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You Gotta Have Peeps
by Mary Barry, MD
“ Now if you feel that you can’ t go on Because all of your hope is gone And your life is filled with much confusion Until happiness is just an illusion....”
The Four Tops had it down. Reach Out I’ ll Be There is the hymn sung by every hospitalist internist to all possible surgeons, and by every specialist to all possible primary care docs. The late and very great Dr. Gordon Tobin was called upon frequently to heal fairly hideous wounds, and while his team was busy with this, I devoted myself to helping his patients with the big picture: breathing, blood pressure, sugars, heart health, mobility and morale. We haunted 5M and the ICUs together for people who’ d arrived in distress, sometimes disastrous: open chest wounds from infected midsternal incisions, for example, or long-draining fistulas. The hand patients had frustratingly slow progress at times, especially the trauma ones – keeping their spirits up was a challenge.
The neurosurgeons’ and back surgeons’ patients had wound issues too, and litanies of medical needs. The obesity surgeons’ patients often had problem lists that took a paragraph to enumerate, and medication lists that took days to prune. But what I loved about hospital consulting most was the patients. I cared for many people from farms and small towns, who brought with them beautiful accents, gracious manners, a lot of common sense and a ton of UK banners. I wore red and black most days, so we enjoyed ritual rival-bashing to the hilt.( The Hoosiers spontaneously would offer opinions of Bobby Knight. I once threatened
32 LOUISVILLE MEDICINE to throw a chair at a Hoosier patient who would not, could not take any known blood pressure medicine. He gave in.)
The ortho ward at Methodist was my happy place. I had worked there first as a nurse’ s aide and knew the routines backwards and forwards. I could always find a stat orange juice and later, an empty computer terminal. There stayed victims of trauma who came back repeatedly for staged repairs of various parts, and patients who needed, serially, their knees and hips replaced. I got to know them, their spouses and their homemade cookies. Over and over, I learned that FALL is a four-letter word. Perfectly happy functioning people would fall down some steps and end up – if they lived – paralyzed, or with rib fractures that led to pneumonia, and leg or hip fractures that could lead to pulmonary emboli. Orthopedic surgeons are such a brilliant and cheerful and practical group – always studying and tweaking the best way to do anything, whether under the knife, or post-op mandates. They were always willing to teach, and calm in the face of a horrifying injury. Drs. Rudy and John Ellis, Dr. Walter Badenhausen, Dr. Owen( Woody) Hitt, Dr. Mark Smith, Dr. Steven Glassman – we are blessed with far too many great orthopedists to list, but my patients needed them all, and urgently.
The consulting street is definitively two-way. Thousands of times I must have called UofL Surgery from the Norton or Methodist ER,
OPINION