Snow:
Great for kids…another day off from school ~ Annoying for most of us…shovels full, bad backs, wet, sloppy ~ Awful for emergency responders!
I vividly recall the Blizzard of 1977. I had just begun a practice and was the busiest and youngest surgeon at Cabrini Hospital. The snow had piled up over several feet in drifts, burying my car. In Queens, where I was living at the time, the snowplows hadn’t even come through the residential streets. Cutbacks in manpower had plagued the Beame administration with a near bankruptcy of New York City. No one was going to travel or so I thought.
So naturally, at 9 a.m. I got a call from the Chief Resident in Surgery at Cabrini Hospital. He had abdominal pain, in the middle of his stomach since 10 the night before. He experienced vomiting and now the pain was severe but localized to the right lower quadrant and was becoming more intense. He had an elevated white count, and a fever of 101. Classic appendicitis, and he insisted that I was the ONLY one who he would allow to operate on him.
When the snow drifts on the road are higher than your car bumper, it’s not terribly wise to try to drive. “It’s only an appendix…can’t you get someone else to operate on you?” I guess it was time to begin my trek through the blizzard. Calling the local precinct (this was before I became a police surgeon), I explained the situation. They would have a car meet me at a plowed major intersection and transport me to the nearest subway. Mushing through the drifts, I got into the police car. Seeing how miserable I looked with my trek, the officers transported me all the way to the hospital, lights flashing.
A successful appendectomy had my chief resident back at work in a week. In those days you would make a small cut to get the appendix out. Fortunately, the appendix hadn’t ruptured, although it was obviously heading in that direction when I took it out.
This wouldn’t be the last dangerous, difficult or trying situation when emergency calls would drag me out of the house or away from family events. But when you gotta go, you gotta go. It’s all in the contract called “physician.” It made life quite interesting.
Read all about them in my book…Life on the Thin Blue Line, Tales of the NYPD Executive Chief Surgeon.
