Hospital Read Online Free Page B

Pfeifer told him she had been thinking about doing postdoctoral work at Columbia or New York University. So after Gregorius had already sent out twenty-five applications to hospital residency programs, she said to him, “Why don’t you send a couple to New York?”
    Later he remembered picking Mount Sinai because one of his teachers in medical school had gone there. As he recalled, “The other one was obviously Maimonides, but I really don’t remember picking it,” he said. “I thought I put Methodist. I thought I put some kind of M. But the whole application process is clicking on computers, you know? Click, click. When I got the e-mail back inviting me for an interview to Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, whatever, I went WHAT? But I still went. I thought, I’ve never been to New York, I’ll check it out.”
    He traveled on the overnight flight from Phoenix, landing bleary-eyed in New York on a cold Sunday morning in December. He spent the day in Manhattan, staying with a friend on the Upper West Side. She showed him Times Square, Central Park, the usual tourist stuff. On Monday morning he took the subway to Borough Park, crossing the East River, away from the Manhattan skyline toward Brooklyn, once described by another transplanted midwesterner, Ian Frazier, as having “the undefined, hard-to-remember shape of a stain”—in other words, a place you wanted to be from, not head toward. In recent years, however, the real-estate craze in Manhattan had given the borough new definition, no longer stain but hot spot for the disenfranchised young people who couldn’t afford the East Village or Lower East Side and for cramped, growing families looking for bigger spaces, more sky, yards.
    Gregorius, born in Missouri but raised in Nebraska—fifth generation at least—had a vague TV- and movie-inspired notion of Brooklyn “as a knife and guns place.” When he disembarked from the D train, he was relieved to find himself in a safe-looking (only slightly shabby) neighborhood, with rows of two- and three-story houses and little stores—newsstands, flower shops, delis, bakeries, and shoe-repair places—some of them displaying signs with Hebrew lettering.
    On the short walk from the elevated subway tracks to the hospital, he passed worried-looking bearded men dressed in long black coats and large black hats and young women wearing matronly clothes and herding large groups of children. There were black people whose words floated by with a Caribbean lilt and Pakistanis with bright scarves sticking out from under winter coats. He didn’t pay much attention; he was mentally preparing for his interview with John Marshall, the residency program director.
    They hit it off. Marshall was balding but youthful, a calm man with dark, penetrating eyes, who seemed intellectual yet also knew how to have fun. He was thirty-seven, from Detroit, had been in the air force, and was a passionate downhill skier. What a coincidence! Gregorius had fantasized about becoming a fighter pilot but quit the Naval Academy at Annapolis when he was told his less-than-perfect eyesight nixed that ambition. He transferred to the University of Colorado at Boulder and reverted to his back-burner dream, being a doctor (like his dad). And yes, he would figure out how to combine work with pleasure. Maybe a job in an emergency room in the Colorado mountains, maybe two or three shifts a week. Make that an emergency room in Vail, add ski patrol a couple of days, leaving time for fishing twice a week.
    The hospital in Borough Park did not fit Davey’s blithe vision of work hard, play hard. His memories of his first foray into the Maimonides emergency room were vague: It was crowded. Really crowded. Stretchers with patients were lined up two and three deep, with the lucky ones semisecluded behind curtains that barely closed. He noticed but didn’t fully comprehend that the melting-pot mayhem—Hasids, Chinese, Pakistanis, Haitians, Russians, Bulgarians—did