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I'm post-call. I'm not happy.
My wife has the car so I'm waiting for the bus at the corner of Ninth Avenue and Irving Street. It's a typically foggy, cold San Francisco morning. I'm chilled to the bone and my feet hurt really bad.
Ten feet away from me a man in traditional Russian clothing is assaulting an accordion. There is a horrible cry coming from the instrument that is reverberating inside the empty walls of my cranium. I'm nauseated. I am becoming increasingly angry. If I could get away with it, I'd go over and kick his dentures deep into his throat. Instead, I reach into my pants pocket and pull out the last of my change (-thirty-five cents) and heave it into the open case at his feet. He smiles and continues to abuse the keyboard and bellows. My head is pounding. I pace anxiously, awaiting the arrival of the #44 to take me home.
Last night was a typical OB anesthesia torture session. I did nothing all day. As soon as the sun went down, every laboring woman in the city of San Francisco showed up on the maternity ward. Membranes ruptured, cervices dilated, uteri contracting, lungs bellowing forth a stream of endless profanities and adjectives like "excruciating, intolerable, indescribably horrible, unbearable, unimaginable, and medieval" , they came to request my services.
You see, I'm the candy man on the OB service now. I am keeper of the epidural cart. With a small catheter I can bring joy and happiness to the huddled masses seeking to bring forth from their loins objects of immense size and substance. Yes sir, the gametes are fully grown now and it appears that the carpenter made the door too small. So, before we begin remodeling, may I suggest you get yourself one of these stylish epidural catheters.
"Room 4 wishes to have a drug-free delivery," a nurse tells me at 2:00 AM.
Translation: "Room 4 is minimally dilated now. She thinks the rest of the night is going to go easily. But when Cletus the Fetus decides to jam his fat skull down into her cervix in a quest for daylight, she'll wake your ass up and screech for relief. Furthermore, since she'll be in agony, she won't be able to sit still. See ya' at 4:30."
Naturally, the sequence unfolds as I had predicted. I'm paged at 4:36 AM. When I call back all I hear is the shrieking of a higher primate in the background. Someone (the zookeeper?) is calmly saying "breathe, breathe, breathe."
"Mo, room 4 wishes to reconsider her choice of labor analgesia."
Translation: "Yes sir, another well-meaning, granola-eating, Yanni-listening San Francisco Yuppie has realized that the perineum is one of the most highly innervated areas of the human body. Furthermore, she has realized that the stretching, tearing and evisceration of said structure is in no way a spiritually enlightening experience. Come quick before she jumps from the fifteenth story window."
So there I am, standing behind a woman who is moving in rotatory fashion, exhaling expletives that would make a longshoreman blush. I'm holding an 18 gauge Tuohy needle thinking, "I'm either going to relieve her suffering or I'm going to paralyze her permanently. Either way, I'm getting some sleep in the next 20 minutes or I'm gonna climb the clock tower with an assault rifle and open fire on everything in site. And by the way^ÅSHUT THE FUCK UP."
Translation: "It's OK dear. Take a deep breath. Breathe. Breathe. I know it's hard. You'll feel better soon."
Again my predictions come true. The epidural is a success. I go to my call room. The pager goes off again.
"Mo, room 5 has reconsidered her choice of labor analgesia."
I can see the clocktower from my call room.
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[ T o n y | M a r c u
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n | R a v i | D a n i e l |
M o | P e t e r ] |
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