Up to now, I thought I was pretty big stuff and knew my medicine. My first month was spent in the emergency room, which was a very busy place considering where we were in New York City.
My schedule was 12 hours on and 12 hours off for a month straight. Up to that point I thought I learned most things in med school. That month was a real eye opener, but it taught me a lot for the rest of my internship.
The ER nurses were very good and taught me a lot. One of those things was how to handle someone in pulmonary edema while we were waiting for the diuretic to work. I remembered that lesson many years later on a trip home from Mongolia. Most of my ER stories occurred later in my internship when I again thought that I had learned it all. You can see that I was a slow learner.
About once a week, Dad and Jo would come down to the city and take us out to dinner. One evening, while walking up one of the village streets while we were going to Minnetta’s for dinner, we ran into two drunks with a bottle between them. One recognized me as his doctor and he called out to me. I knew him from the ER. Dad thought it was funny, but Jo was upset.
Ambulance rides
When I was on obstetrics, also known as OB, we used to ride the ambulance in those days. The drivers of the ambulance were a Puerto Rican and an African-American who called themselves Lord and Jesus, respectfully. They were wild and would go up the street the wrong way or drive on the sidewalk. We thought it was funny. All our patients knew who they were and would ask who was driving.
It was not conducive to keeping pregnant women from delivering in the cab. If they did, I would owe the ambulance group a case of beer for the OB mess they had to clean. Once, that happen to me and I delivered the baby as we were approaching the hospital. The nurses took the baby and we put the lady on a stretcher. They took her to the OB suite, but I was not allowed into a delivery room because of the mess.
While we were taking care of the after-birth and asking for some Methergine to contract the uterus, another doctor was in the delivery room. At the end, a doctor named Winterhalter came out of one of the ORs where he had delivered his case. He was laughing at my technique.
By now, I knew him because he was taking care of Sally. She did not like to make prenatal visits, so during the fall, Winterhalter would come with us to New York Giants football games and ask her how she was doing. The humor of the delivery-room incident was that my case did not get infected nor turned a hair. His case got an infection in the episiotomy.
Home Delivery
Another OB case was in a tenement. The rule was that we were not supposed to go into a building unless the police was there. I arrived and people were on the roof screaming for me to hurry up. I saw the police car, but no policeman.
I was young and full of the milk of human kindness, so I grabbed my bag and went in. On the way up the winding staircase, someone came out at me with a very large knife and wanted my medical bag because he thought I had narcotics in it.
I was agreeable. At that moment, a cop appeared out of nowhere and hit him so hard on his head that I thought he was going to cut him in half. The cop then told me to get upstairs and help the lady.
They lived in a lean-to (shack) on the roof. They had a plaque on the wall from the city that said they were members of the City Clean Dwelling group. She also had some of her children in bed with her and some hysterical relatives all over.
I thought I could get her to the hospital rather than doing a home delivery. We put her on a wooden chair and carried her down to the ambulance. On the way down, I saw the cop who had helped me and tending to a man lying on the sidewalk. It was the same man who had tried to rob me. The cop said this guy had fallen down the stairs and asked me if I could help him. I told him it was obvious he had fallen down the stairs and it was very good of him to help the man. So, I agreed I would send another ambulance for him.
Another wild ride was around the corner on Sixth Avenue, where the women’s prison was. It was a terrible place. It was something like a prison in an old movie like the Count of Monte Cristo. I think it is still there on a triangular piece on Sixth Avenue around 9th or 10th Street.
One evening, when I was making rounds on private medicine, I was writing night-time orders. A little fat priest came over to me and very politely said he was sorry to disturb me, but could I tell him the room where ''Mrs. Got Rocks'' was. That was a street term for rich, old lady.
I looked on the chart rack and told him. I said to myself that he looked familiar. About five minutes later there were nuns everywhere. I said now I know why that priest looked familiar. It was Cardinal Spellman, but I didn't recognize him. I was to make that type of mistake a few more times in my life on other notable people.
Queen of the Gypsies
When I was on the private surgical service, one of the very old-time surgeons was a R.P. Sullivan. He was very important, but his best days were over. His fame was that he operated on one of the Mayo brothers who came to New York on his way to Europe. He knew he was over the hill. He would go into the OR and make a few scratches on the abdomen to show how to line up the skin at the end of the operation. He would then tell his young partner -- his name was Walter Mitty, just like the movie -- to just finish up.
Another night, when I was in house on-service medicine, I got a call to come down in the middle of the night to pronounce someone dead. Since the woman was dead, I did not rush, but when I did arrive, there was a melee in the lobby. It seemed this woman was the head of the Gypsies, and they were illegally taking her out of the hospital without a death certificate. They were going to hold the wake in a storefront that was vacant. We finally settled it, but it was fun. If we didn’t settle it, they would have started the wake in the lobby.
