Chapter Thirty-One

June

I wiped my forehead with a lap sponge and said, “For a place that is so god-awful cold in the winter, it sure gets hot in the summer.”

I was sitting in the empty waiting room of St. Joe’s ER in Mankato. Mary and Rita, two of the nurses, were sitting with me. We were watching a rerun of Bonanza. We hadn’t had much business all day. This was the fourth day in a row with temperatures and humidity in the nineties. It was too hot for people to go out and hurt themselves.

The hospital was rumored to be air-conditioned but no one believed it. Rita, who weighed all of ninety pounds, was fairly comfortable; but Mary, who hadn’t weighed ninety pounds since she was six, was roasting. She was holding her long brown hair up over her head, and had draped an ice pack low across her neck.

“I don’t get paid enough to put up with this,” she panted.

It had been seventy-six degrees when I left Rochester at 5:30 that morning. A thick, steamy haze obscured the sunrise. At seventy miles an hour I kept cool enough, but I could almost feel my car slicing through the heavy air that smothered the fields and woods. As I passed Loon Lake, near Waseca, I could just barely see the figure of a solitary fisherman in a boat about thirty feet from shore lazily laying down casts on the surface of the misty lake.

 

About five o’clock that afternoon an ambulance called to say they were bringing in a guy with a broken nose and a cut on his forehead. Rita and I heaved ourselves out of our chairs and went to check him out. Mary wiped her forehead and said she’d be along in a minute.

Our patient arrived five minutes later. He was telling a joke to the paramedics as they wheeled him in. “…so then the plumber says to the guy, ‘I think I can save your wife but the bishop’s a goner!’ Ah-ha-ha-ha!”

The paramedic at the head of the cart shook his head and cracked a smile. “We gotta go, Sal,” he said, rubbing the patient’s shoulder. “You take care, and go easy on the brews next time.”

I motioned the paramedic over. “What’ve you got?” I asked him.

“The dumb shit spent the afternoon sitting in a lawn chair on his driveway. He had a cooler next to him, and his feet in one of those little, plastic baby pools. We found eighteen empty beer cans next to his chair. When he finally got up to take a leak he was so plastered he fell flat on his face. Did you see the guy’s nose?”

“Yeah, I saw it. There goes his chance for the cover of GQ.”

I said good-bye to the paramedics and went over to the cubicle where Rita was getting our patient’s vitals.

“You’re beautiful, baby,” the guy was saying. “You should be in Hollywood not here.”

Rita wasn’t buying it. “Sir,” she said, “please hold your arm still so I can take your blood pressure.”

His forehead was wrapped with a bloody gauze bandage against which he was holding an ice bag. I removed the bandages so I could examine his injuries. He had a long laceration across his forehead, and his nose wasn’t just broken, it had landed in another zip code. It was mashed way over to the left and flattened against his cheek. Dried blood rimmed his eye sockets. Apparently, however, he was feeling no pain.

“Hey, Doc, how’s it goin’, hah?”

“Mr., ah…” Dawn handed me his chart. “Mr. Pagulia. How are you, sir?”

“Listen, Doc, I gotta tell ya something.” He propped himself up on his elbows and leaned forward to speak confidentially. “The ice bag them ambulance guys gimme is leaking. Looka this shit,” he said, holding up the bloody, dripping bag. “It’s drippin’ all over me. In fact—” he paused and looked at me wide-eyed—“I think I’m getting water on the brain.” He burst into laughter. “Ah, Jesus! Water on the brain!” He fell back against the cart, shaking with laughter. He jarred his head enough to make his laceration start bleeding again. “Get it, Doc?” he said between belly laughs. “Water! On the fuckin’ brain!”

“An interesting observation, Mr. Pagulia. By the way, have you been drinking this afternoon?”

“What gave you that idea?” Rita whispered to me.

“Just a few beers,” he said.

“A few beers.” I nodded. “How many, do you think?”

“Ah, five or six maybe.”

“Five or six.”

“Maybe more. I dunno. Who’s counting? It was hotter ’n shit out there.”

“How did you hurt yourself?”

He struggled to sit back up again. “I got attacked, Doc.”

“You did?” I looked over at Rita. That’s not what the ambulance guys said.

“Yeah.” He nodded his head, making the laceration bleed even more. “Yeah, the fucking driveway hit me right in the face! A-ha-ha-ha.”

