The View from the Vue (15 page)

I got up and walked over to the man. “How do you do, sir,” I said. “I’m Dr. Karp. What’s your name?”

“John the Baptist,” said my new patient weakly. Before I could react he lifted his stick and began to wave it in my direction. “Do you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ?” he demanded to know.

I cogitated for a very brief moment, and then answered, “Yes sir, I certainly do.”

The old man dropped his stick back into his lap and rumbled, “Very well, then, I will not fear.”

“Good,” I said. “Now, tell me: is John the Baptist your real name, or is that just what you call yourself?”

“Why, my real name, of course.”

At that point I took the admission slip from the messenger, who headed off at top speed down the hallway, dramatically holding his nose and pretending that he was about to become violently sick to his stomach. According to the official hospital document, the patient’s name was Baptist, John; he had no known address; and his admitting diagnosis was “RLL pneum.” This was an abbreviation for pneumonia of the lower lobe of the right lung, a very common cause for admission of these elderly, emaciated, often alcoholic gentlemen during the New York winter season.

“Let’s try once more,” I said, and looked into John’s eyes. “Are you the original John the Baptist, or a reincarnation? Or are you a guy whose name happens to be John Baptist?”

The old fellow looked annoyed. He glared up at me and said, very slowly, as though he were addressing a child, “My…name…is…John…the…Baptist.”

That settled that. At least I knew he had a middle name.

“How did you get here?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

The admitting paper said he had been found by a policeman, helpless on the sidewalk. Again, the usual Bellevue winter’s tale.

“What’s bothering you, John?” I said.

“I have a great pain here.” He pointed to his right lower rib cage. “My very breath itself causes pain.”

I assured him we’d take care of his problem very shortly, and then set about working him up. The physical examination, the blood count, the appearance of his sputum, all were characteristic of bacterial pneumonia. To be certain of the extent of the disease, and to be sure there was no tuberculosis underlying the pneumonic infection, I sent him down for X-rays. My wife wheeled him away and I wrote up his chart and his orders.

Forty-five minutes later she wheeled him back, carrying a huge sheaf of X-rays under her arm.

“My God, what took you so long?” I asked.

Myra pushed the wheelchair a little distance away and then came over to whisper to me. “They had to take three shots for every one you ordered. Whenever they told him to stop breathing and move, he’d start waving that stick and call the wrath of God down on the heads of all disbelievers.”

“Oh.”

“Then, finally, the X-ray tech just lost all her patience with his moving around. She shoved him against the machine and hollered at him, ‘God damn it, now, hold still, you stupid old bastard.’ That didn’t set too well with your friend.”

I closed my eyes and ground my teeth. “No, I guess he wouldn’t have taken too kindly to that,” I said.

“That’s putting it mildly,” replied my wife. “He went after her with the stick, yelling something or other about smiting the sinners as did Isaiah in the days of yore. I finally managed to get him calmed down and made him stand still long enough to take the pictures.”

I looked at John. He was slumped in his wheelchair, his head lolling above the right armrest. I went over and checked him. Sure enough, his temperature had gone up from 101° to almost 104°, and his pulse was disturbingly fast and weak. So I put him to bed, gave him aspirin to lower the fever, and started an intravenous infusion of penicillin solution. After this, I checked the X-rays: they revealed the presence of a severe pneumonia, but there was no evidence of tuberculosis. Then I returned to John’s bedside for a moment. He was lying unconscious, breathing in and out thirty times a minute (approximately twice the normal rate), the whiskers near his mouth moving back and forth with the breeze.

“Is he going to make it?” Myra whispered from behind me.

I shook my head. “Can’t really tell for twenty-four hours or so. All we can do is hook him up to the antibiotics and hope.” I checked my watch; it was eleven o’clock. I decided it was time to get some sleep.

When my phone rang, my watch read a quarter to five. I snapped the receiver off the hook and growled a hello.

“Dr. Karp?” It was the night nurse on the ward.

“Yeah,” I growled. Interns always hope that night calls will turn out to be wrong numbers.

“Listen, Dr. Karp. You’d better come on down to the ward. Mr. John the Baptist pulled out his intravenous needle, and he’s causing a terrible ruckus here.”

