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    Bellevue Diary: Lights Within the Shadows
    Bellevue Diary: Lights Within the Shadows
    Bellevue Diary: Lights Within the Shadows
    Ebook147 pages1 hour

    Bellevue Diary: Lights Within the Shadows

    By Gilles Monif MD

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    About this ebook

    From its founding 1736, Bellevue Hospital has been a dumping ground into which a city poured its poor, elderly, and dying. What makes the oldest hospital in the United States unique is that Bellevue is a place from which no one in need is turned away.

    Bellevue Diary is a collection of short stories borne out of Dr. Monif s year of internship that collectively pays tribute to this great hospital.

    Bellevue Diary is mosaic of short snippets of stories. Mosaics have to be near perfect to work. Ironically, this one comes close. What is surprising that it works on multiple levels: a historical characterization of a place and time and the impact of the Bellevue Hospital on a young physicians professional and spiritual growth into which is woven a thesis of deaths ultimate meaning. The pieces all come together to make this mosaic good reading.

    Peter Firchow, PhD
    Former Professor of English University of Minnesota
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateAug 16, 2011
    ISBN9781450290258
    Bellevue Diary: Lights Within the Shadows
    Author

    Gilles Monif MD

    Gilles Monif, M.D. goes from Bellevue Hospital to the National Institutes of Health as a research fellow, and then to the University of Florida College of Medicine, and finally to Creighton University School of Medicine, He will achieve international recognition as a clinician, researcher, and educator in the area of infectious diseases that afflict women and their unborn babies. Currently, he resides in the Midwest with his wife and four children where he is president of a medical research company. In his life, A-3 cast a long shadow

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      Book preview

      Bellevue Diary - Gilles Monif MD

      Copyright © 2011 by Gilles Monif, MD

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

      iUniverse

      1663 Liberty Drive

      Bloomington, IN 47403

      www.iuniverse.com

      1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

      Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

      ISBN: 978-1-4620-0845-2 (sc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4502-9025-8 (ebook)

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2011904972

      Printed in the United States of America

      iUniverse rev. date: 07/19/2011

      Contents

      Preface

      Fred

      Part I

      Bellevue Hospital

      Bellevue Hospital

      The Room

      Doubts

      Part II

      The Chest Service

      The Chest Service

      FUO

      Double Jeopardy

      The Gift

      Good Offense, Bad Defense

      Tobacco’s Addictive Grip

      The Social Order

      Left Breast Coat Pocket

      The Dining Room

      A Journey Not Kept

      Peking Duck

      Part III

      A3: First Medical Division

      Doubts

      A-3

      Night Sounds

      The Touch

      Emergency Room Baptism

      No Problem, Big Problem

      Checks and Balances

      Mine or Theirs

      VIP Rounds

      Schwarzewolke

      Not My Job

      Fecal Impaction

      Goya versus El Greco

      Everybody Knows

      Biggest Show in Town

      Coming Home

      Oy, Oy, My Heart

      Bells Unrung

      A Circus Team

      Hubris

      Sugar-Coated Bagel

      My Lady

      Female Medical Clinic

      A Grand Event

      When Breath Permits

      Night Becomes Morning

      Part IV

      B4: First Medical Division

      Matthew Greene

      Unanswered Question

      The Front Porch

      Wrong Direction

      Here, Kitty, Kitty

      Proximity’s Price

      Mother by Necessity

      Second Thoughts

      Chutzpah

      Crashing the Gate

      Little Words

      Sooner

      New Year’s Eve

      A Different Bed

      Miss PanAm

      The Cup

      Snow

      A Drop of Truth

      Reflections of the Father

      Not Bricks

      Ashes to Ashes

      A Matter of Pennies

      Score: Country One

      Barton & Sons

      Mayhem

      Bellevue Nurses

      Moses

      The Rock

      That’s It

      The Ugliest Man in the World

      Preface

      Fred

      The first day of anatomy was a personal challenge that could not be avoided. The bodies had to be carried up from cold storage in the basement to the Anatomy Dissection Room. Death had yet to touch my life. Though family members involved in the French resistance had died in World War II, I had never before been physically exposed to death. When volunteers were asked for, I took the first step forward. After carrying thirteen bodies up three fights of stairs, their collective weight blunted my initial fear.

