The white coat effect, p.1
The White Coat Effect, page 1
The White Coat Effect
By L. B. Wells
The White Coat Effect © 2020, L.B. Wells. All rights reserved.
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may bereproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise whether now or hereafter known),without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for insertion in a magazine,newspaper, broadcast, website, blog or other outlet in conformity with United States and International Fair Use or comparable guidelines to such copyright exceptions.
ISBN: 9798768473471
Contents
1. Boy Crazy
2. Webberworld
3. The Egg With Legs
4. I Think I Just Had Sex
5. The First Real Boyfriend
6. Death Is All Too Familiar
7. Untying the Knot
8. Sixty Percent Fructose Does Not Taste Like Sugar
9. Point and Shoot
10. Eight Thousand Nerve Endings
11. Infinite Rounds
12. Let the Bacteria Kill Them All
13. Saved by the Straitjacket
14. Ginge Minge
15. How to Bowl a Perfect Game
16. Tequila and Tumors
17. The Intruder
18. Nurse Teapot in a Tempest
19. Father Knows Best
20. A Home-Cooked Feeling
21. Esther Silverblatt
22. A Stranger Infiltrates Webberworld
23. Show Me a Monkey
24. A Fiddler on the Roof
25. Like a Rolling Stone
26. The Ides of March
27. Flatlined
28. The White Coat Burning Ceremony
Epilogue
1. Boy Crazy
I remember when I first truly fell in love with surgery. It coincided with my first true love for Amir Hadid, the man who changed my life.
* * *
The first two years of medical school had been primarily book learning. It was boring and seemed to involve tons of rote memorizing. Social life was a non-starter. I was horny and bored. My third year was also a colossal disappointment.
Now I was entering the fourth year, rounding the corner of my first clinical year. Everything would change, I thought, as we engaged with real human patients. I stood in full uniform—scrubs, ponytail, clogs—ready to be thrown into the icy waters.
I had reported for duty at City Hospital in Westport without much instruction on what to expect. There were no smiles, no pleasantries. I was briefly introduced to my new surgical team, and I shook hands with Shay Meyer, the intense Israeli man who would be my chief resident for the month.
We headed toward the first patient’s room. Suddenly, a tall, dark figure in scrubs brushed past me. As our shoulders met, the tattered carpet generated a painful electric shock.
“Watch where you’re going!” I said.
“Everyone, listen up.” Shay, the chief resident, was now addressing us. “This is our fourth-year resident, Amir.”
“Oh shit,” I whispered, head down, my cheeks flushing with embarrassment at having rudely chastised an important superior.
I took the risk of looking at him. I had to look; we were being introduced. From behind the Clark Kent glasses, his eyes hit me with 360 joules of energy, the maximum setting on a defibrillator.
It was him, the handsome stranger I had seen in passing a few years prior and once, I confess, in my dreams. He stood well over six feet, with an imperious chest and broad shoulders filling out his short-sleeved green scrubs. His forearms flexed the muscles of a day laborer, his dark skin gleaming.
All of his kinetic energy pulsed through light-brown eyes with a dramatic touch of emerald green. His face, deep in concentration, seemed to harbor a spiritual and probing intelligence.
Warning bells from my childhood were chiming insistently. With a name like Amir and his coloring, he was almost certainly Arabic, not exactly the ethnic origin that my parents had in mind for a mate.
I lapsed back into reality. I knew the drill. I had buried my earlier clipboards at the bottom of my closet, under all the unworn stilettos. Clipboards were for meditrons. Surgeons were the cool kids, and we traveled light: one piece of paper, small illegible notes, tiny check-boxes representing orders and tasks.
Whatever didn’t fit in your pocket was irrelevant.
The nurses were known to be cynical and dismissive. Many of them had more practical experience than we did. But I was not going to be outsmarted. I’d arrived at the hospital at 4:30 a.m., a full hour early, and pored over the charts of every single solitary ward patient.
I was locked and loaded for rounds.
We started in the room of Mrs. Roberts, a newly postoperative forty-four-year-old woman who’d had her stomach stapled. The moment we entered, a noxious, fungal odor coming from her bed assaulted us.
At 450 pounds, she resembled Jabba the Hutt of Star Wars fame. A candida infection had developed under one of her massive breasts. Her stringy hair was cut short at the neck, her face badly acne-pocked.
When she saw us, she bellowed a hearty greeting: “Good morning, team! The food sucks, and I’m pent up as hell, but I ain’t seen nothin’ ’round here worth fuckin’!”
A naughty smile sliced across her scarred face.
We calmed her down, checked her vital signs (all relatively normal except for elevated blood pressure), and communicated to each other in Surgeon Speak. This conveyed the numbers in a lifeless monotone. No time for emotion or improvisation.
I felt confident; I had already learned the lesson of seeing the patient as faulty software. I looked up at Amir again, my breath quickening.
No one noticed my eager reaction. No one except Amir, who looked up from the patient’s records and said urgently, “I need you.”