“Oh, God. I’ll be right over.”

The entrance to the long, rectangular Bellevue wards was occupied by a nurses’ desk, and on one side were medication cabinets, with examination rooms on the other. The rest of the ward space was taken up by three rows of about fifteen beds each, two rows down each wall and one down the middle. According to the custom, as the newest, sickest admission, John the Baptist was occupying the bed nearest the nursing station. He was sitting up, his beard and his hair flying in all directions, and he was waving his stick. The smashed penicillin bottle lay at the foot of the bed, and blood dripped from his arm where the needle had been. His shrill voice pierced the semidarkness. “Beware, ye sinners, for the end of the world is near at hand. Thus saith the Lord.”

The night nurse trotted over to me. “His temperature broke about an hour ago, Dr. Karp,” she said. “Since then, he’s been raising hell. He’s got the whole place awake.”

“Oh, Christ!”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.” I really didn’t, either.

“We could bug him over to psych.”

“No, we don’t want to do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because the intern on that ward weighs thirty pounds more than I do, and he’d kill us both if we dumped this mess on him at five o’clock in the morning.”

Meanwhile, the sermon went on. “The meek shall inherit the earth,” hollered John. “An eternity in the most fiery of hells awaiteth the sinner. Thus spake the Lord of Hosts.”

“Shut up, you goddamnsonofabitch!” The command came straight from the heart of the Bowery denizen across the way, and it was punctuated by a flying metal urinal that bounced off the wall behind John, showered plaster all over him, and then fell to the tile floor with an ear-splitting clatter.

John looked up at the ceiling. “Oh Lord, Lord, deliver me from the hands of mine enemies,” he implored. “Visit the wrath of Sodom and Gomorrah on the sinners,”

Suddenly I had a magnificent idea. “That’s it,” I whispered. “That’s the ticket.” I pounded the poor night nurse on the back so hard that she stumbled forward, almost falling on her face.

“That’s what?” she asked as she straightened up. But I didn’t answer her; I was on my way over to John’s bedside. As I drew near, John saw me coming and he lifted up his stick as if in preparation to part my hair. I was scared silly, but I tried not to show it.

“John!” I said.

He stopped in mid-swing, the stick poised over his head.

“Put down that stick, John,” I commanded. “You dare not strike an angel of the Lord.”

He looked at me as though I were some special sort of nut. “
What
say you?” he asked.

“The Lord is pleased with your work, John,” I rapidly continued. “But the sinners do not heed your warnings.”

“They will pay for their sins in the fiery furnaces of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.”

“But, John, the Lord desireth not the death of the sinner, but that he return to the way of righteousness and live. Thus, it is the will of the Lord that you visit purgatory, the better that you may tell the sinners the error of their ways.”

John actually dropped his stick. “You mean…this is—”

“Yes, John. You must spend ten days and nights here. I have been commanded to guide you through. Then, when you are finished, you will go again among the sinners and make them see the true light.”

John shot a glance at the guy who had thrown the urinal at him. “But that blasphemer over there—”

“John,” I hissed. “That’s an evil spirit. He’s a demon, sent by Satan himself to make certain that you will fail, so that all the souls will come to him. But he cannot succeed. The Lord will make you stronger than your enemy.”

John sat there, staring silently at me.

“John, you must not hesitate,” I said. “Think of all the souls that will be lost if you defy the word of the Lord.”

John the Baptist turned his fanatical gaze on me, and I tried hard to mirror it back. I must have proved I was as buggy as he, because he grasped my arm, closed his eyes, looked skyward, and called out, “O Master! As you suffered the pain of the cross for our sins, so will I suffer the tortures of purgatory for the souls of my fellow men. I shall heed the call of my Lord.”

I let out a deep breath, and told John that his faith would certainly please the Lord. Then I put the needle back into his arm, the nurse hung up a new bottle of penicillin, and we all went back to sleep.

For the next couple of days John the Baptist behaved himself and appeared to be convalescing smoothly. On the morning of the third day, though, we had a bit of tension when John waved his stick at one of the attending physicians who wanted to examine him while he was reading the Bible. We told the doctor that he’d have no trouble if he would only preface his examination with, “The Lord is my Strength and my Redeemer,” one of John’s favorite lines. The attending said he’d be damned first, and asked why didn’t we just take the stick away. I explained we couldn’t possibly do that; that it would convince John that the forces of evil had triumphed over him.

