Dr. Galen's Little Black Bag: Stories

R.A. Comunale M.D.

Description

In "Dr. Galen's Little Black Bag," we follow the man that Berto Galen, the boy from the New Jersey Tenements, has become, as he deals with the pleasures, traumas, and tragedies of life in the medical profession. Like R.A. Comunale's "Berto's World," it is a collection of stories, but together these stories create a portrait of someone who is deeply dedicated to healing–even as he struggles to heal the hurts and wounds he has suffered over a lifetime. And like the preceding collection, "Dr. Galen's Little Black Bag" presents basic human truths, dressed of necessity in the cloak of fiction.

Sujets

• Short Stories
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 05 octobre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780984651283
• Langue: English

Extrait

Dr. Galen’s
Little Black Bag
 
STORIES
 
 
R.A. Comunale, M.D .
 
 
M OUNTAIN L AKE P RESS
M OUNTAIN L AKE P ARK , M ARYLAND


 
Dr. Galen’s Little Black Bag
Copyright © 2011 R.A. Comunale
All Rights Reserved
Published in eBook format by
Mountain Lake Press
http://mountainlakepress.com
Converted by
http://www.eBookIt.com
ISBN 13: 978-0-9846512-8-3
Cover design by Michael Hentges
 
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.


ALSO BY R.A. COMUNA LE
Requiem for the Bone Man
The Legend of Safehaven
Berto’s World
Clover
 


 
 
To my long-suffering secretaries, Virginia and Barbara. Friends and consiglieres of unlimited wisdom, they’ve saved my ass more times than I can count.
 
PROLOGUE
 
Hey, Mistah, wanna buy a duck?
He don’ need no duck, kid. He’s a quack.
Hey, Rube!
 
I know that I’m old … over four score … but I’m not senile.
Just because I fall asleep in my chair, mouth open and snoring to beat the band, I still have all my faculties … I think.
So why the hell am I hearing voices?
I’m up here, Gazoonie!
It sits on my shelf, companion to the stuffed toy dog my beloved Leni brought me that last day of her life.
A black-leather doctor’s bag.
It sits there, mute testimony to over sixty years of interacting with the lives of countless patients.
Did I say mute?
Yeah, Galen, it’s me. You haven’t held me in a coon’s age, have you?
Like me it’s well-worn, the gold lettering on its side now faded and illegible; its surface scuffed and cracked.
Well, ain’t you curious, old man?
I rise from my chair. I reach up, take hold of the handles, sit back down and set it on my lap.
I open it. Its hinges creak stiffly, just like mine.
Inside I see my old friends: bottles, glass ampoules and rubber-stoppered vials with faded labels; worn metal gadgets that would make today’s doctors laugh at the primitive state of medicine once practiced. I do not remind them that such shamanism kept their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents alive to carry on their genetic whirlpool.
Now ya got it, old man. Remember?
Yes, I do. There’s the old scalpel I used in cadaver lab. Don’t know why I kept it. Never used it on anyone living … I think.
Hey, Galen, you really did a hatchet job on me, didn’t you? You got damned big fingers to go poking around my insides.
Harry? You here, too?
Patients who endured the fumbling of a medical student and survived; patients who became my friends and extended family; young patients who stroked my ego by following in my footsteps—all peering up at me from that bag.
Doc, look what ya made us do! Ya sure ya ain’t the devil?
Listen, guys, can I help it if you were foolish enough to become doctors? Crescenzi, Criswell, Shepland, all of you—admit it. You wanted it, too, didn’t you?
Yeah, and you were just some innocent recruiter, weren’t you? Come on, Doc, you conned us into it. We never got our seventy two virgins, either!
Heh, heh, so I lied, guys. Sue me!
I see other things as well: my passions, my loves, my failures and … my few successes? I see the rich, the poor, the famous and the unknown. In the end all shared the same human traits: the boy who shot himself in order to live; the child with Down’s syndrome, who understood more than most; the politicians whose idiosyncrasies would startle and disgust their followers, and the quiet lives of heroes and cowards.
I return it to my shelf, not-so-mute testimony to sixty years of my life.
My little black bag: the one life companion the Bone Man could not take from me.
—Robert Anthony Galen, M.D. (retired)
 
When Harry Met Sal
 
Hey, Berto, let me outta this damned thing!
Sal, is that you?
Sho’nuff, Dottore.
What the hell am I doing here, Sal?
Don’t you know, kid?
 
“Wake up, City Boy! No bad dreams today.”
My roommate, Dave, stood over me wearing only his birthday suit.
“Wha … what’s going on?”
I lay in a cold sweat, almost as naked as Dave, sprawled half in, half out of my dorm bed.
“You were yellin’ at somebody named Sal.”
I shook my head. I couldn’t get the image out of my mind: my dead friend Salvatore zipped up in a rubber body bag.
“Come on, roomie, let’s hit the showers. Can’t keep the dean waitin’!”
 
