Looking for a patient with whom I could interact, I elected to begin with the only one who was ambulatory: the large man on the stationary bike.
“Hello,” I said, gently tapping on the glass divider separating the patient’s room from the rest of the unit. He stopped pedaling and took off his headphones. A Hispanic man in his early forties, he had a shaved head and a room littered with books, magazines, and scraps of handwritten notes. He was stocky, barrel-chested, and broad-shouldered like an ex-linebacker, and by the looks of things he had been in the unit for quite some time.
“Hi,” I continued as I entered the room, “I’m…”
“One of the new guys.”
“Yes.”
“Benny Santos,” he said, extending a hand. “It’s a pleasure.” He spoke softly and deliberately and had a surprisingly smooth hand. Unlike the other patients, he was not in a hospital gown. Instead, he wore a New York Giants T-shirt and jeans.
“I’m one of the new physicians here,” I said, avoiding the word intern.
“Welcome.”
Catching sight of a notebook by his bed, I paused and tried to figure out how to ask this rather large, well-appearing man why he was in a critical care unit.
“Why am I here?…Is that what you’re wondering?” he said, flashing a smile. His voice was so soft that I found myself leaning in close to catch his words.
“It is.”
“Need a new ticker,” he said, pointing at his chest.
Outside his room, we overheard a senior physician giving an evening tour to a group of medical students. “Many of the patients in this unit,” the guide said, “are among the more than five million Americans living with heart failure—a condition in which the heart is unable to pump sufficient blood to the body.”
“That’s me,” Benny said cheerfully, “star attraction.”
“Failing to deliver blood to starving organs,” the guide continued, “fluid gradually backs up into the lungs as the kidneys and liver inevitably fail. At that point, no medication or dietary modification can save them. It’s transplant or bust.”
“Been here for several months,” Benny said softly, “just waiting.”
I thought of how I’d spent the past few weeks—graduation parties, move to Manhattan, orientation cocktails. “That’s tough,” I offered. On the other hand, his relatively stable condition meant one less patient for me to worry about.
“Just trying to sneak up the UNOS list,” he said. On rounds as a medical student I had been introduced to the United Network for Organ Sharing and its sophisticated algorithm for allocating organs; it varied significantly by city, but the median wait time for a new heart was expected to be just over 150 days. Benny, however, was on his way to becoming an unfortunate outlier.
“What are you listening to?” I asked. This was a mistake. I wanted to make a connection, but discussing music was a huge weak spot for me. In college I’d once been laughed out of a dorm room for saying that I felt like the Goo Goo Dolls were playing the sound track to my life.
“A little Babyface,” he said. “You a fan?”
“I can’t say that I am.”
“Okay, okay. That’s cool.”
“Judge Judy, on the other hand,” I added, motioning toward the television, “huge fan.”
He smiled, and we looked up at the television. “Yeah, she’s great. Very wise.”
My teeth grinding came to a halt and I took a seat on the edge of his bed. “They call her the White Oprah,” I said.
Benny wrinkled his brow as Judy banged her gavel. “Who calls her that?”
“Didn’t someone call her that?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Definitely not.”
Benny looked out of the window, onto the Henry Hudson Parkway, where traffic was backed up for miles. “I really appreciate you guys coming in here, checking on me periodically, shooting the shit and whatnot.”
“Of course.”
“You know, one of your colleagues used to come in here, spent fifteen or twenty minutes with me every single day. Talk about Scripture, talk about music, anything.”
“That’s great.”
“One day we were both here on a holiday. I was down, and she could tell I wasn’t my normal, charming self. So we’re looking out the window just like this and she says, you know, more traffic accidents happen on holidays. Drunk drivers, more people on the roads, stuff like that.”
I nodded.
“And she smiles and says, ‘Every drunk driver, every family coming back from the beach…those could be organ donors.’ Every crash brings me closer to a transplant.”
He turned from the window and looked at me.
I wasn’t sure what reaction was called for here. “I suppose that’s one way of looking at it,” I responded.
He frowned. “That’s a horrible way of looking at it!”
“Yes, that is a horrible way of looking at it.”
I blushed, embarrassed by the exchange.
“She meant well,” he said, glancing up with a smile, “but no one would mistake your colleague for White Oprah.”