It was Thursday non fiction
Thursday, January 15th. 1977. It was a cold night and this was a big city hospital on the city’s north side. (No, St. Louis, not you). I was working the night shift from 6 p.m. to the next morning. I was an intern. I carried a stethoscope. In those days we worked 24 hours on and 36 hours off. It had been a busy day and the house was full. I was working with my resident and we were covering the 6th floor, a medical floor. The story you are about to hear is true, the names have been changed to protect the innocent.
It grew late. Minutes turned into hours. The lights in the hall were turned down, the noises had become muted after the patient visitors had left except for the dinging of the call bells as patients in their beds rang for assistance. The requests first went to the nurses and what they deemed of importance came to me, one of the house staff, the doctor “on call” for the floor.
It was a large hospital, almost a thousand beds, and a teaching hospital. That meant there were a lot of house staff, doctors in training. The house staff were assigned to “call rooms” which served multiple capacities. They were break rooms, places where you could take a sandwich and a cup of coffee and they were also lecture rooms and conference rooms and bedrooms. They were almost universally outfitted with sofas, most of the “hide-a-bed” variety. There were also assigned dorm rooms, some with bunk beds. There was a pretty strict hierarchy in the division of sleeping quarters. The chief residents usually got a room to themselves. The more senior residents were assigned quarters which were in various places around the hospital but the interns had to find what they could find, usually in the on-call rooms on the floor you were working that particular night. The students typically went home for the night. The attendings were at home, snuggled safe in their beds. Unfortunately, on this particular night, as I checked all the available sleeping spaces, every one was filled with a warm body.
I had been working through the evening seeing patients at the behest of the floor nurses, doing admissions from the E.R., chasing down lab results, recording EKG’s, drawing bloods. In today’s world, many of these things are done by specialist nurses or technicians but in those days they all fell to the intern. And that’s why we had beepers. Beepers were a relatively new thing and they did not have voice capacity but only signaled a number which you were to call.
My beeper dinged. It was 1 a.m. I was dozing in a stiff wooden chair. The charge nurse said,
“Doctor, could you please go down to room 621? We need you to do a ‘declaration’ on Mrs Star. She was expected to die soon and we need to fill out the paperwork and then we can move her to the morgue.”
This was one of the jobs of the intern at night. Usually in the day it would be done by the attending doctor or resident but at night it was the intern’s turn. Rising slowly, as there was no emergency here, I plodded down to 621. I examined the patient: no pulse, no respirations, no audible heartbeat, pale, cool skin, no pupillary light reflex, no pain reflex to a pinch, no vestibular reflex. She was dead. Really dead. So I plodded back to the nursing station, pulled a death certificate from the drawer and filled-in the blanks. It didn’t take long. I never knew the patient. The nurse asked,
“Doctor, could you help us move the body onto the gurney, we’re a little short-staffed tonight?”
“Sure” I replied, “I’ll be right there”.
In a transfer like this somebody grabs the sheet at the head, somebody at the feet and somebody the draw sheet under the trunk. Somebody calls “Lift” and with any luck the body lands on the gurney and is trundled off to the back elevator. Housekeeping is called, linens are quickly gathered, personal effects bagged, flowers and cards placed in a box, the bed wiped down. Another life is ended.
I made one observation: it was a single room. No roommate. It was late, really late. Unlikely there would be another admission to the floor that night and, if so, I would be the person to know about it. So, I grabbed clean sheets and blankets from the linen room, stealthily slouched to 621, made the bed and climbed in. Except for a slight persistent indentation in the mattress and the faint persistent odor of disinfectant, it was just like home. It was two a.m. With any luck, I might sleep ‘til six.
The story you have heard is true, only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.
James Littlefield Nov. 22, 2019