Goodbye Stories from University Hospital

B Schiffer Randolph

Description

Goodbye Stories from University Hospital describes the journey of a young man from the infantry battlefields of Vietnam to becoming a physician in the major medical centers of the United States of America.The stories are of the relationships he has experienced along the way and of the lessons which came from those who faced the most difficult thing in life, which is the leaving of it.

Informations

• Publié par: Austin Macauley Publishers LLC
• Date de parution: 30 septembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781645366355
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Goodbye Stories from University Hospital
Randolph B. Schiffer
Austin Macauley Publishers
2019-09-30
Goodbye Stories from University Hospital About the Author About the Book Dedication Copyright © Randolph B. Schiffer (2019) Acknowledgement Introduction Chapter One Last Days and First Chapter Two And If a Single Child Should Die Chapter Three Words Chapter Four The Commune Girl Chapter Five The Woman in the Wheelchair Chapter Six I Bet I Killed More People Than You Have Chapter Seven June and Julie – Julie Chapter Eight June and Julie – June Chapter Nine L-Asparaginase Chapter Ten Eighty and Two Chapter Eleven The Last Story
About the Author
Randolph B. Schiffer graduated with Honors from Yale College in 1969. He served afterward as an infantry officer with the 1st and 3rd Marine Divisions in Vietnam and contiguous areas in Southeast Asia. Dr. Schiffer graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in 1976 and, afterward, completed residencies both in Psychiatry and Neurology. In his medical career, he directed the Ambulatory Care System at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York, held the Vernon and Elizabeth Haggerton Chair in Neurology at Texas Tech University, and was named the founding director of the Center for Brain Health at the Cleveland Clinic. He is the author of two medical books and more than one hundred and forty medical science publications. He is the only physician named in The Best Doctors in America in two separate specialties. He and his wife, Lynn Bickley, live in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he writes fiction and does private wealth management. They have two grown children, one of whom is an Air Force Weapons Defense Officer and one an Associate with J. P. Morgan.
About the Book
Goodbye Stories from University Hospital  describes the journey of a young man from the infantry battlefields of Vietnam to becoming a physician in the major medical centers of the United States of America. The stories are of the relationships he has experienced along the way and of the lessons which came from those who faced the most difficult thing in life, which is the leaving of it.
Dedication
These words are dedicated to Lynn Scott Bickley,
who gave the gifts
that made my life rhyme.
Copyright © Randolph B. Schiffer (2019)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.
Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Ordering Information:
Quantity sales: special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Schiffer, Randolph B.
Good Bye Stories from University Hospital
ISBN 9781641828963 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781641828970 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781645366355 (ePub e-book)
The main category of the book — FICTION / General
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019907933
www.austinmacauley.com/us
First Published (2019)
Austin Macauley Publishers LLC
40 Wall Street, 28th Floor
New York, NY 10005
USA
[e-mail]
[phone]
Acknowledgement
I would like to acknowledge the comments and advice of John A. Fisher and of Raphael Dolin in my struggle to produce this book.
Introduction
It has been a long time now since those days in university hospital.
Sometimes I look back on them and they seem so far away, sometimes not so far, and sometimes I am there again.
I see their faces still, the young and the old, the sick and the hurt; each one looking up to me as if to take him home. There were many of them.
It’s the goodbyes that I remember, the times when things were at their worst.
It was at those times that they taught me the lessons that they had to teach.
I have kept these lessons with me and now, before it is too late, I am writing them down.
They will not read this book, yet I cannot help but hope that if they could, they would say, yes. That’s the way it was; that’s the way we were.
What I owe to them I cannot pay, nor take it back, nor say it was not there, because they taught me to be a doctor, and that was the best gift of all.
What I can do is to write this small book, then here in the Introduction of it say to them, I hope that in your eyes at least the things I did in Medicine were good enough.
Randolph B. Schiffer
Chapter One

