Norm
Wizard
The Great Cookie Caper
After attending Mount Sinai Medical School in New York I accepted an internship at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx. My wife to be was going to be an intern at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. After travelling to see her every third weekend that first year of internship I decided to try to complete my residency in Boston, where we would then be married. I applied to several programs and as luck would have it, a spot opened up at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge Massachusetts.
Internship is tough. It’s like the “basic training” in the military, meant to bring you near the breaking point, then build you back up to the person they the institution believes you ought to be. Or not to be…that is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or take arms against a sea of troubles…A Møøse once bit my sister ...
No realli! She was Karving her initials on the møøse
with the sharpened end of an interspace tøøthbrush given
her by Svenge - her brother-in-law - an Oslo dentist and
star of many Norwegian møvies: "The Høt Hands of an Oslo
Dentist", "Fillings of Passion", "The Huge Mølars of Horst
Nordfink".
We apologise for the fault in the
subtitles. Those responsible have been
sacked.
Mynd you, møøse bites Kan be pretty nasti...
We apologise again for the fault in the subtitles. Those
responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked
have been sacked.
sorry, now where was I? Oh yea, basic training. Of course, every training program was different, some harder than others. Montefiore included time spent at North Central Bronx Hospital, not a bad place if you’re a canine but otherwise I’d steer clear. Montefiore’s training program was the equivalent of “hard time” at a tough prison. Mount Auburn was like the country club gigs where the likes of Martha Stewart “served” time. I came to Mount Auburn having completed the toughest year of training in one of the meanest programs in the country. So, needless to say, the new interns at Mount Auburn thought I was God.
You could be God at that hospital. I mean cushy doesn’t begin to describe the place. At Montefiore I worked for 36 hours straight, collected blood, urine, and stool samples myself, prepared the microscopic slides, interpreted the slides, ran the blood analysis machines, and pushed my own patients on a stretcher from test to test. If a street person came into the emergency room with maggots guess who got to put them in the shower and clean them up. We used to hand them 3 bucks to turn around and hit the street before they registered…if we got to them first. At Mount Auburn I could order all this stuff from the “Doctor’s Lounge” while I watched color TV and had a snack from the hospital deli. Needless to say, I liked Mount Auburn.
A second year resident was usually assigned 2-3 interns. At Mount Auburn I had three. Two of my three just happened to be the most beautiful women medical students to just graduate Harvard Med School. The third, was a gangly fellow from a poor working class neighborhood. Good natured and witty he had a heavy heart that year as his dad, and best friend, was dying. Of course I liked him from the start.
One evening, one very unusual evening, my three interns were being pounded with admissions. Admissions were sick people that the emergency room physician deemed sick enough to require hospitalization. Nowadays there are limits as to how many patients any intern can be required to take on. That’s because more than a few people died in the charge of overworked, overtired, and distracted interns. In those days, whatever team was on call took as many admissions as came to them during a 24 hour period.
Not to stereotype but my two women interns, both named Karen actually, became tearful after their 10 admissions each, with no end in sight. Paul, the sole man, became agitated and depressed. I wish he would have just cried; it may have been easier on him. Being the user friendly second year resident I was I helped with their chores as much as I could. I even went to the ER resident and gave him the “Sieve vs. Wall” lecture explaining that the great residents of the Bronx allowed no one in the hospital. They were affectionately known as “Walls.” The weak resident’s admitted every sniffle and paper cut. They were known non-affectionately as “sieves.” “Right!” he shouted, and continued letting the walking wounded shack up in our confines like we were a Holiday Inn Express. We’re not in the Bronx any more Toto.
So, there was only one thing left to do: When the going gets tough in the Bronx, the tough play stickball. Stickball is a game that was essentially born in the streets of New York. There were different ways to play, bounce, fast pitch, sewers, but the way I brought with me from Brooklyn was fast pitch, against a brick wall, where the strike zone was completely chalked out. That way, when the ball hit it there would be a plume of smoke and no denying what was a strike and what was a ball. The ball, as every good New Yorker knows, was a “Spaldene.” Really, it was a “Spaulding High Bounce Ball,” a smallish hollow rubber and pink ball. Even when it broke in half, as it was apt to do after many hard hits, we used the halves, as flying saucers, and pitched them in. 25 cents was a lot of money back then, a lot of returned bottles and cans for the half penny deposit. So we made do.