While I was on-service medicine, we came up with our best idea. Each of the service floors was named after saints like St. Joseph, east and west, and Saint Teresa, east and west. As the elevators stopped at each floor there was a statue of the saint and a place to light a candle. Some Puerto Ricans used to come in with rosary beads and scapulars in order to impress the nuns. They wanted to get admitted and get three hot meals and a flop. Our job was to keep them out.
One night after a few beers, we came up with a great idea. One of our group knew someone in a junk store who had a cigar-store Indian about six feet high. They were all around New York outside cigar stores called Schulte. We took down the statue of St. Joseph and put him in a bathroom stall and replaced him with the cigar-store Indians.
The floppers didn’t know the difference the next day and were praying to him. One of the nuns called us in and really gave it to us. The nuns were usually very nice people, and I’m sure they laughed among themselves. I haven’t heard from St. Joseph yet. I suspect I will.
When I was on the Ob service we took all such cases that came to the ER. One evening I was called to see a lady who said she just delivered a dead baby but needed us get her after birth. She knew we would not do an abortion. In order to prove her point she brought the dead child with her in a bag. It was a chicken with its head cut off. Naturally we inclined to do anything which would have caused a true abortion.
Son of Huey Long's Assassin
On my nights on call, I stayed in the interns’ quarters that was an old brownstone next to the hospital. My roommate was a Carl Weiss, who was from Columbia P and S and lived in Long Island. One day, I was reading the Daily News and they had an article about the 1935 shooting death of Governor Huey Long of Louisiana on the steps of the state capitol. The man who did it was a Dr. Carl Weiss, who hated Long because of what he was doing to his sister.
The doctor was cut down by Long's bodyguards. As it turned out years later, forensic evidence concluded that Long was killed by friendly fire. I thought that Carl had some relatives down south, so I asked him. He said yes, that man was his father. This was another evidence of my social graces.
A Trip to Bellevue
The halls were very narrow in these old buildings, and you had to pass sideways when you were passing by someone. We also had an 80-year-old nun as housemother. She was spooky. If you left your laundry out and went down the hall to the bathroom, you would come back and see your laundry put away in the dresser or your bed made. You never physically saw her.
One day, Carl was showing me his scuba gear and in particular his spear gun. I was trying to be careful, but it had a hair trigger in air and I tripped it. The spear hit the door and went partly through. There was a blood-curdling yell and we thought we had killed her. We opened the door and we had just missed her, but we scared her and us to death.
Then it was the end of my internship. Sally had Tommy in March 1959, and she spent the last of my internship in Pelham. My last month was the ER again, and again I felt I was pretty savvy by this time. I was so tired that last day when I was going up to Pelham, I fell asleep at the wheel and wrecked the car. Fortunately, I was not hurt.
However, that month was wild. One of the drunks was being a particular nuisance. We decided to get rid of him. One of the children who were in earlier had been to a shoe store called Indian Walk. Each kid gets a band with one feather on it as a gift. He left it.
We wanted to send this drunk to Bellevue, but the rule of that hospital was that the drunk had to be actively hallucinating. They did this to prevent the city from sending all the drunks there.
So, I took off my shirt, pulled up the pants of my greens, put Mercurochrome on my face and the feather on my head. I walked in, raised my hand and said, "How,'' and walked out. My partner came in and asked the drunk if he had seen an Indian. He said, "Yes,'' and we put on his chart that he was actively hallucinating. Then we sent him to Bellevue.
Nights in the ER
We also continued to have our share of ambulance trips. There were two other incidences in the ER. One evening, the police brought in someone who needed some stitches in his leg after a fight with the police. Before I knew it, he had taken razor blades from his rear end and used the tape to place the razors between his fingers.
That was a favorite way for these people to fight and cut you to pieces. I yelled for the police and they came in and hit him in the leg. This was my second leg fracture. I agreed with the cop that he had fallen down the stairs.
However, I was really annoyed at this guy. Usually you put the cast on below and above the joints near a fracture. I wanted to be extra sure, so I continued it to his chest. This would be very uncomfortable when you are in the prison ward of Bellevue. There was no air conditioning and, of course, he could not scratch.
The last case was another drunk. The flop houses are supposed to empty out every day and then the tenants would line up to get a room at 3 o'clock. It they did not, then they would come to our ER looking to be admitted.
When we were getting the report at 8 p.m. from the two on duty about the cases still around, they told us about our drunk friend who had been in several times and drunker each time. During my shift, he made a few more appearances and was even drunker. The last time he said he was hit by a truck and was weaving down the hall.
We decided to put him in the tank room, let him sleep it off and discharge him in the morning. When we were changing shifts the next morning, one of the nurses came over to us and said our friend's blood pressure was 60 over nothing. Turned out he had a fractured pelvis and was, indeed, hit by a truck. We thought we should admit him. Another of my orthopedic moments.
I finished my internship and immediately headed for the Army.