      Having volunteered, I got to choose the cadaver that I and three other classmates would dissect. I chose a thin white male, probably in his sixties. Having established a truly physical relationship, I named him Fred. In the many hours we spent together, Fred shared glimpses into his life with me. The skin of his hands told of hand work. His lungs, two sacks filled with coal dust, spoke of where he had been. The near absence of fat and his body’s donation by the City of Boston to the medical school bore witness to the probable poverty of his last days.

      In teaching me about the human body, Fred opened my consciousness to, not death, but the steps before it.

      Bellevue Diary chronicles more than just a tribute to a great institution. The events related are nonfiction. They occurred primarily between 1961 and 1962, the year of my medical internship. The names of most individuals have been changed; for several individuals, not to recognize them would be wrong.

      The lights within the shadows provided the insights that allowed me to write, You meet many persons who desperately cling to lives that have long lost their substance. Physical existence is the last possession they have. And then there are those who come to death with ‘their cups filled.’ Before I too enter into the shadows, I want to share experiences that enriched my life.

      "The people that walk in darkness have seen a great light:

      They that dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, upon

      them hath the light shined."

      Isaiah 9:2

      Part I

      Bellevue Hospital

      Bellevue Hospital

      In 1736, Bellevue Hospital, the oldest public hospital in the United States, was founded. At the time, George Washington may have been four or five years old.

      Following a fire that occurred sometime around the turn of the century, between 1906 and 1939 Bellevue was rebuilt in bits and pieces. She now shows her age: a conglomerate of brick buildings stretching along First Avenue from Twenty-Fifth Street to Thirtieth Street. The one architectural element that gives her an illusion of grandeur is the Administrative Building, which faces First Avenue. Its strong, vertical, inlaid concrete columns take one’s gaze upward to a pseudo-Athenian temple facade that towers two stories above the adjacent roofs.

      What makes Bellevue great is that she is the hospital from which no one is turned away. She is an open-ended funnel into which New York dumps its poor, elderly, and dying. If an individual presents at another hospital for admission and it is apparent that he or she will demand a disproportionate amount of care, the admitting physician has only to write No beds and the patient is Bellevue-bound.

      Competition for internships at Bellevue Hospital is intense. Its 2,500 patient beds are the medical equivalent of what was once the great library at Alexandria. Within each bed, a potential lesson waits—a lesson in which knowledge is exchanged for a dose of healing. Educationally, big-city hospitals are the Harvards of the medical world, and, as at Harvard, learning can come at a steep price.

      The Medical and Chest Services are divided between three medical schools: Columbia University (since 1888), Cornell University (since 1888) and New York University (since 1898). Each institution has imparted to its house staff a unique profile. The Cornell interns and residents are dubbed the All-American boys. By and large, they tend to be clean-cut and have the distinction of having been elected by their respective school faculties to the national honorary society, Alpha Omega Alpha (AOA). The New York University interns and residents emphasize academic brilliance over decorum and appearance. The Columbia interns and residents are called the aristocrats of Bellevue. The latter image is largely fashioned by the predominance of Columbia graduates among its house staff. They are New York’s response to the proper Bostonians.

      My reasons for wanting to be part of the Columbia Medical Service had to do with something else. The Columbia Medical Service at Bellevue had produced more academicians than even the Thorndike Service at Boston City Hospital. In the 1950s, a Nobel Prize in Medicine had been awarded to its director and his collaborators for pioneering research in the area of pulmonary physiology. What I did not know when making my selections for the National Internship Matching Program was that his retirement was imminent.

      The Chief of Service’s replacement seemed a strange choice: an uptown physician whose patients had, more likely than not, frequented Harkness Pavilion at Presbyterian Hospital. At Bellevue, the patients, more often than not, called the Bowery home.

      Despite having graduated in the top ten of my class and having very strong letters of recommendation, the absence of my election to the national honorary medical society should have raised a red flag. My election to Alpha Omega Alpha had been blackballed by two professors.

      The Room

      The house staff rooms are located on the fifth and sixth floors of the Administration Building. Five cartons of medical books and two suitcases of clothes quickly teach me that, at Bellevue, the elevators are more symbolic than functional.

      Tired from carrying the last load of books up five sets of stairs, I quickly turn the key, push the metal door open, and begin carrying

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