Nothing Lasts Forever (5 page)

They watched him walk away. Paige turned to look at the patient again. She was alive.
In a few hours she will be dead. We’ll pull the plug this afternoon.

That’s murder!
Paige thought.

T
hat afternoon, when the rounds were finished, the new residents gathered in the small upstairs lounge. The room held eight tables, an ancient black-and-white television set, and two vending machines that dispensed stale sandwiches and bitter coffee.

The conversations at each table were almost identical.

One of the residents said, “Take a look at my throat, will you? Does it look raw to you?”

“I think I have a fever. I feel lousy.”

“My abdomen is swollen and tender. I know I have appendicitis.”

“I’ve got this crushing pain in my chest. I hope to God I’m not having a heart attack!”

Kat sat down at a table with Paige and Honey. “How did it go?” she asked.

Honey said, “I think it went all right.”

They both looked at Paige. “I was tense, but I was relaxed. I was nervous, but I stayed calm.” She sighed.

“It’s been a long day. I’ll be glad to get out of here and have some fun tonight.”

“Me, too,” Kat agreed. “Why don’t we have dinner and then go see a movie?”

“Sounds great.”

An orderly approached their table. “Dr. Taylor?”

Paige looked up. “I’m Dr. Taylor.”

“Dr. Wallace would like to see you in his office.”

The hospital administrator!
What have I done?
Paige wondered.

The orderly was waiting. “Dr. Taylor…”

“I’m coming.” She took a deep breath and got to her feet. “I’ll see you later.”

“This way, doctor.”

Paige followed the orderly into an elevator and rode up to the fifth floor, where Dr. Wallace’s office was located.

Benjamin Wallace was seated behind his desk. He glanced up as Paige walked in. “Good afternoon, Dr. Taylor.”

“Good afternoon.”

Wallace cleared his throat. “Well! Your first day and you’ve already made quite an impression!”

Paige looked at him, puzzled. “I…I don’t understand.”

“I hear you had a little problem in the doctors’ dressing room this morning.”

“Oh.”
So, that’s what this is all about!

Wallace looked at her and smiled. “I suppose I’ll have to make some arrangements for you and the other girls.”

“We’re…”
We’re not girls,
Paige started to say. “We would appreciate that.”

“Meanwhile, if you don’t want to dress with the nurses…”

“I’m not a nurse,” Paige said firmly. “I’m a doctor.”

“Of course, of course. Well, well do something about accommodations for you, doctor.”

“Thank you.”

He handed Paige a sheet of paper. “Meanwhile, this is your schedule. You’ll be on call for the next twenty-four hours, starting at six o’clock.” He looked at his watch. “That’s thirty minutes from now.”

Paige was looking at him in astonishment. Her day had started at five-thirty that morning.
“Twenty-four hours?”

“Well, thirty-six, actually. Because you’ll be starting rounds again in the morning.”

Thirty-six hours! I wonder if I can handle this.

She was soon to find out.

Paige went to look for Kat and Honey.

“I’m going to have to forget about dinner and a movie,” Paige said. “I’m on a thirty-six-hour call.”

Kat nodded. “We just got our bad news. I go on it tomorrow, and Honey goes on Wednesday.”

“It won’t be so bad,” Paige said cheerfully. “I understand there’s an on-call room to sleep in. I’m going to enjoy this.”

She was wrong.

An orderly was leading Paige down a long corridor.

“Dr. Wallace told me that I’ll be on call for thirty-six hours,” Paige said. “Do all the residents work those hours?”

“Only for the first three years,” the orderly assured her.

Great!

“But you’ll have plenty of chance to rest, doctor.”

“I will?”

“In here. This is the on-call room.” He opened the door, and Paige stepped inside. The room resembled a monk’s cell in some poverty-stricken monastery. It contained nothing but a cot with a lumpy mattress, a cracked wash basin, and a bedside stand with a telephone on it. “You can sleep here between calls.”

“Thanks.”

The calls began as Paige was in the coffee shop, just starting to have her dinner.

“Dr. Taylor…ER Three…Dr. Taylor…ER

Three.”

“We have a patient with a fractured rib…”

“Mr. Henegan is complaining of chest pains…”

“The patient in Ward Two has a headache. Is it all right to give him an acetaminophen…?”

At midnight, Paige had just managed to fall asleep when she was awakened by the telephone.

