Them and Us

At the small city hospital where I trained, “they” were us. As rumpled, sleepless interns, most of us living just a walk away, our patients were our neighbors, like the loud old man whose radio and opinions I could hear on baseball nights, and whose blood pressure I stopped by to check after a heart attack. Or the teenagers who came to the emergency room with lacerations and sprains, and who knocked on my apartment door for suture removal and a sheepish question about sex.

The nurses, our friends and party-mates, brought reluctant uncles for checkups. Retired professors, admitted for an arrhythmia or pneumonia, could have been our fathers, or the graduate student with the worrisome pleural effusion, one of us. Even the wilder ones, raving in restraints from alcohol or angel dust, reminded us of friends on the edge or the black sheep in our families.

The line between work and leisure was blurred. We were never anonymous, never truly off duty. Passing through the cafeteria line, we would be told of symptoms and asked for advice by those serving the potatoes. Stopping by a neighborhood bar to catch the late innings on TV one night, I noticed, with mutual awkwardness, a patient just discharged from the detox ward.

The pity of it all could not be missed. We pumped red cells into the chief of pathology as his ulcer bled, sped him to surgery, watched his slow return to work and health, gaunt over the microscope. Sometimes the closeness was almost unbearable—feeling a stab of guilt at the unexpected death of a patient who had brought cakes at Christmas, hearing the love and despair in the voice of a senior resident admitting his own depression-struck father.

This small world, looking after its own, could give limitless support and …