And making do is what I had to do this night. There was no Spaldene. There was no broom stick, our usual stickball bat. Looking back, what I should have gotten in trouble for was taping together two chest tubes. These were fifty bucks apiece back then, no small change for a hospital trying to stick to budget at the emergence of HMO’s in the ‘80’s. I would have even understood if I got yelled at for chalking up the cafeteria wall, which lucky or unlucky for us, happened to be made of brick. I could even understand being chided for throwing an entire pound of heavy hospital white tape rolled up in a tight ball against the brick wall at 60 MPH while a chalk fog rolled over the denizens of this eatery in the wee hours of the morning.
But no! I got in trouble for something far worse: stealing cookies! Forum members, let this be fair warning: don’t let your children steal cookies…from anywhere!
You see, it went like this: Paul was pitching to me. The two Karens were gleefully playing the outfield. Attending doctors (full fledged doctors, checking on their patients) passing through laughed like kids and asked if they could join us. A cardiologist asked if he could join the Karens in the outfield. Everyone knows a good resident looks after his interns so I told him he could play the field but to keep his hands off my Karens. Our patients continued not dying in the ER or in their rooms. Everyone was a winner. And then Paul threw a cut fastball, which naturally shattered my chest tube bat to the tune of $100 (have I mentioned that nobody cared about the chest tubes?) and the “ball” slithered sideways and went under a cage that blocked the entrance to the ovens, food line, and, wait for it…snacks, and…COOKIES!
So there we were, despondent over the loss of our ball. That ball took time to create. I mean we had smoothed it out and rubbed it in just right. It wasn’t going to be easy to replace, and then, a miracle: the gate, it seems, was made of aluminum foil…or so it felt. Paul had grabbed the bottom of it and it just bent up. Could you imagine a bank vault using the same alloy? Brilliant! So underneath we went and retrieved our ball. And when we stood up our eyes caught hold of one of the most special sights an intern can hope to see while incarcerated within the confines of a hospital: free cookies, and cupcakes, and devil dogs, and twinkies! Jackpot! We have a winner! While the Karens giggled from the other side of dessert nirvana Paul and I loaded up the goodies by holding out our scrub bottoms and using them as a pouch.
Our next move proved fateful. We decided that our added ballast would not make the trip back under the gates of cookieville so we simply “walked” out the back door. Which was alarmed. Never before and never since have The Mount Auburn Security guards arrived at a call in under 10 minutes. But that day, their most physically fit guard, at merely 60 pounds overweight, answered the call for stolen cookies in 30 seconds. Brilliant!
Joe, the hospital security guard took our names and inventoried the stolen goods. He didn’t care for any explanations; and why would he? The marsupial twins had the goods gleaming in their plastic packages and spilling over the brim of their makeshift pouches. And two stupid grins, which complimented the pouches nicely I might add. After taking possession of Hostess’s finest we were dismissed by Boston’s un-finest.
The Karens having long ago forgotten their woes, and their patients, pondered our immediate future:
Karen 1 (laughing): Norm, don’t look so glum! It’s just cookies. That guy was an idiot.
Karen 2 (laughing): Yea (fatefully), no one will ever know!
Norm: (hard gulp)
Paul: (finally crying)
Well, in the Bronx I would have worked right through the next evening. And in the Bronx, some security guy named Joe wouldn’t have shaken me down for my stolen stash of cookies. But we weren’t in the Bronx, were we? So the next morning, as per club med protocols at this training facility, I went home. I fell asleep, hungry I might add because I lost my taste for the sweets when Joe came along and would have slept quite soundly, had my wife not woken me to tell me the vice chairman, Charlie, was on the phone.
Charlie wasn’t in a good mood it seems. That wasn’t the surprise because Charlie rarely was in a good mood. Wanting me to return to Mount Auburn after working 24 hours was a surprise, rather harsh for these parts. So I coffee’d myself up and returned to the scene of the crime. The secretary, with a devilish grin, waved me on into Charlie’s inner sanctum. This was normally a place where, in better times, Charlie would gush over my superior skills as a resident, which he attributed to me having a proper training in one of America’s few remaining “real” residency programs: the Bronx. That was where he trained, of course.