“Report to ER One.” It was a knife wound, and by the time Paige had taken care of it, it was one-thirty in the morning. At two-fifteen she was awakened again.

“Dr. Taylor…Emergency Room Two. Stat.”

Paige said, groggily, “Right.”
What did he say it meant? Shake that ass, tootsie.
She forced herself up and moved down the corridor to the emergency room. A patient had been brought in with a broken leg. He was screaming with pain.

“Get an X-ray,” Paige ordered. “And give him Demerol, fifty milligrams.” She put her hand on the patient’s arm. “You’re going to be fine. Try to relax.”

Over the PA system, a metallic disembodied voice
said, “Dr. Taylor…Ward Three. Stat.”

Paige looked at the moaning patient, reluctant to leave him.

The voice came on again, “Dr. Taylor…Ward Three. Stat.”

“Coming,” Paige mumbled. She hurried out the door and down the corridor to Ward Three. A patient had vomited, aspirated, and was choking.

“He can’t breathe,” the nurse said.

“Suction him,” Paige ordered. As she watched the patient begin to catch his breath, she heard her name again on the PA system. “Dr. Taylor…Ward Four. Ward Four.” Paige shook her head and ran down to Ward Four, to a screaming patient with abdominal spasms. Paige gave him a quick examination. “It could be intestinal dys-function. Get an ultrasound,” Paige said.

By the time she returned to the patient with the broken leg, the pain reliever had taken effect. She had him moved to the operating room and set the leg. As she was finishing, she heard her name again. “Dr. Taylor, report to Emergency Room Two. Stat.”

“The stomach ulcer in Ward Four is having a pain…”

At 3:30
A.M.
: “Dr. Taylor, the patient in Room 310 is hemorrhaging…”

There was a heart attack in one of the wards, and Paige was nervously listening to the patient’s heartbeat when she heard her name called over the PA system: “Dr. Taylor…ER Two. Stat…Dr. Taylor…ER Two. Stat.”

I must not panic,
Paige thought.
I’ve got to remain calm and cool.
She panicked. Who was more important, the patient she was examining, or the next patient? “You stay here,” she said inanely. “I’ll be right back.”

As Paige hurried toward ER Two, she heard her
name called again. “Dr. Taylor…ER One. Stat…Dr. Taylor…ER One. Stat.”

Oh, my God!
Paige thought. She felt as though she were caught up in the middle of some endless terrifying nightmare.

During what was left of the night, Paige was awakened to attend to a case of food poisoning, a broken arm, a hiatal hernia, and a fractured rib. By the time she stumbled back into the on-call room, she was so exhausted that she could hardly move. She crawled onto the little cot and had just started to doze off when the telephone rang again.

She reached out for it with her eyes closed. “H’lo…”

“Dr. Taylor, we’re waiting for you.”

“Wha’?” She lay there, trying to remember where she was.

“Your rounds are starting, doctor.”

“My rounds?”
This is some kind of bad joke,
Paige thought.
It’s inhuman. They can’t work anyone like this!
But they were waiting for her.

Ten minutes later, Paige was making the rounds again, half asleep. She stumbled against Dr. Radnor. “Excuse me,” she mumbled, “but I haven’t had any sleep…”

He patted her on the shoulder sympathetically. “You’ll get used to it.”

When Paige finally got off duty, she slept for fourteen straight hours.

The intense pressure and punishing hours proved to be too much for some of the residents, and they simply
disappeared from the hospital.
That’s not going to happen to me,
Paige vowed.

The pressure was unrelenting. At the end of one of Paige’s shifts, thirty-six grueling hours, she was so exhausted that she had no idea where she was. She stumbled to the elevator and stood there, her mind numb.

Tom Chang came up to her. “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” Paige mumbled.

He grinned. “You look like hell.”

“Thanks. Why do they do this to us?” Paige asked.

Chang shrugged. “The theory is that it keeps us in touch with our patients. If we go home and leave them, we don’t know what’s happening to them while we’re gone.”

Paige nodded. “That makes sense.” It made no sense at all. “How can we take care of them if we’re asleep on our feet?”

Chang shrugged again. “I don’t make the rules. It’s the way all hospitals operate.” He looked at Paige more closely. “Are you going to be able to make it home?”

Paige looked at him and said haughtily, “Of course.”

“Take care.” Chang disappeared down the corridor.

Paige waited for the elevator to arrive. When it finally came, she was standing there, sound asleep.

Two days later, Paige was having breakfast with Kat.

