A SECOND OPINION
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You Can Go Home Again by MARY BARRY , MD
If that home is Grady Hospital , that is : it ’ s the giant goldy brick grande dame of Atlanta , hard by the Coca-Cola curve on I-75 . From her upper windows , you can see the shining dome of the state Capitol and the now-sprawling Georgia State campus .
My bestie Diane Schneider and I ( University of Louisville School of Medicine , class of 1984 ) with Paul Martin , Mark Wathen and Terri Rice followed Henry Sadlo and Brian England there ( class of 1983 ) after Henry told us it was a seventh medical wonder of the world , and a fine place to learn how to take care of the sickest people around ( if you are an internist , extremely sick people are the bomb , providing , of course , they survive ).
Grady ranks up there with Cook County and the former Charity , New Orleans and Parkland . In 1984 we had five separate ERs : the medical one MEC , the SEC , the peds one , the OB one and the psych one . A sorting nurse sat out by the ER doors and magically sent each patient to the right place ( well , nearly always ).
This early April , Diane , Henry and I joined up again in Atlanta ( the American College of Cardiology was meeting there ) with various Grady luminaries , including Drs . Louis Battey , Henry ’ s Chief Resident when he was an intern , Steve Clements , who pioneered cardiac cath and angioplasty at Emory , and heart docs Dante Graves and Mike Cecil , my Grady July intern when Diane and I were third-years .
Dr . Battey hails from Augusta , Georgia and learned to play golf at Augusta National and has the most beautiful southern accent I have ever heard . I remember being mesmerized by him to the point of missing the sense of what he said , his vowels are that enchanting . He ’ s 70 and still takes cardiology call , and so do Drs . Clements , Cecil and Graves : the work ethic we learned at Grady has never left us .
We all missed intensely the late Dr . H . Kenneth Walker , (“ Keen ” in Grady-speak ) our peerless and irreplaceable Residency Director .
When Diane had in March inquired about touring Grady , an office staffer said we would need security clearances requiring a two-month process .
However , as the responsible senior physicians we are , we simply walked in , then all over the entire joint before meeting a lovely Grady medicine professor , Dr . Colin Washington , for an approved tour . He said : no medical students take call . No interns take call . Nocturnists now take call , and fellows of various specialties . We toured the cafeteria – the basement Rooter Bar is gone , which I mourned : its endless supply of Coca-Cola kept me awake for three years running . Now they have vegan options , a taco bar and slushies …( we rolled our eyes ).
Only the elevators – grimy , creaky , slow and gray – and the green terrazzo tile are the same . Gone are the four- and eightbed wards ; gone is the sixth floor Chief Resident ’ s office with its scoreboard of horrors outside (“ Highest Blood Glucose , 12,382 ” etc .). Gone is the sixth floor Student Lab , which had textbooks and microscopes and where for each and every admission , interns had to spin down every body fluid collected from each patient and look at it under the microscope . We found TB there , and gonococci , and horrible fungal things that spelled doom for our AIDS patients . The rooms are private and semi-private , and the ICUs are high-tech and shiny , each bed in its own glassed-in world , instead of the writhing lineup of beds and vents crammed in and hooked up to every imaginable electrical source . You could
32 LOUISVILLE MEDICINE OPINION