But not today. Today he was red faced, shouting something about “How could you” and “I was so proud of you” and “I knew that intern Paul was an idiot” and I took it all but had to stop him there. “Charlie, it was my idea, not Paul’s. Please don’t punish him.” A good resident takes the fall for their interns, especially if he put them up to the crime to begin with. Charlie didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t want to hear me. But it was at the end of the tirade that he betrayed himself, when he uttered his thoughts out loud: “What were the guards to think, two budding doctors in our fine training program, about to make millions in practice, stealing cookies?”
He then outlined my punishment, which it seemed he had already given Paul. First I was to apologize to the chairman. Then it was off to the guard headquarters, a shack in back of the hospital, where it was rumored dozens of morbidly obese men in blue uniforms infested an otherwise benign looking structure. No un-uniformed, non-obese person had ever set foot in that shack. That got my attention but was quickly forgotten when Charlie read off my final punishment: No paycheck for one week!
Most of this country lives paycheck to paycheck and interns and residents are no exception. I moaned and whined but Charlie heard none of it as he sent me out of his office and pointed to the path toward the chairman, like the munchkins pointed to the yellow brick road for Dorothy, and when I arrived quite alone, with no lion, no tin man, and no scarecrow to ease my anxieties the kind octogenarian secretary waved me to the kind octogenarian chairman.
Ron was a benevolent ruler. He always smiled and patted our heads gently, like we were golden retrievers, even if we screwed up. We could kill someone and he’d still smile, pat our heads, and give us a coupon for a free lunch at the cafeteria. So I really couldn’t see this man losing it over a few cookies, quite literally, or a lot of cookies as the case may be. He smiled his kind smile as I entered. He waved me to a nice comfortable chair. I sat down.
Ron: Wow, Charlie’s really steamed about this huh?
Norm: Yes Ron. Anything you could do to help me out? I don’t think I can make it a week with no pay
Ron: Hmmm. I got a few coupons for the cafeteria (handing them over).
Norm: Thanks Ron, but I was kind of thinking of getting my paycheck back.
Ron: Yea, I think he’s being much too harsh. I’ll work on it Norm.
And then, like all good old people, his thoughts roamed and he muttered aloud “Cookies” and began to laugh hysterically. Really, I thought the guy was gonna die and one final thought as he walked out the door:
Ron: Norm, you always manage to crack us all up
But I wasn’t laughing today. Not with a few cafeteria coupons and no paycheck. I already tried cherry picking the best that cafeteria had to offer anyway. And now it was off to the guard shack where I believe a sign above read “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” I walked in and saw…just what I had always thought: 20 fat guys in drab blue uniforms eating pizza and having a good ole time. All the while ignoring the dozens of flashing red lights on the lone console in the room. Why couldn’t they have ignored it last night? They all hushed up and focused forward, to me, and the chief guard, a man of prodigious proportions.
Chief Guard: Hey, you must be Doc Miller?
Norm: In the flesh. Call me Norm.
CG: Sure Doc. So what brings you to our fine establishment?
Norm: I thought you knew?
CG: Sure we know. We just wanted to hear you say: “I stole cookies.”
And with that all 20 guards laughed so hard I couldn’t tell if they were having a group session heart attack or a good time.
CG: I mean really doc, cookies?
Norm: Uh, its just Norm, and yea, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I’m really sorry that officer Joe had to…
CG: (interrupting me) Officer Joe? That numbnuts? I fired him. (20 guards are again laughing out of control.
Norm: You fired him?
CG: Of course. What kind of an idiot guard reports a doctor for taking some cookies? Hell, we might need one of you guys one day (I’m thinking even sooner than he thinks) and then where’d we be?
Norm: Well that seems a little harsh.
CG: Nonsense! (shouting). Besides, the moron made us look bad; answering the red lights when they first light up! We had a good story going here: the wiring to the shack was bad and all and “we never saw the light.” To which, you guessed it: they all cracked up again.
Norm: So, ah, we good here?
