Walk on the Wild Side - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,87
me in her lap. The pediatrician was in front of us, talking to me in a soothing tone. The nurse crept up behind me with the hypodermic needle. My mother was supposed to hold me tight. The nurse would give the injection and pull out the needle, quick as a wink, all over and done, and then I could shriek as much as I liked.
“This is, of course, a hell of a way to establish physician-patient trust, but doctors in the 1940s were more pragmatic. If Mother had held my arm tightly, it probably would have worked. However, she didn’t have a firm grip. I was a strong child. I jerked my arm away. The needle went all the way through my arm and broke off.
“So I sat in my mother’s lap, screaming, a needle protruding from the side of my arm. These were the old days, when needles and syringes were sterilized and used over and again. The needle that protruded from my arm seemed to me as large as a ten-penny nail. The nurse stood helplessly. Mother screamed. The doctor moved swiftly and grasped the protruding point with forceps, pulling the needle on through.
“After that I was given a tetanus shot.”
Marcia rubbed goose pimples from her arms. “After that you must have been a handful.”
Grant finally sipped at his beer. “I’d hide under beds. Run away. They kept doctor appointments secret after a while. I never knew whether a supposed trip to the grocery store might really be a typhoid shot or a polio shot.”
“But you got over it when you grew up?” Freddie urged.
“When I was sixteen or so,” Grant said, “I cut my foot on a shell at the beach. My folks insisted that I have a tetanus shot. I flew into a panic, bawling, kicking, disgracing myself in front of everyone. But they still made me get the shot. I wonder if my parents ever knew how much I hated them.”
“But surely,” said Marcia, “it was for your own good.”
“How can someone else decide what is your own good?”
Grant decided his beer was awful and set it aside. He drank only rarely, but tonight seemed to be a night for confessions. “So,” he said. “The old ‘identification with the aggressor’ story, I suppose. I became a physician.”
Freddie removed his tie and shoved it into a pocket. He offered them cigarettes, managed to light one for himself.
“So how’d you ever manage to give anybody a shot?”
“Learning to draw blood was very difficult for me. We were supposed to practice on each other one day, but I cut that lab. I went to the beach for a day or two, told them I’d had a family emergency.”
Marcia waved away Freddie’s cigarette smoke. She remembered Grant as the class clown, his blue eyes always bright with ready laughter. She cringed as she remembered.
Grant continued. “Third-year med students were expected to draw blood from the patients. They could have used experienced staff, but this was part of our initiation ritual. Hazing for us, hell for the patients.
“So I go in to draw blood. First time. I tie off this woman’s arm with a rubber hose, pat the old antecubital fossa looking for a vein, jab away with a needle, still searching, feel the pop as I hit the vein, out comes the bright red into the syringe, I pull out the needle—and blood goes everywhere because I hadn’t released the tourniquet. ‘Oops!’ I say as the patient in the next bed watches in horror; she’s next in line.
“Well, after a few dozen tries at this I got better at it-but the tasks got worse. There were the private patients as opposed to those on the wards; often VIPs, with spouses and family scowling down at you as you try to pop the vein first try.
“Then there’s the wonderful arterial stick, for when you need blood gases. You use this great thick needle, and you feel around the inside of the thigh for a femoral pulse, then you jab the thing in like an ice pick. An artery makes a crunch when you strike it, and you just hope you’ve pierced through and not gouged along its thick muscular wall. No need for a tourniquet; the artery is under pressure, and the blood pulses straight into the syringe. You run with it to the lab, and your assistant stays there maybe ten minutes, forcing pressure against the site so the artery doesn’t squirt blood all through the surrounding tissue.”