“Do you want to hear a terrible confession?” Paige asked. “Sometimes when they wake me up at four o’clock in the morning to give somebody an aspirin, and I’m stumbling down the hall, half conscious, and I pass the
rooms where all the patients are tucked in and having a good night’s sleep, I feel like banging on all the doors and yelling, ‘Everybody wake up!’”

Kat held out her hand. “Join the club.”

The patients came in all shapes, sizes, ages, and colors. They were frightened, brave, gentle, arrogant, demanding, considerate. They were human beings in pain.

Most of the doctors were dedicated people. As in any profession, there were good doctors and bad doctors. They were young and old, clumsy and adept, pleasant and nasty. A few of them, at one time or another, made sexual advances to Paige. Some were subtle and some were crude.

“Don’t you ever feel lonely at night? I know that I do. I was wondering…”

“These hours are murder, aren’t they? Do you know what I find gives me energy? Good sex. Why don’t we…?”

“My wife is out of town for a few days. I have a cabin near Carmel. This weekend we could…”

And the patients.

“So you’re my doctor, eh? You know what would cure me…?”

“Come closer to the bed, baby. I want to see if those are real…”

Paige gritted her teeth and ignored them all.
When Alfred and I are married, this will stop.
And just the thought of Alfred gave her a glow. He would be returning from Africa soon.
Soon.

At breakfast one morning before rounds, Paige and Kat talked about the sexual harassment they were experiencing.

“Most of the doctors behave like perfect gentlemen, but a few of them seem to think we’re perks that go with the territory, and that we’re there to service them,” Kat said. “I don’t think a week goes by but what one of the doctors hits on me. ‘Why don’t you come over to my place for a drink? I’ve got some great CDs.’ Or in the OR, when I’m assisting, the surgeon will brush his arm across my breast. One moron said to me, ‘You know, whenever I order chicken, I like the dark meat.’”

Paige sighed. “They think they’re flattering us by treating us as sex objects. I’d rather they treated us as doctors.”

“A lot of them don’t even want us around. They either want to fuck us or they want to fuck us. You know, it’s not fair. Women are judged inferior until we prove ourselves, and men are judged superior until they prove what assholes they are.”

“It’s the old boys’ network,” Paige said. “If there were more of us, we could start a new girls’ network.”

Paige had heard of Arthur Kane. He was the subject of constant gossip around the hospital. His nickname was Dr. 007—licensed to kill. His solution to every problem was to operate, and he had a higher rate of operations than any other doctor at the hospital. He also had a higher mortality rate.

He was bald, short, hawk-nosed, with tobacco-stained teeth, and was grossly overweight. Incredibly, he fancied himself a ladies’ man. He liked to refer to the new nurses and female residents as “fresh meat.”

Paige Taylor was fresh meat. He saw her in the upstairs lounge and sat down at her table, uninvited.

“I’ve been keeping an eye on you.”

Paige looked up, startled. “I beg your pardon?”

“I’m Dr. Kane. My friends call me Arthur.” There was a leer in his voice.

Paige wondered how many friends he had.

“How are you getting along here?”

The question caught Paige off-guard. “I…all right, I think.”

He leaned forward. “This is a big hospital. It’s easy to get lost here. Do you know what I mean?”

Paige said warily, “Not exactly.”

“You’re too pretty to be just another face in the crowd. If you want to get somewhere here, you need someone to help you. Someone who knows the ropes.”

The conversation was getting more unpleasant by the minute.

“And you’d like to help me.”

“Right.” He bared his tobacco-stained teeth. “Why don’t we discuss it at dinner?”

“There’s nothing to discuss,” Paige said. “I’m not interested.”

Arthur Kane watched Paige get up and walk away, and there was a baleful expression on his face.

First-year surgical residents were on a two-month rotation schedule, alternating among obstetrics, orthopedics, urology, and surgery.

Paige learned that it was dangerous to go into a training hospital in the summer for any serious illness, because many of the staff doctors were on vacation and
the patients were at the mercy of the inexperienced young residents.

Nearly all surgeons liked to have music in the operating room. One of the doctors was nicknamed Mozart and another Axl Rose because of their tastes in music.

For some reason, operations always seemed to make everyone hungry. They constantly discussed food. A surgeon would be in the middle of removing a gangrenous gall bladder from a patient and say, “I had a great dinner last night at Bardelli’s. Best Italian food in all of San Francisco.”