CG: Of course doc
And I turned and began to walk out when I heard a snickering among the pack of guards and the chief stopped me:
CG: Say doc, before you go I was wondering if you’d answer a question?
Norm: Of course
CG: You see, the guards and me, we had a bet we were hoping you would settle. We just wanted to know who had the idea to walk out the alarmed door when you could have just rolled back under the aluminum foil gate. Was it you, or doc Paul.
And to be honest, I couldn’t remember whose idea it was. But a resident always protects his interns and I told him it was me, to which half the guards, including the chief, began to squeal with delight. The chief defied gravity a jumped out of his chair and smacked me, good naturedly of course, on the back:
CG: Doc, I mean Norm, you just made me a rich man! Come get me later, we’ll gout for beer.
And with that money began changing hands reminiscent of 20 portly tellers at a bank.
I did walk out now and from the back of the shack I heard someone bellow: “Man I think those doktas is even stupider than me. The chief immediately rebuked him but I couldn’t get the thought out of my head. In fact, as I thought about it on my walk back to the house of humans there probably wasn’t a stupider doctor on the face of the earth. Even the lowly cruise ship doctor, bereft of any country’s blessing to practice medicine on solid land, would have waited till morning to swipe some cookies from the ship’s cafeteria, when no alarms would sound.
My day’s indignities complete I returned home and took stock of my Kraft macaroni and cheese, as that’s what I’d be living off for the next week. I told the landlord I’d be a little late with the months rent but since I’d treated his daughter when she had an ear infection he told me not to worry and handed me some of his homemade gazpacho soup. Nice family, I thought to myself.
The next day I arrived at work to an interesting sight. Some of the interns and residents were sitting outside Charlie’s office. One of them jumped up when he saw me:
Intern: Norm, we heard what happened. We’re each going in there and telling Charlie off! We’ll get your paycheck back.
Seems word travelled fast.
Norm: Uh, that’s really nice of you but I don’t think he’s going to change his mind
Intern: You leave that to us Norm.
The exuberant intern put a little smile on my face because he reminded me how wonderfully naïve I myself was, just one year ago. But we must all grow up. And as grown-ups we must take responsibility for our actions. I hunted down Paul and the momentary good feelings the intern had imparted left me when I talked to Paul. He told me Charlie had used the cookie thing as a springboard to express all his disappointments in him, as an intern, and a doctor. He also told me his dad was about to die. I sent him home to attend to his dad and promised Charlie would not get the best of him. Why I did this only God knows because I had no such special powers.
Or did I? The next day 5 interns and residents turned into 20 and the day after that 20 became 50, with signs that read “Give Norm and Paul their paychecks” and even the heavy guards got in on the act. But Charlie’s heart was hardened. Maybe he needed the money. Maybe he was embarrassed. Maybe he was just trying to teach us a lesson. I guess I’ll never know what went through Charlie’s head that day. That was, until Lenny, the attending cardiologist who played outfield that day with the Karens ,and Mount Auburn’s biggest money maker, walked into Charlie’s office. I know what Charlie felt then: fear.
Lenny walked out of the office and straight to me with a big grin on his face:
Lenny: Hey Norm, why so glum?
Norm: You know Lenny, the cookie thing!
Lenny: (smiling, not really even hearing me) Yea, that was hilarious: Chest tube stickball! Can we play again tonight?
And with that he started to walk away and then, as if an afterthought just came upon him:
Lenny: Oh, and I spoke to Charie. You’ll be getting your paycheck back.
He went on his way but was still giggling and muttering to no one in particular “chest tube stickball: Brilliant!” I knew Lenny didn’t “speak” to Charlie. Lenny didn’t “speak” to anyone when he wanted something. He shouted. And when Lenny shouted people listened. Not only did I get my paycheck back, I got a letter from Charlie himself, saying he was really sorry and, it seems, he went overboard and no one should get so upset about some cookies, and I raised the morale of my interns that night, who so desperately needed the encouragement, and how resourceful I was, and how all the interns and residents think so much of me and even he thought so much of me and it was all obviously because I trained at a “real” residency in the Bronx. Interestingly we got our paychecks back because of Lenny. But it was good old kind hearted Ron, the chairman, who ripped Charlie a new one and made him write the letter. Brilliant!
