Read Online Weekends at Bellevue by Julie Holland - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Julie Holland
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last job, before Bellevue, I had breast cancer. Radical mastectomy, chemo, radiation, the whole nine. I was thirty-one.” We are standing in line at the coffee shop, getting breakfast. She tells me how incredibly sick she got, how even now anything orange, the color of the chemotherapy meds in the IV bag, can make her gag. How her white blood cell count got so low, her fevers so high, her oncologist didn’t think she was going to pull through, but she did.
As if she weren’t enough of a mythic figure in my eyes, Lucy Jones has beaten cancer. I call her accountant and get the pricey disability insurance.
Our faculty meetings are a smaller version of the weekly staff meetings: just the attending physicians are included. We meet on Thursday mornings after Lucy’s overnight shift. She is giddy from lack of sleep and even more disinhibited than usual. It’s my favorite time to be with her. She is wearing scrubs and is usually in need of a shower. There are times when I lean into her, seeing if her scent does anything for me, the way Jeremy’s does. I love his smell; I can feel something stir in my pelvis when I breathe it in. I stare at her armpit hair, transfixed as it peeks out from her tank top. She doesn’t shave there, like I do, like a man doesn’t. She smiles at me and I blush. She has caught me, I think, but she lets it go. I am experimenting with an idea here, and I appreciate the latitude. We huddle in the corner, whispering and cracking wise. Dr. Lear has to separate us during the meetings as if we were schoolgirls. On Monday mornings, when I come in for rounds, I often say, “Good morning, Dr. Jones…. Good morning, everyone else.” I do, on some level, separate her (or maybe it’s us?) out from the rest. She rises easily above and beyond the other staff members, the cream above the crop. And I’m not the only one who places her on a pedestal. There are many of us at CPEP who speak of Lucy in blatantly worshipful language. She has a large group of idolizers, but the thing that I love best, that makes me feel special, is that she also admires me.
“Julie, sometimes I lie awake at night afraid you’re smarter than I am,” she says to me one morning. She smiles, and I know she’s teasing me, but not totally. There is truth in her jest, and I lap it up like milk ina saucer. Soon we are a team, a mutual admiration society, and partners in crime.
We double-date with Sadie, her girlfriend, and Jeremy, inviting each other over for dinner to our apartments, or going down to Chinatown for Vietnamese food. Lucy and Sadie eventually buy a house together in the Hamptons, and they go there on the weekends. Jeremy and I can’t hang out with them since that’s when I work, but they generously offer us the use of the house during the week. The light in the late summer afternoons is like nothing I’ve ever seen. We go biking, windsurfing, kayaking. We eat lobsters and corn. We break their hammock with our combined weight, and I replace it, owning up to it when I see Lucy on Monday morning.
In the Bellevue of the Beast
I thought I knew what crazy was. Then I came to Bellevue.
I had already seen plenty of insanity, insinuating myself among the sickest psychiatric patients whenever possible during my eight years of training. I’d interviewed a guy at Temple who was hearing the Devil’s voice while smelling burning flesh and seeing the flames of hell; I’d talked to a man at Mount Sinai with tinfoil under his hat to deflect the messages sent by the aliens; at the VA, I’d convinced a Vietnam veteran wearing a dead rat around his neck that we had better ways to protect him from his enemies.
These patients and their symptoms all pale in comparison to the pathology that parades through Bellevue’s doors. The depth and breadth of madness on display at CPEP is like nothing I’ve ever experienced, and because of that, going to work is fascinating, illuminating, and exhilarating, week after week.
It’s not until
As if she weren’t enough of a mythic figure in my eyes, Lucy Jones has beaten cancer. I call her accountant and get the pricey disability insurance.
Our faculty meetings are a smaller version of the weekly staff meetings: just the attending physicians are included. We meet on Thursday mornings after Lucy’s overnight shift. She is giddy from lack of sleep and even more disinhibited than usual. It’s my favorite time to be with her. She is wearing scrubs and is usually in need of a shower. There are times when I lean into her, seeing if her scent does anything for me, the way Jeremy’s does. I love his smell; I can feel something stir in my pelvis when I breathe it in. I stare at her armpit hair, transfixed as it peeks out from her tank top. She doesn’t shave there, like I do, like a man doesn’t. She smiles at me and I blush. She has caught me, I think, but she lets it go. I am experimenting with an idea here, and I appreciate the latitude. We huddle in the corner, whispering and cracking wise. Dr. Lear has to separate us during the meetings as if we were schoolgirls. On Monday mornings, when I come in for rounds, I often say, “Good morning, Dr. Jones…. Good morning, everyone else.” I do, on some level, separate her (or maybe it’s us?) out from the rest. She rises easily above and beyond the other staff members, the cream above the crop. And I’m not the only one who places her on a pedestal. There are many of us at CPEP who speak of Lucy in blatantly worshipful language. She has a large group of idolizers, but the thing that I love best, that makes me feel special, is that she also admires me.
“Julie, sometimes I lie awake at night afraid you’re smarter than I am,” she says to me one morning. She smiles, and I know she’s teasing me, but not totally. There is truth in her jest, and I lap it up like milk ina saucer. Soon we are a team, a mutual admiration society, and partners in crime.
We double-date with Sadie, her girlfriend, and Jeremy, inviting each other over for dinner to our apartments, or going down to Chinatown for Vietnamese food. Lucy and Sadie eventually buy a house together in the Hamptons, and they go there on the weekends. Jeremy and I can’t hang out with them since that’s when I work, but they generously offer us the use of the house during the week. The light in the late summer afternoons is like nothing I’ve ever seen. We go biking, windsurfing, kayaking. We eat lobsters and corn. We break their hammock with our combined weight, and I replace it, owning up to it when I see Lucy on Monday morning.
In the Bellevue of the Beast
I thought I knew what crazy was. Then I came to Bellevue.
I had already seen plenty of insanity, insinuating myself among the sickest psychiatric patients whenever possible during my eight years of training. I’d interviewed a guy at Temple who was hearing the Devil’s voice while smelling burning flesh and seeing the flames of hell; I’d talked to a man at Mount Sinai with tinfoil under his hat to deflect the messages sent by the aliens; at the VA, I’d convinced a Vietnam veteran wearing a dead rat around his neck that we had better ways to protect him from his enemies.
These patients and their symptoms all pale in comparison to the pathology that parades through Bellevue’s doors. The depth and breadth of madness on display at CPEP is like nothing I’ve ever experienced, and because of that, going to work is fascinating, illuminating, and exhilarating, week after week.
It’s not until
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