“Yes,” I thought. “Shall I go down on you right here, or wait for a more private moment?”
“You come with me,” he said. “We have a patient requiring manual disimpaction.”
Not what I had in mind. Unplugging a clogged bowel was not quite like a romantic jaunt in the park.
Amir began walking briskly, several steps ahead of me. He opened the door to the stairwell and started climbing, two stairs at a time, fully expecting me to keep up with him. And keep up with him, I did. I wasn’t going to give this handsome mofo any rope to hang me with.
Three floors later, at the patient’s bedside, he spoke. “I assume you have disimpacted patients before . . .”
“Of course,” I said bravely, “but maybe you’d better give me a few pointers.”
Thus began our first “date,” and my life would never be the same.
* * *
Ever since I sprouted a hormonally erupting hourglass figure in the tenth grade, I’ve been trying to navigate through the emotional shoals of the male psyche. There was the lascivious trumpet player in the high school band who, in my dreams, had pinned me down under the bleachers; in reality he barely knew my name. There was the camp tennis instructor with those great tanned muscles. There was the first college boyfriend who loved my body so much that he would forget to call for weeks on end.
There was the perfect Dr. Right, over a research summer in Boston, whose ego was in total focus while his uncentered penis produced an unpleasant car-wash spasm of semen, which he generously shared with a whole host of Slavic fashion models.
And of course, there were plenty of older married doctors who couldn’t keep their surgical hands above the operating table.
But sex had to take a backseat (at least when I wasn’t fending off a boyfriend while splayed out in a backseat) to my career.
As I started my clinical training, I was starting to get a bit cocky about my prowess as doctor-in-training. This was the “big leagues,” and the stakes were higher now—falter on one procedure, vocally complain about the long hours, piss off a mentor, and my future could be downgraded to a lower tier of residency.
Or at least it felt that way.
There was always the pressure that had started from childhood. Become a doctor and reap all the good things in life: material success, happy family lifestyle, societal adulation.
I knew I’d be intimidated by the aggressive white-haired cats in surgery, but my mastery was evolving. I could bag the big game by outperforming these blowhards. I believed that young women like me were harbingers of a new breed of physicians. The big cats were going to have to share this jungle.
But finally, after being almost a nun through most of medical school, I met him, the ultimate him, Amir Hadid. This should have been the answer to my prayers in bed at night (hands lowered below midriff), after all the bad boys with emotional shortcomings that I had rejected.
I won’t lie. My dreams gradually gave way to drudgery. I couldn’t wait to get out of medical school and become a real live doctor. That was, until, he showed up. My tall, strong, Arabian prince—the star of those fantasy Casablanca nights, the squad leader who helped me not only survive the relentless military-like days, but actually enjoy them.
He was my new life. But I came from a Jewish home, from a culture far different than his. So I kept him a secret, like that inside pocket of my white coat no one knew about, the one for tampons and antidepressants, the female medical students’ survival kit.
&nb sp; But eventually a time bomb would hit the trenches, and all things secret would be exposed . . .
2. Webberworld
My life seemed predetermined.
My European-born grandparents emigrated to America after the war and brought along only their unfiltered anguish from the unbearable atrocities they suffered during the Holocaust. My conception was the eventual product of one of history’s greatest traumas, industrialized genocide performed on a scale that had never been perpetrated before.
They had lost everything—close relatives, most of their possessions, all of their self-esteem.
Thus, any and all pleasure cells were, by design, to be rendered extinct in their heirs. My parents were given the role of enforcing the almost-military discipline.
My mother’s default position on a weekly basis was always “I told you so,” even when I had no idea what she had told me that was relevant to “the issue” at hand. (And there were always plenty of issues when two headstrong females clashed.) My father was a very successful physician, but his storehouse of empathy was exhausted by his patients while the love for his wife and daughter seemed to dwindle daily.
It all comes back to me in a torrent of sadness: between my father’s inaccessibility and my mother’s continuing disapproval, there was never a normal childhood. I realize that, somehow, I’d skipped all the conventional emotional stages of growing up.
Meanwhile, for all its external opulence, my home was like a prison for me.
Mockingly dubbed Webberworld by our neighbors, it was my mother’s pride and joy, an obsession into which she poured all her love and devotion.
As spoiled as it may sound, I hated growing up in this 10,000-square-foot mausoleum with its cold brick-and-stone edifice teeming with pretentiousness.
Our backyard boasted a Japanese garden bisected by a pathway that culminated in a fairy-tale-inspired gazebo. There was a waterfall feeding into a swimming pool, and a tennis court that had been erected on a promontory jutting out over a man-made lake.
In my childhood fantasies, closing my eyes for a moment, I would picture the epic barbecues my family would host. The town’s glamorous elite would congregate in our backyard as in a Town & Country cover, while tuxedo-clad waiters passed around finger sandwiches and canapés. My father and the mayor would work a massive kitchen-sized grill, producing prime sirloins and ribs.