After attending Mount Sinai Medical School in New York I accepted an internship at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx. My wife to be was going to be an intern at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. After travelling to see her every third weekend that first year of internship I decided to try to complete my residency in Boston, where we would then be married. I applied to several programs and as luck would have it, a spot opened up at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge Massachusetts.
Internship is tough. It’s like the “basic training” in the military, meant to bring you near the breaking point, then build you back up to the person they the institution believes you ought to be. Or not to be…that is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or take arms against a sea of troubles…A Møøse once bit my sister ...
No realli! She was Karving her initials on the møøse
with the sharpened end of an interspace tøøthbrush given
her by Svenge - her brother-in-law - an Oslo dentist and
star of many Norwegian møvies: "The Høt Hands of an Oslo
Dentist", "Fillings of Passion", "The Huge Mølars of Horst
Nordfink".
We apologise for the fault in the
subtitles. Those responsible have been
sacked.
Mynd you, møøse bites Kan be pretty nasti...
We apologise again for the fault in the subtitles. Those
responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked
have been sacked.
sorry, now where was I? Oh yea, basic training. Of course, every training program was different, some harder than others. Montefiore included time spent at North Central Bronx Hospital, not a bad place if you’re a canine but otherwise I’d steer clear. Montefiore’s training program was the equivalent of “hard time” at a tough prison. Mount Auburn was like the country club gigs where the likes of Martha Stewart “served” time. I came to Mount Auburn having completed the toughest year of training in one of the meanest programs in the country. So, needless to say, the new interns at Mount Auburn thought I was God.
You could be God at that hospital. I mean cushy doesn’t begin to describe the place. At Montefiore I worked for 36 hours straight, collected blood, urine, and stool samples myself, prepared the microscopic slides, interpreted the slides, ran the blood analysis machines, and pushed my own patients on a stretcher from test to test. If a street person came into the emergency room with maggots guess who got to put them in the shower and clean them up. We used to hand them 3 bucks to turn around and hit the street before they registered…if we got to them first. At Mount Auburn I could order all this stuff from the “Doctor’s Lounge” while I watched color TV and had a snack from the hospital deli. Needless to say, I liked Mount Auburn.
A second year resident was usually assigned 2-3 interns. At Mount Auburn I had three. Two of my three just happened to be the most beautiful women medical students to just graduate Harvard Med School. The third, was a gangly fellow from a poor working class neighborhood. Good natured and witty he had a heavy heart that year as his dad, and best friend, was dying. Of course I liked him from the start.
One evening, one very unusual evening, my three interns were being pounded with admissions. Admissions were sick people that the emergency room physician deemed sick enough to require hospitalization. Nowadays there are limits as to how many patients any intern can be required to take on. That’s because more than a few people died in the charge of overworked, overtired, and distracted interns. In those days, whatever team was on call took as many admissions as came to them during a 24 hour period.
Not to stereotype but my two women interns, both named Karen actually, became tearful after their 10 admissions each, with no end in sight. Paul, the sole man, became agitated and depressed. I wish he would have just cried; it may have been easier on him. Being the user friendly second year resident I was I helped with their chores as much as I could. I even went to the ER resident and gave him the “Sieve vs. Wall” lecture explaining that the great residents of the Bronx allowed no one in the hospital. They were affectionately known as “Walls.” The weak resident’s admitted every sniffle and paper cut. They were known non-affectionately as “sieves.” “Right!” he shouted, and continued letting the walking wounded shack up in our confines like we were a Holiday Inn Express. We’re not in the Bronx any more Toto.
So, there was only one thing left to do: When the going gets tough in the Bronx, the tough play stickball. Stickball is a game that was essentially born in the streets of New York. There were different ways to play, bounce, fast pitch, sewers, but the way I brought with me from Brooklyn was fast pitch, against a brick wall, where the strike zone was completely chalked out. That way, when the ball hit it there would be a plume of smoke and no denying what was a strike and what was a ball. The ball, as every good New Yorker knows, was a “Spaldene.” Really, it was a “Spaulding High Bounce Ball,” a smallish hollow rubber and pink ball. Even when it broke in half, as it was apt to do after many hard hits, we used the halves, as flying saucers, and pitched them in. 25 cents was a lot of money back then, a lot of returned bottles and cans for the half penny deposit. So we made do.