I wrapped a roll of Kerlex around his head and then sent him for nasal, skull, and C-spine films. A half hour later I could hear him down the hall as the X-ray tech was wheeling him back.

“Volare,” he was singing, “wo-wo.”

The tech laid the films on the counter and rolled her eyes. “He asked me to marry him,” she said.

“Cantare. Wo-wo-wo-wo.”

I picked up the films and was snapping them up on the view box when he called over to me. “Hey, Doc! You know ‘Volare’?”

“No, sorry. I took Greek in high school not Latin.”

He frowned and muttered, “What the fuck?”

“Well,” I said, walking over to him, “good news. Your skull and neck films look good. The only thing broken is your nose.”

“My nose? It is?” He reached a paw to his bloody face and felt his nose. “Son of a bitch. The old schnoz hung a Louie. Hey, Doc, the fuckin’ thing is pointing at my ear.”

“Don’t worry, sir. It can be fixed.”

“Shit, yeah,” he said. “I’ve had it fixed ten times before.”

Rita began assembling a suture tray for me. “6-0 nylon,” I told her.

“So, Doc,” my patient said when I returned, “how do you like this doctor thing?”

I replied that although it was hard work I liked this doctor thing a lot.

“Yeah,” he said wistfully, “I thought of bein’ a doc myself.”

“Really?” I said, unfolding the edges of a sterile towel. “I’m sure you would have made a very interesting doctor.”

“Fuckin’-A right,” he said. He struggled to sit up and I pushed him back down.

“Sir, you have to lie still now so I can sew up the cut on your forehead.”

He gave no sign that he heard me. “Yeah,” he went on, nodding his head and making it impossible to drape him. “I thought a lot about bein’ a doc.” He lapsed into a short silence. “Medicine’s great. You know, spending all day telling broads to take their clothes off for ya.”

I heard Mary snickering over near the crash cart.

“Well, sir, that’s not really—”

“Can you imagine,” he went on, “every day, beautiful broads, completely naked, hanging all over you.”

“You’ll feel a little pain when I put in the numbing medicine,” I said as I drew up the lidocaine. He didn’t flinch. It made me wonder if he even needed a local anesthetic.

“So, what’s it like, Doc? You know, being around all those naked women every day?”

Rita opened a suture for me and dropped it on my field. She cocked her head and looked at me innocently as if she, too, wanted to know.

“Mr. Pagulia,” I said, “it really isn’t very often we have to ask women to remove their clothes.”

He smirked. “Yeah, right, Doc.” This man knew a cover-up when he saw one.

“No, seriously, sir. I rarely ask my patients to disrobe.”

He looked up at me. “Aren’t you a real doctor?”

“Yes, sir, I am.”

“Then whaddaya mean you don’t tell ’em to take their clothes off?”

By now all work in the ER had ceased. Everyone was listening to our conversation. Rita, who was standing in the corner behind Mr. Pagulia, looked at me questioningly, gestured at her blouse, and started to unbutton the top button. I gave her a dirty look and told her to get me some more sterile towels.

“Sir,” I said, “there is no need to have women remove their clothes for most orthopedic problems.”

He wasn’t sure if I was a liar or a fool who had wasted four years of medical school. “What’s that got to do with having some broad get naked for ya?” His laughter came in great rolls that echoed around the ER. “I’d just tell ’em I can’t tell what’s wrong with their ankle until I see what their bazumbas look like.”

I finally got him to lay still so I could cover his face with the sterile drape. I tried to switch the conversation to other things but his muffled voice continued to escape from under the drape constantly harking back to naked women, breasts, and pelvic exams.

In desperation I explained that most doctors, myself included, did not spend a lot of time with unclothed women. He was obviously dismayed and disillusioned. His dreams of a career in medicine were being shattered.

We then started talking about what kind of work I did. I told him about setting fractures, repairing ligaments, and replacing joints. He seemed fairly interested.

“And yer called a ortho-peedist, huh?”

“That’s right,” I said encouragingly.

“And you spend most of your time fixing bones and shit, huh?”

“Yes, I do.”

“So you don’t get no chance to check out naked broads, huh?”

I groaned. I thought we were off this subject. “No, sir, I really don’t.”

He thought about that a moment and then gave me a look of pity.

“Well, Doc,” he said, “don’t let the bastards get you down. I’m sure if you do a good job with all this bones and shit, someday you’ll get your chance to be a gynecologist.”