, who would have gotten it? No contest.

When a Zock gets admitted to the House of God, the whole ice?cream cone of Slurpers shakes and shimmers like a belly dancer in a hall of mirrors. The Leggo gets a call, and he calls on down the cone to the lower Slurpers, and as the nurses were settling Old Lady Zock into her bed, in trotted Pinkus. I looked at him and said, "Great case, eh?"

"Does she have a hobby?"

"Sure does. Moo?elling."

"Never heard of that one," said Pinkus, "what is it?"

"Ask her."

"Hello, dearie. What's your hobby?"

"MOO-ELL MOO-ELL!"

"What a fu

We fondled the steel cords that were his gastrocs and soleus. Pinkus reached into his tote bag and produced a pair of ru

Pinkus and I performed the ritualized stretching of the muscles from the pelvis to the toes. Warmed up, he began to walk out of the Unit as dawn was begi

"New admission. Name's Bloom. No hobbies. None at all."

"Figures. So long."

The next day I was surprised that I was not tired. I felt excited. I'd been in control of the sickest, deadest patients alive. By watching the numbers and occasionally giving a med or turning a dial, I'd averted disaster all night long. Bloom had made it through the night. My biggest thrill that morning was Pinkus turning to me at the end of rounds and saying, much to Jo's chagrin: "Roy, good job on your first night on call. And not just a good job, no, I mean darn good job, Roy. Darn good job indeed."

For the rest of the day I rode the backs of the rolling waves of intoxication at my competence. Before I left, I went to "M and M Rounds," which stood for "Morbidity and Mortality." At this conference, mistakes were aired, with the idea of not repeating them. In practice, it was a chance for the higher-ups to shit on the lower-downs. Given the propensity for mistakes on the part of some of the terns, the same terns would appear over and over again. That day, again it was Howie, being shat on for mismanaging someone with disease in his future specialty, renal medicine. Unfortunately, Howie had missed the diagnosis, and had treated the man for arthritis until he died from renal failure. I entered at Howie pronouncing the death.

"Did you get the post?" asked the Leggo.

"Of course," said Howie, "but I'd made a mistake the patient was not dead after all."

"Well, what happened next? '

"I called the resident," said Howie, as the audience laughed.

"Yes?" asked the Chief.

"Then. the patient really died and we got the post. The dying words were something like 'the nurse is incompetent' or 'the nurse is incontinent.' "

"What difference does that make?" asked the Leggo harshly.

"Why, I don't know," said Howie.

And Molly loves that asshole? I dozed off, and awakened to the Leggo discussing the case, saying, "Most people who have glomerulonephritis and spit blood have glomerulonephritis and spit blood." I thought I'd been dreaming until, awakening again, I heard the Leggo's next pearl: "There is a tendency for healing in this fatal disease." How pedestrian. Poodling around with kidney disease, and I was doing high-powered medicine with exact regulation of every known body parameter, in the Unit. I left M and Ms, signed out, drove home. I was surprised to find myself whistling, happy, thinking of the musculature of the leg. I would become like Pinkus. The deadness I'd felt in Gomer City was being replaced by the excitement of the Unit. Like the E.W., it was not a place where the gomers could come to linger and outlast me, no. From the Unit, unless they were rich or young, they would be TURFED elsewhere. The thrill of handling the complexity of disease, of ru

I couldn't wait to slip into my shorts and Pinkus's old shoes. Well-worn, they cradled my feet. Tired as I was, I put myself through the Pinkus stretching maneuvers, and trotted out to the street, and with the sun lowering in front of my eyes, with the soothing PLONKA PLONKA of the wide cushioned soles against the asphalt, I was carried a few miles farther toward the land of dilated coronary arteries, patent to rich red well?oxygenated blood. I was a child, free after supper, floating on Icarus wings in the first warm evening breeze of Daylight Saving Time, of spring.

I came back with chest pain, worried that I had angina pectoris and that I had started exercising took late in life. I would die from an MI while ru

Berry was waiting for me at home, and given my usual sedentary life, she couldn't believe her eyes.

Taking her hands, I put them on my gastrocnemis and said, "Here, feel that."

"Yeah?"

"That's BEFORE. I want you to form a clear mental image of that, for when you get to feel AFTER."