And making do is what I had to do this night. There was no Spaldene. There was no broom stick, our usual stickball bat. Looking back, what I should have gotten in trouble for was taping together two chest tubes. These were fifty bucks apiece back then, no small change for a hospital trying to stick to budget at the emergence of HMO’s in the ‘80’s. I would have even understood if I got yelled at for chalking up the cafeteria wall, which lucky or unlucky for us, happened to be made of brick. I could even understand being chided for throwing an entire pound of heavy hospital white tape rolled up in a tight ball against the brick wall at 60 MPH while a chalk fog rolled over the denizens of this eatery in the wee hours of the morning.
But no! I got in trouble for something far worse: stealing cookies! Forum members, let this be fair warning: don’t let your children steal cookies…from anywhere!
You see, it went like this: Paul was pitching to me. The two Karens were gleefully playing the outfield. Attending doctors (full fledged doctors, checking on their patients) passing through laughed like kids and asked if they could join us. A cardiologist asked if he could join the Karens in the outfield. Everyone knows a good resident looks after his interns so I told him he could play the field but to keep his hands off my Karens. Our patients continued not dying in the ER or in their rooms. Everyone was a winner. And then Paul threw a cut fastball, which naturally shattered my chest tube bat to the tune of $100 (have I mentioned that nobody cared about the chest tubes?) and the “ball” slithered sideways and went under a cage that blocked the entrance to the ovens, food line, and, wait for it…snacks, and…COOKIES!
So there we were, despondent over the loss of our ball. That ball took time to create. I mean we had smoothed it out and rubbed it in just right. It wasn’t going to be easy to replace, and then, a miracle: the gate, it seems, was made of aluminum foil…or so it felt. Paul had grabbed the bottom of it and it just bent up. Could you imagine a bank vault using the same alloy? Brilliant! So underneath we went and retrieved our ball. And when we stood up our eyes caught hold of one of the most special sights an intern can hope to see while incarcerated within the confines of a hospital: free cookies, and cupcakes, and devil dogs, and twinkies! Jackpot! We have a winner! While the Karens giggled from the other side of dessert nirvana Paul and I loaded up the goodies by holding out our scrub bottoms and using them as a pouch.
Our next move proved fateful. We decided that our added ballast would not make the trip back under the gates of cookieville so we simply “walked” out the back door. Which was alarmed. Never before and never since have The Mount Auburn Security guards arrived at a call in under 10 minutes. But that day, their most physically fit guard, at merely 60 pounds overweight, answered the call for stolen cookies in 30 seconds. Brilliant!
Joe, the hospital security guard took our names and inventoried the stolen goods. He didn’t care for any explanations; and why would he? The marsupial twins had the goods gleaming in their plastic packages and spilling over the brim of their makeshift pouches. And two stupid grins, which complimented the pouches nicely I might add. After taking possession of Hostess’s finest we were dismissed by Boston’s un-finest.
The Karens having long ago forgotten their woes, and their patients, pondered our immediate future:
Karen 1 (laughing): Norm, don’t look so glum! It’s just cookies. That guy was an idiot.
Karen 2 (laughing): Yea (fatefully), no one will ever know!
Norm: (hard gulp)
Paul: (finally crying)
Well, in the Bronx I would have worked right through the next evening. And in the Bronx, some security guy named Joe wouldn’t have shaken me down for my stolen stash of cookies. But we weren’t in the Bronx, were we? So the next morning, as per club med protocols at this training facility, I went home. I fell asleep, hungry I might add because I lost my taste for the sweets when Joe came along and would have slept quite soundly, had my wife not woken me to tell me the vice chairman, Charlie, was on the phone.
Charlie wasn’t in a good mood it seems. That wasn’t the surprise because Charlie rarely was in a good mood. Wanting me to return to Mount Auburn after working 24 hours was a surprise, rather harsh for these parts. So I coffee’d myself up and returned to the scene of the crime. The secretary, with a devilish grin, waved me on into Charlie’s inner sanctum. This was normally a place where, in better times, Charlie would gush over my superior skills as a resident, which he attributed to me having a proper training in one of America’s few remaining “real” residency programs: the Bronx. That was where he trained, of course.
