that he had only us by his bed.
We took more admissions, neurological ones and renal ones. We pronounced two people dead on our ward, and I dispatched Willie to the other subspecialty wards twice for the same thing, one whom he coded unsuccessfully and one who clearly had been dead for some time. The Baptist guys who always came and sang on Sundays appeared in the halls in the early afternoon, and harmonized on hymns. Families in their church hats began to appear, and several brought sweet potato pie; one brought biscuits already buttered. I fought off waves of homesickness all afternoon, brought on by the smell of those still-warm biscuits( one of us always had the sworn duty of Not Letting Mother Forget the Rolls). Willie ducked his head when I asked him about being homesick. We agreed it was the very worst part of leaving home.
We took more admissions, GI ones, and neurological ones, people with strokes. They were disheartening. We wished we were elsewhere. We missed watching the Lions play. We argued over whether we missed pumpkin pie more than dressing, or the smell of wood smoke over the smell of burning leaves. It was quite companionable and we motored along until about 0200, when the night Admitting Resident beeped me again.
“ Do you speak Spanish?” I said no.“ Does your intern?” He said no.“ Great. Get down here anyway, come see me.”
What Dan had was a tiny Equadorian man who had a lung mass and what smelled like a lung abscess, to boot. He had a short little daughter who was at least 50 and very round and very tired and looking grim. She did not speak English either. I thought to myself, why is this not a C-D hit and Dan saw that in my face and said,
“ They got slammed and you haven’ t yet and you know it will be your jurisdiction anyway.”
The patient was named Mr. Arturo, and we examined him in sign language, and took him upstairs. Willie did not think any Spanish-speaking interns were around. I called the operator and asked her if she had paged anybody who answered with a Spanish accent, and she sent me to the surgical ICU where I found Dr. Perez, a thoracic fellow who was completely uninterested in translating, once he heard the guy had lymph nodes. But the aide up there, Jorge, was from Puerto Rico and he came with me to help. He understood that I did not want the guy to get coded, especially with his daughter there, but could not even tell him his diagnosis( such as it was).
Jorge was great. They understood about the growth( smoked since childhood), the pneumonia, and the no getting on respirators, and the meds to help till we could get a definite name for the mass. But Jorge was puzzled about the straw.
Mr. Arturo’ s lips got dusky when he talked, so I got anxious. I turned up his O’ s. He was trying to explain something about straw. It was not a drinking straw. We said straw like horses eat? Yes, it was that. He talked some more. But it caught fire? He got frustrated. Yes, it was straw, and they put it on fire on purpose.
I wondered if he had brain mets, or was trying to explain some past tragedy, but no, he seemed to be wanting us to set straw on fire. His daughter was crying. At length, we understood that you made a straw man and set him on fire, and his daughter said that was at Christmas. But he wanted to do it now, and we all realized he thought he would die before Christmas.
( continued on page 18)
DECEMBER 2016 17