patients were unique only in that time had stopped inside their wounds, which were seemingly never to heal. The pain was so thick and palpable in the psych ward that a visitor could breathe it like the heavy humidity of summer air, and I soon realized that the challenge would not be to defend myself from patients, but to defend myself against my own increasing indifference toward them. What originally struck me as cryptic in chapter fifty-nine was now mundane:
they are turned inward, to feed upon their own hearts, and their own hearts are very bad feeding.
After a few months in the hospital lab, I became really good at shooting bags, to the extent that I could keep up with Lydia and even outstrip her at times. Eventually the Pharm.D.’s double-checking quit turning up errors in my work, and soon afterward, my confidence ripened into boredom. I challenged myself by developing time-saving rituals for everything from how I lined up my medications to the number of steps I took while walking to the Teletype. I studied the names on each label and began to recognize the sicker patients who required the same mixtures day after day. I started shooting the tiny bags that required complicated dilutions, made for infants born prematurely and bearing stickers that read only “Baby Boy Jones” or “Baby Girl Smith” where there would otherwise have been a full name.
Occasionally I was handed a “cut slip,” printed from a second, quieter Teletype, which informed the pharmacy when a patient requiring medication had died, so that the order was no longer needed. If a Pharm.D. tapped me on the shoulder and presented me with a cut slip, I stood up, walked to the sink, slashed or “cut” the bag that I was shooting and poured it out, and then grabbed a new order on the way back to my chair. One day I got a cut slip for a chemotherapy bag that I was making for a patient whose name I was in the habit of searching out from the pile daily. I stopped and looked around. Somehow I felt I had a simple sort of respects to pay, but who would want them?
Slowly I went from believing that I was doing the most important work in the world to ruminating over how pointless it was to be part of a pharmaceutical chain gang producing a mule train of medications to be hauled upstairs every hour of every day forever without end. From this darker perspective, the hospital was a place where you confined a sick person and then pumped medication through him until he died or got better, and it was not more complicated than that. I couldn’t cure anybody. I could follow a recipe and wait to see what happened.
Just as I reached the peak of my disenchantment, one of my professors offered me a long-term work-study position in his research laboratory, and all at once I was assured of the money that I needed to keep me in college until I got my degree. So I quit my hospital job and gave up on saving other people’s lives. Instead, I started working in a research laboratory in order to save my own life. To save myself from the fear of having to drop out and from then being bodily foreclosed upon by some boy back home. From the small-town wedding and the children who would follow, who would have grown to hate me as I vented my frustrated ambitions on them. Instead, I would take a long, lonely journey toward adulthood with the dogged faith of the pioneer who has realized that there is no promised land but still holds out hope that the destination will be someplace better than here.
On the same day that I gave my notice to the human resources office at the hospital, I sat through my break with Lydia. While she smoked, she explained to me that I should never buy a Chevrolet because they just wouldn’t run reliably for a woman driver. She had always stuck with Fords and had yet to have one completely crap out on her. During a pause, I shared with Lydia that I’d gotten a better-paying job and that I was quitting the pharmacy. True, I’d been working in the hospital
they are turned inward, to feed upon their own hearts, and their own hearts are very bad feeding.
After a few months in the hospital lab, I became really good at shooting bags, to the extent that I could keep up with Lydia and even outstrip her at times. Eventually the Pharm.D.’s double-checking quit turning up errors in my work, and soon afterward, my confidence ripened into boredom. I challenged myself by developing time-saving rituals for everything from how I lined up my medications to the number of steps I took while walking to the Teletype. I studied the names on each label and began to recognize the sicker patients who required the same mixtures day after day. I started shooting the tiny bags that required complicated dilutions, made for infants born prematurely and bearing stickers that read only “Baby Boy Jones” or “Baby Girl Smith” where there would otherwise have been a full name.
Occasionally I was handed a “cut slip,” printed from a second, quieter Teletype, which informed the pharmacy when a patient requiring medication had died, so that the order was no longer needed. If a Pharm.D. tapped me on the shoulder and presented me with a cut slip, I stood up, walked to the sink, slashed or “cut” the bag that I was shooting and poured it out, and then grabbed a new order on the way back to my chair. One day I got a cut slip for a chemotherapy bag that I was making for a patient whose name I was in the habit of searching out from the pile daily. I stopped and looked around. Somehow I felt I had a simple sort of respects to pay, but who would want them?
Slowly I went from believing that I was doing the most important work in the world to ruminating over how pointless it was to be part of a pharmaceutical chain gang producing a mule train of medications to be hauled upstairs every hour of every day forever without end. From this darker perspective, the hospital was a place where you confined a sick person and then pumped medication through him until he died or got better, and it was not more complicated than that. I couldn’t cure anybody. I could follow a recipe and wait to see what happened.
Just as I reached the peak of my disenchantment, one of my professors offered me a long-term work-study position in his research laboratory, and all at once I was assured of the money that I needed to keep me in college until I got my degree. So I quit my hospital job and gave up on saving other people’s lives. Instead, I started working in a research laboratory in order to save my own life. To save myself from the fear of having to drop out and from then being bodily foreclosed upon by some boy back home. From the small-town wedding and the children who would follow, who would have grown to hate me as I vented my frustrated ambitions on them. Instead, I would take a long, lonely journey toward adulthood with the dogged faith of the pioneer who has realized that there is no promised land but still holds out hope that the destination will be someplace better than here.
On the same day that I gave my notice to the human resources office at the hospital, I sat through my break with Lydia. While she smoked, she explained to me that I should never buy a Chevrolet because they just wouldn’t run reliably for a woman driver. She had always stuck with Fords and had yet to have one completely crap out on her. During a pause, I shared with Lydia that I’d gotten a better-paying job and that I was quitting the pharmacy. True, I’d been working in the hospital
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