But not today. Today he was red faced, shouting something about “How could you” and “I was so proud of you” and “I knew that intern Paul was an idiot” and I took it all but had to stop him there. “Charlie, it was my idea, not Paul’s. Please don’t punish him.” A good resident takes the fall for their interns, especially if he put them up to the crime to begin with. Charlie didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t want to hear me. But it was at the end of the tirade that he betrayed himself, when he uttered his thoughts out loud: “What were the guards to think, two budding doctors in our fine training program, about to make millions in practice, stealing cookies?”
He then outlined my punishment, which it seemed he had already given Paul. First I was to apologize to the chairman. Then it was off to the guard headquarters, a shack in back of the hospital, where it was rumored dozens of morbidly obese men in blue uniforms infested an otherwise benign looking structure. No un-uniformed, non-obese person had ever set foot in that shack. That got my attention but was quickly forgotten when Charlie read off my final punishment: No paycheck for one week!
Most of this country lives paycheck to paycheck and interns and residents are no exception. I moaned and whined but Charlie heard none of it as he sent me out of his office and pointed to the path toward the chairman, like the munchkins pointed to the yellow brick road for Dorothy, and when I arrived quite alone, with no lion, no tin man, and no scarecrow to ease my anxieties the kind octogenarian secretary waved me to the kind octogenarian chairman.
Ron was a benevolent ruler. He always smiled and patted our heads gently, like we were golden retrievers, even if we screwed up. We could kill someone and he’d still smile, pat our heads, and give us a coupon for a free lunch at the cafeteria. So I really couldn’t see this man losing it over a few cookies, quite literally, or a lot of cookies as the case may be. He smiled his kind smile as I entered. He waved me to a nice comfortable chair. I sat down.
Ron: Wow, Charlie’s really steamed about this huh?
Norm: Yes Ron. Anything you could do to help me out? I don’t think I can make it a week with no pay
Ron: Hmmm. I got a few coupons for the cafeteria (handing them over).
Norm: Thanks Ron, but I was kind of thinking of getting my paycheck back.
Ron: Yea, I think he’s being much too harsh. I’ll work on it Norm.
And then, like all good old people, his thoughts roamed and he muttered aloud “Cookies” and began to laugh hysterically. Really, I thought the guy was gonna die and one final thought as he walked out the door:
Ron: Norm, you always manage to crack us all up
But I wasn’t laughing today. Not with a few cafeteria coupons and no paycheck. I already tried cherry picking the best that cafeteria had to offer anyway. And now it was off to the guard shack where I believe a sign above read “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” I walked in and saw…just what I had always thought: 20 fat guys in drab blue uniforms eating pizza and having a good ole time. All the while ignoring the dozens of flashing red lights on the lone console in the room. Why couldn’t they have ignored it last night? They all hushed up and focused forward, to me, and the chief guard, a man of prodigious proportions.
Chief Guard: Hey, you must be Doc Miller?
Norm: In the flesh. Call me Norm.
CG: Sure Doc. So what brings you to our fine establishment?
Norm: I thought you knew?
CG: Sure we know. We just wanted to hear you say: “I stole cookies.”
And with that all 20 guards laughed so hard I couldn’t tell if they were having a group session heart attack or a good time.
CG: I mean really doc, cookies?
Norm: Uh, its just Norm, and yea, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I’m really sorry that officer Joe had to…
CG: (interrupting me) Officer Joe? That numbnuts? I fired him. (20 guards are again laughing out of control.
Norm: You fired him?
CG: Of course. What kind of an idiot guard reports a doctor for taking some cookies? Hell, we might need one of you guys one day (I’m thinking even sooner than he thinks) and then where’d we be?
Norm: Well that seems a little harsh.
CG: Nonsense! (shouting). Besides, the moron made us look bad; answering the red lights when they first light up! We had a good story going here: the wiring to the shack was bad and all and “we never saw the light.” To which, you guessed it: they all cracked up again.
Norm: So, ah, we good here?
CG: Of course doc
And I turned and began to walk out when I heard a snickering among the pack of guards and the chief stopped me:
CG: Say doc, before you go I was wondering if you’d answer a question?