Last Days and First
“I’m sending you home, Lieutenant,” said the Major where we stood at dawn, looking out across the wire to the places where the dark valleys of Quang Nam Province rose westerly into the Que Sanh Mountains. “This is your last day in Vietnam,” he added.
It was cold there in the mornings in winter where the Marines were in those years in what they called the ‘I’ Corps of Vietnam. Gray mists rolled down at night from the Que Sanhs, and with the rolling mists came the enemy, silent, gliding down the pathways of the night they knew so well. They came to kill. At 3 AM they came, always at 3 AM.
They had come this night.
The gunfire and the colored tracers had moved across our wire-tied lines until 4 AM, when the Phantoms had come from DaNang to roaring scorch in darkness the coordinates of Combat Base Baldy where we were, dropping their napalm canisters awkward tumbling close along the edges out beyond the wire, and the fires had been lit which now still burned.
The Major and I had come out at first light, to see.
“I forwarded your request for extension here in country to Regiment, Lieutenant,” said the Major to me but not looking at me.
“Request denied,” I said. “‘Member to return to CONUS (Continental United States).’ That’s what I wrote on it.”
We watched the Quick Reaction Force (QRF) come out, silhouettes of men and helmets and rifles, first holding down the wire, then stepping over it, then moving out into the moon-scarred landscape of the free-fire zone beyond.
“That was shit, Lieutenant, what you did, trying to extend over here when you could go home,” said the Major, still looking out to where the napalm fires burned. “It just shows how fucked up you are.”
We watched the QRF guys spread out on line now, working their way into the rising ground of the burning ridgeline beyond. They carried their rifles at port arms, and from a distance they seemed very small, very slow.
“And you know what else about you was shit, Lieutenant?” said the Major and now he did turn to me, and I to him. “That talk of yours about going to medical school when you get back. That was shit, too.”
We both looked back to the ridgeline and the QRF guys, as the day grew lighter.
“You’ll never be a doctor, Lieutenant,” said the Major, perhaps to the QRF guys in the distance.
“Even if you can find some medical school dumb enough to take you…which I fucking doubt,” he continued, “Even if you did, it wouldn’t matter because you’ll always be here, Lieutenant, right here with me, where everything is shit.”
A jeep pulled up alongside.
“Get in the jeep, Lieutenant,” said the Major. “Smitty here is going to take you to DaNang. And he has orders to put you on the fucking freedom bird back to the world, and I hope I never see you again.”
Then, the Major turned his attention away from me, back to the forever drama of the war and the burning napalm fires across its distant stage.
*****
It turned out that the Major was mostly right for a very long time, until he was wrong.
I did get into a medical school but just one out of a long list. And even that one might have been more luck than anything else because in the entire class of over two hundred young men and women, there wasn’t a single other veteran; not just no other Vietnam veteran, but no other veteran at all, not even one who had done the Thursday-night drills at the neighborhood reserve unit to drink beer and avoid the draft.
It was the University of Michigan that I got into, my home state school.
It may also have been the way I did the interview for that school that got me in, because instead of wearing the uniform and telling the Gook stories and the way that napalm smells in the morning, this time I wore just the tee shirt under an old suitcoat and I said that after college, I had spent three years traveling in Asia, searching, but I didn’t tell them I had been searching for the Gooks. And then out there, one time there had come a great burning light in the sky—which was partly true—and then I had realized that my purpose in life would be to serve…to heal…to comfort…the sick…especially the poor sick… And I would work in a free clinic and wear suspenders… And though I might not make much money, yet still if I could become a doctor, I’d never have to get up in the morning…ever…and look in the mirror to wonder if my life were meaningful.
They accepted me to the Ann Arbor Medical School, so I went there, because there was no other place for me to go.
At the University of Michigan, I kept quiet about the things the Major had said and I stayed with myself. The four years passed without making a lot of memories that I can think of now, until it came time for graduation.
Now there, at the end, there did come a little…turbulence.
They selected me to give the commencement speech.
No one ever said why they did this, but I figured it probably was because of what had happened at the surgery oral examinations in the senior year.
In those days, the surgery clinical rotation at university hospital was sixteen weeks of degradation, pain, and exhaustion for the medical students, which caused some of them to cry or faint, especially the girls. The oral exa