“Besides,” said one of the residents with a smirk, “it was a personal gift to him from Jesus.”

At that point, the attending stormed off the ward muttering that he’d seen nutty things at Bellevue, but when the doctors acted nuttier than the patients, it was time for him to leave. Such is the case with nonbelievers.

On the fourth day, the nurse called me because John, having improved to the point where we could discontinue the intravenous penicillin, was refusing his twice-daily intramuscular injection of the antibiotic I hustled over to the ward.

Using his always-ready stick for emphasis, John informed me that in no way was he going to accept this latest visitation from hell. I directed his attention to the sadistically grinning bum next to him. “John,” I said, “the forces of hell must not triumph. Think of the consequences if you ignore the Lord’s command to you.”

The fire came into John’s eyes, and he fixed his stare on his neighbor. “You shall
not
defeat me,” he bellowed. “You shall return in failure to your evil master, and submit to his fearful punishment.”

The guy in the next bed turned pale and lit out for the men’s room. John took his shot, and that was that.

As promised, by the tenth day, John was ready for discharge. He was all set to stride forth, but had to be convinced that the wheelchair was necessary so no lurking devils could trip him and break his leg. As he rode off, I asked him where I might hear him preaching the Gospel.

“At Forty-fifth and Broadway,” he said. “That’s where there are more sinners than any other place on Earth.”

I wasn’t inclined to argue.

A couple of weeks later, I actually did go to hear him. My wife told me maybe I shouldn’t. “What’ll you do,” she asked, “if he sees you there and starts yelling that you’re the Angel of Mercy himself? You’ll both end up in the hatch together.”

“We’ll stay in the back,” I said. “He won’t even see us.”

We did and he didn’t. The wind was howling around the corners of the buildings, and the temperature was in the mid-twenties. Wrapped in a gray, herringbone coat which was two sizes too large, and was closed with only one button, John the Baptist addressed himself to a rapidly changing crowd of about twenty-five. He drew attention to the Bible in his left hand, threatened with the stick in his right, and all the while promised his listeners an eternity in a fiery hell.

“Sounds good t’ me awn a night like this,” chuckled the man standing next to me, as he stuffed his red cheeks full of hot dog. “What the hell makes these nuts go on, huh, buddy? Oughter put ’im away where he can’t hurt no one.” Then, the guy waddled down the street toward the Promised Land of Forty-second Street.

We stayed a bit longer, until the combination of cold winds, jeers from the crowd, and the faint aroma of sulfur combined to drive us off. As we left, we passed to his right. He aimed the stick at me, and my heart began to pound. Here it comes, I thought.

“Young man, you won’t be able to walk away like this on Judgment Day.” His eyes burned into mine, and I looked away.

“He doesn’t even remember you,” whispered my wife.

“Thank God,” I whispered back.

From time to time, I would see John the Baptist on his corner, but he never did give any indication that he remembered me. But that’s all right; celebrities are that way. I’ll bet the actresses and the politicians never gave a second thought to the interns at Cedars and Harkness, either.

Some people are born losers. Through hard work and long effort, others manage to achieve the status of losers. Still others have losing thrust upon them. Many Bellevue patients fit into all three categories.

Probably, the Bellevue losers had their functional origin in the Five-P Syndrome. The five P’s stood for Piss-Poor Protoplasm, Poorly Put Together. Basically, this elegant terminology described the situation of a person who had had lifelong suboptimal nutrition on which was superimposed the sort of neglect and self-abuse which often accompanies an impecunious existence. Then, when the insults of advancing age were added, it took only a relatively minor illness to drop the final straw. At that point, all the efforts of the Bellevue personnel would be in vain, as things would go from bad to worse to worst. The downward spiral would be irreversible, complications would accumulate in a geometric fashion, and the patient would breathe his last with tubes in every orifice and machines of every description humming and clattering frantically. Although the doctors never failed to gloomily take stock and wonder where they might have gone wrong in their care, the whole process was really nobody’s fault. It was not only a medical, but also a serious sociological problem.