Webberworld would spell newfound popularity, with the high school kids clamoring for an opportunity to have chicken fights in the luxury pool. The gazebo was the backdrop for my potential make-out sessions with the star quarterback—
Then I would open my eyes. It never happened. The pool parties, the barbecues, the make-out passion, the whole Gatsby scenario. I would have given anything to go back to the more modest gatherings reserved for our old, lived-in house. In the place of senators, celebrities, pretty popular girls, and football players were . . . woodchips, the kind that my father, Milton, liked to lay down on the weekends.
My mother promised, “Your father and I will have guests when the landscape is finished.”
But the landscaping was never finished; it was infinite and ever-evolving. One truckload of woodchips led to a truckload of stones followed by a truckload of manure. Not one stray blade of grass was permitted, and a lawn party would, no doubt, decimate the sod.
All this elegance left bitter scars, because I felt like a prisoner trapped in a tower awaiting execution by my mother, her royal majesty. No classmates or potential boyfriends would dare to cross or sully the imposing moat-like sea of grass on which two gardeners fanatically plucked out the first signs of a weed eruption.
From time to time, I would sit down in the kitchen, miscalculating by placing my hands on the granite top.
“Don’t touch the counter!” My mother, Simone, appeared from the ether. She had designed the house to be a museum, a shrine to her hard work and obsessive-compulsive tendencies. The house was not intended to be lived in. It is said that home is where the heart is. But there was very little pulse beating in my childhood.
3. The Egg With Legs
My problems started surfacing in middle school. I attended a Jewish yeshiva where there was physical separation between the boys and girls, with each gender being trained in different ways. The boys were destined to be scholars, while the girls studied to be the wives of those scholars.
Give my mother some credit; as an early feminist, she couldn’t accept this division of academic labor. One day she dragged me into the principal’s office and vehemently complained that my schedule was filled with home economics, art, and piano lessons. “Where are the classes to train her in advanced mathematics and chemistry?” my mom asked angrily, clearly thinking of the future medical career she was planning for me. The rabbi cowered, Mom’s brand of domineering and beautiful too overwhelming for a pious man.
Poor rabbi. He didn’t stand a chance. The very next day, she pulled me out of yeshiva and enrolled me in the town’s most elite private middle school. However, she made it clear that there was another goal: my becoming a Jewish doctor was only the first step. I was also expected to MARRY a Jewish doctor one day.
That would not be so easy. While school was a breeze, my body was painfully slow to develop. My mother once told me, “Rory, sadly, you have not inherited my looks, but you did inherit your father’s brain. Academia will be your ticket in life.” My mother’s admonition that I was ugly and should simply forget about a social life was coming true, whether I liked it or not.
I waded uncomfortably through early adolescence, struggling with the inner tube that had accumulated along my midsection while my legs remained gangly. My body was in freakish prepubescence: an egg with legs.
I recalled covering my bedroom mirror with a sheet the way my relatives did while sitting shiva after funerals. The less I saw of that awkward creature staring at her reflection, the better.
As the end of the school year approached, I found myself being boisterously teased by my classmates. They had never accepted this strange alien from a “weird” school. And I was jealous and so insecure. With my pudgy face, frizzy sandy-brown hair, and crooked teeth imprisoned by heavy orthodontia, I just wanted to be pretty like the other girls, with their long, straight hair and perfect skin. I was ashamed of being this odd creature, and as a result, I barely opened my mouth. If the other kids would laugh just looking at me, I could just imagine how embarrassing it would be if I tried to talk through my braces.
One bad day, I made it through the infinite teasing of classmates and somehow held back the tears until I arrived home that afternoon, where I unburdened my tortured soul to my mother.
She repeated her useless mantra, barely making eye contact: “Rory, sweetheart, we have talked about this before. Some girls are destined for beauty. Those are the types that grow up to have men take care of them. Others live by their brains. You’re in the latter category. One day, you will become a doctor and stand on your own two feet, and boys won’t matter so much.”
I guess that was my mother’s attempt to protect me from an unforgiving world, but boys won’t matter? I wasn’t buying it. Despite being the classic book nerd, I wasn’t devoid of common sense.
From time immemorial, young males flooded with testosterone had believed that breasts held a sort of mythical power. Those girls who were robust in the chest department flaunted this power as a look-but-don’t-touch coquetry.
During adolescence, however, common sense didn’t help me understand the “rules of cool,” the natural process of being a part of the “in crowd.” In those hormone-charged years, I knew that there was only one way to anesthetize the emotional pain—I wanted in. Katy Perry breasts, Britney Spears midriff.
Yet how to attain cool-girl status from where I stood was still a mystery.
It wasn’t so mysterious where geeky boys and girls like me lived: band class. Playing second-row clarinet, I would stare longingly at Tommy Reed with his shiny brass trumpet; he was my first real crush, who dismissively ignored my puppy-eyed stares.
Aside from the onset of the monthly painful cramps, my fat, fleshy body with bite-sized breasts remained the same throughout middle school and the beginning of high school. In typical fashion, my mother offered a simple warning: keep your legs locked tight and ignore all boys who only have dirty things on their minds.
