| The Funny Bone |
Comic Relief My patient walked in, a quiet, dignified lady in a long, rustling, black taffeta dress. She had seen me several times before yet always maintained I needed to check her liver edge for possible hepatitis. The nurse helped her onto my new examining table, complete with seven levers on its hydraulic base to provide endless combinations of positions and elevations. I pumped the table up high—indeed, too high, so I touched the release lever to lower my patient. But I had pressed the wrong lever. As the entire head of the table sank to the floor, the patient’s body began a slow slide, at which she started kicking the air, revealing two full white petticoats atop long white bloomers. The dazzling display reminded me of an inverted cancan dancer. She slid completely to the floor behind the table, then burst into gales of laughter, which continued until we helped her to her feet. She stood flushed and radiant. Thereafter she was one of my most congenial patients. —Donald Bickley ’34, Waterloo, Iowa Grave Error I had what we euphemistically termed a Difficult Patient. I was an intern, and I had done everything I could to make the elderly man comfortable. Though bedridden with pneumonia, he was not too weak to criticize my every effort. Staggering with exhaustion at the end of working 36 hours straight, I nonetheless steeled myself to check in on him one last time. As I was leaving his bedside, I cheerily and unthinkingly advised, much to his outrage, “Rest in peace!” —Elizabeth Miller ’92, Cambridge, Massachusetts The Naked Truth I first met my new lab partner over the discard barrel as he cheerfully dispatched his latest experiment-gone-bad with a fire extinguisher. We were taking organic chemistry in the summer of 1952, and I feared that the “killer” course might prove literally fatal in his case. Fortunately, he survived to become one of the best psychoanalysts in the world—but not before a particularly memorable mishap. Late one afternoon, my partner bumped against a flask of nitric acid he kept stored on his laboratory bench. When the flask struck the granite counter, corrosive acid splattered all over the handsome seersucker suit he had donned in anticipation of a cocktail party that evening. A few holes immediately appeared in the suit—and they seemed to be enlarging by the second. My friend sprinted for the door, bolted down the stairs, and hopped on his bike to make a desperate dash for home. But he was too late. By the time he reached Harvard Square, his suit and shirt had disintegrated. He was Harvard’s first streaker, peddling frantically through the startled commuter crowd wearing nothing but sneakers and briefs. To this day he is convinced he is a better analyst because he has actually experienced the classic nightmare of being naked and defenseless in a large crowd. —Anthony Patton ’58, Danvers, Massachusetts The Da Vinci Code When I was a first-year psychiatry resident at McLean Hospital, during the Christmas crush of admissions I was called to evaluate a middle-aged Italian bricklayer. According to the chart, he had experienced several recent episodes of violence, attacking his brother, his father, and his dog, a cockapoo named Moose—short for Mussolini. His chief complaint: “I am God.” I asked a security guard to come into the interview room with me. The patient—call him Primo—was a short, fat, laser-eyed man dressed all in black. He was sweating profusely even though it was freezing outside and cold in the room. “How do you know you’re God?” I asked. “Because I was chosen.” “Why were you chosen to be God?” “Because I was in hell. You want proof?” He lifted up his shirt. On his belly was a magnificent tattoo of The Last Supper. Clearly it had been done many years before, when he’d been thinner and what was now his belly had been his chest, for the tattoo had expanded, so that Christ and the Apostles were all wearing broad grins. “What’d you think, Doc?” the security guard said after we’d locked Primo up. “298.80. Brief reactive psychosis.” “You don’t think he’s God?” “He may well be,” I said, “but it’s not reimbursable.” —Stephen Bergman ’73, Newton, Massachusetts A Wrenching Discovery I had just started my internship when I was assigned to take a blood specimen to the Thorndike Laboratory at the Boston City Hospital for testing. Upon arrival, though, I found the laboratory deserted. Finally I heard the sound of pipes clanging and noticed a pair of legs jutting out from under a sink. I gently kicked the legs a few times and said, “Hey, buddy, how can I find someone who works here?” The legs inched themselves out, a trunk and arms followed, then a face, and, by God, I found myself staring at the famous chief of medicine himself, William Castle ’21. I flushed with mortification, but Dr. Castle didn’t seem to mind. He politely took the tube of blood from my trembling hand, filled in the correct information, thanked me, and slid under the sink again. —Robert Cotsen ’56, Buffalo, New York In a Snit A nursing shortage in the late 1970s led my surgical practice to recruit and train some staff from the Philippines. Technically they excelled, but occasionally the language gap created misunderstandings. One of my favorite partners in the practice wasn’t afraid to cuss when events turned sour in the operating room. In the midst of a large abdominal aortic aneurysm resection, he nicked an anomalous branch of the patient’s vena cava, and blood began spurting from a small, almost invisible hole. As a resident called for help, I could hear my partner yelling, “Shit! Shit! Shit!” For every “Shit!” he spat out, his Filipino nurse handed him a snit, a special clamp we used in thoracic and vascular surgery. When I arrived just seconds later, I grasped the severity of the problem in a glance: 15 snits were lined up, ready for use. —Anthony Patton ’58, Danvers, Massachusetts Rude Awakening During my internship at the Boston City Hospital, a man was brought to our emergency department apparently in a coma. It didn’t seem like the usual coma, though. Our rude attempts to rouse him failed, but a catheter produced normal urine. A lumbar puncture was under way when he slowly began to awaken. Then, startled at our ministrations, he tried to sit up, claiming to be a cardiologist. We greeted his declaration with guffaws of disbelief until he accurately described the electrocardiogram of Wenckebach’s phenomenon. A graduate student, he had taken a sedative to help him sleep. He had been watching television in the lobby of his rooming house while waiting for the pill to take effect when, woe to him, he had fallen so deeply asleep that his landlady had called an ambulance. He was less than grateful for our care. —Stanley van den Noort ’54, Tustin, California This article appeared in the Autumn 2004 issue of the Harvard Medical Alumni Bulletin. Photo: Bettmann/Corbis |
a reserve. Despite my efforts to put her at ease, she rarely offered even a fleeting smile.
|