“Welcome, sons and daughters of Aesclepius!”
My mind’s eye sees them all: the extroverted, the silent, the hand shakers and the wallflowers. I remember the ones who made it through four years of medical boot camp and the ones who did not.
It was the first day—young men and women vibrating with an awareness of something indescribable—that magical first day of medical school, that first day of the rest of our lives.
Today’s young doctors tell me their initiation as acolytes of the son of Apollo began with a white-coat ceremony: Friends and family watch, while dignitaries bestow the traditional garb on each new student. Each dons it as a vestment of the priesthood he or she is about to enter, while the Oath of Hippocrates is recited by candlelight.
Youngsters! We had no such elegance. Neither did we share in a very wonderful and new tradition of honoring the memory of those who had bequeathed their bodies, so we could learn from the mortality of others.
No, we had the black bag.
We listened with half-baked attention, while the dean and other school officials welcomed us, but our eyes kept darting toward a row of tables at the side of the conference room.
There sat more than a hundred small, black-leather bags—real doctors’ bags—enticing and bewitching us with their silent siren call. Not fancy and not big. Those would come later; these were easily recognizable as student bags.
And yet—and yet—they held the tools of our future trade: a simple stethoscope, a little metal hammer with a triangular rubber head that made us giddy, as we laughed and tapped one another’s knees to watch the involuntary-reflex twitching, and more.
We had to buy the sphygmomanometers—aka blood-pressure cuffs—and the fancy flashlights called oto-ophthalmoscopes. We bruised our arms trying them out. We also nearly blinded ourselves by shining the white-and-green lights in our eyes, and we induced bleeding in our auditory canals, when we jammed the dark-green, plastic speculums into fellow students’ ears.
Do not laugh.
We clutched those bags tightly, as we walked back to our dormitories, ignoring the knowing smiles and outright derision of the upper classmen. We didn’t care.
“Ow! Damn it, Dave, go easy with the cuff!”
Dave assumed that maximum inflation was necessary in his first attempts to take my blood pressure. My arm was frequently numb and swollen.
“You’re burnin’ a hole in my retina, you moron!”
Ah, yes, the moron was me. My initial ineptitude at trying to visualize the back of the eye—the retina and the optic disc—gave him many a migraine.
Dave, whom I called Country Boy, and I served as guinea pigs for one another. We’d hold open our Textbook of Physical Diagnosis and listen and thump and blind each other in desperate attempts to imitate the “correct way” of examining patients. It didn’t matter that we still knew squat about the human body. It also didn’t matter that we were embarrassed to hell and back at the more intimate examinations, which were more painful than a baseball to the groin. We were playing doctor, and this time it was for real.
 
“Oh, God, today’s gross anatomy lab.”
My classmate Carol’s tiny voice quivered, as we trotted across the campus to that first lab session. Back then the gross anatomy lab was in a different building—a dirty red brick Civil War relic without air conditioning—and we arrived at the door out of breath.
“Hey, City Boy, what the hell are those things on the walls?”
I had to laugh. Dave was a weed-thin Lynchburg farm boy. If he had grown up in my tenement neighborhood back in Newark, and had gone to my ancient elementary school run by nuns, he would easily have recognized gaslight fixtures that predated the electric light.
A bald-headed gnome and a parrot-faced woman waited impatiently, until we settled down.
The gnome harrumphed.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m John Hedley. This is Mrs. Gertrude Gable, my assistant. There are some rules of behavior that we expect—no, demand—of you.”
Gable’s gravelly voice cut in.
“You will be assigned four to a table. You will wear your lab smocks and gloves at all times. I hope you are wearing shoes and clothes that you won’t miss at the end of the year. You won’t want to keep them.”
Dave and I looked quizzically at one another.
“What the hell is she talkin’ about?” he mouthed.
But Gravel Gertie was right; I still have my shoes. Sixty years later I can still smell the formaldehyde. It never did come out. The clothes and green smock are long gone, more the product of diet than a lack of sentimentality. I’m still good looking but not as svelte as I used to be.
“At no time will you be disrespectful of the bodies you will be working on. Treat them as you would want your own body to be treated.”
Hear that, kid? Did those police docs treat mine with respect?
Sal, you’re dead. You don’t belong here!
Can’t think of a better place for a dead guy to be, Berto.
I noticed Hedley staring at my name tag.
“Mr. Galen, did you have something to say?”
“Uh … no, sir. Sorry, sir.”
Hedley cast a baleful glance at me then held up a pudgy hand and pointed at us.
“If I catch any one being an ass, violating these bodies in any way, I will have you expelled right then and there. Do you understand?”
Was he looking right at me?
We nodded. Why would anyone even think of doing something as grotesque as violating a cadaver?
You are one dumb shit, Berto.
Get outta my head, Sal.
Unh- uh, kiddo. Just wait. You’ll be glad I’m here.
I was no stranger to death. My old neighborhood hosted a char