Norm: Of course
CG: You see, the guards and me, we had a bet we were hoping you would settle. We just wanted to know who had the idea to walk out the alarmed door when you could have just rolled back under the aluminum foil gate. Was it you, or doc Paul.
And to be honest, I couldn’t remember whose idea it was. But a resident always protects his interns and I told him it was me, to which half the guards, including the chief, began to squeal with delight. The chief defied gravity a jumped out of his chair and smacked me, good naturedly of course, on the back:
CG: Doc, I mean Norm, you just made me a rich man! Come get me later, we’ll gout for beer.
And with that money began changing hands reminiscent of 20 portly tellers at a bank.
I did walk out now and from the back of the shack I heard someone bellow: “Man I think those doktas is even stupider than me. The chief immediately rebuked him but I couldn’t get the thought out of my head. In fact, as I thought about it on my walk back to the house of humans there probably wasn’t a stupider doctor on the face of the earth. Even the lowly cruise ship doctor, bereft of any country’s blessing to practice medicine on solid land, would have waited till morning to swipe some cookies from the ship’s cafeteria, when no alarms would sound.
My day’s indignities complete I returned home and took stock of my Kraft macaroni and cheese, as that’s what I’d be living off for the next week. I told the landlord I’d be a little late with the months rent but since I’d treated his daughter when she had an ear infection he told me not to worry and handed me some of his homemade gazpacho soup. Nice family, I thought to myself.
The next day I arrived at work to an interesting sight. Some of the interns and residents were sitting outside Charlie’s office. One of them jumped up when he saw me:
Intern: Norm, we heard what happened. We’re each going in there and telling Charlie off! We’ll get your paycheck back.
Seems word travelled fast.
Norm: Uh, that’s really nice of you but I don’t think he’s going to change his mind
Intern: You leave that to us Norm.
The exuberant intern put a little smile on my face because he reminded me how wonderfully naïve I myself was, just one year ago. But we must all grow up. And as grown-ups we must take responsibility for our actions. I hunted down Paul and the momentary good feelings the intern had imparted left me when I talked to Paul. He told me Charlie had used the cookie thing as a springboard to express all his disappointments in him, as an intern, and a doctor. He also told me his dad was about to die. I sent him home to attend to his dad and promised Charlie would not get the best of him. Why I did this only God knows because I had no such special powers.
Or did I? The next day 5 interns and residents turned into 20 and the day after that 20 became 50, with signs that read “Give Norm and Paul their paychecks” and even the heavy guards got in on the act. But Charlie’s heart was hardened. Maybe he needed the money. Maybe he was embarrassed. Maybe he was just trying to teach us a lesson. I guess I’ll never know what went through Charlie’s head that day. That was, until Lenny, the attending cardiologist who played outfield that day with the Karens ,and Mount Auburn’s biggest money maker, walked into Charlie’s office. I know what Charlie felt then: fear.
Lenny walked out of the office and straight to me with a big grin on his face:
Lenny: Hey Norm, why so glum?
Norm: You know Lenny, the cookie thing!
Lenny: (smiling, not really even hearing me) Yea, that was hilarious: Chest tube stickball! Can we play again tonight?
And with that he started to walk away and then, as if an afterthought just came upon him:
Lenny: Oh, and I spoke to Charie. You’ll be getting your paycheck back.
He went on his way but was still giggling and muttering to no one in particular “chest tube stickball: Brilliant!” I knew Lenny didn’t “speak” to Charlie. Lenny didn’t “speak” to anyone when he wanted something. He shouted. And when Lenny shouted people listened. Not only did I get my paycheck back, I got a letter from Charlie himself, saying he was really sorry and, it seems, he went overboard and no one should get so upset about some cookies, and I raised the morale of my interns that night, who so desperately needed the encouragement, and how resourceful I was, and how all the interns and residents think so much of me and even he thought so much of me and it was all obviously because I trained at a “real” residency in the Bronx. Interestingly we got our paychecks back because of Lenny. But it was good old kind hearted Ron, the chairman, who ripped Charlie a new one and made him write the letter. Brilliant!
Well played.
It's probably a good thing you would do it 'cause if I do it, it won't even sell 2 copies....LOL!