The Patient in Room Nine Says He's God

by Louis Profeta

  I sat with the nurses and told them the story of Maria dying, of me sitting in the office in a stream of consciousness, of the terror that was Kris Reich . . . everything I was feeling. They sat transfixed, kind of freaked out, and completely aware that I was visibly shaking, scared to hell of this man coming to the ER. That made them uneasy. They nervously tried to joke about it. Should security be called, and get leather restraints ready for me, or perhaps sedate me prior to my family encounter. They wanted to know who to call in if I were to get my ass kicked, considering I was the only doc in the hospital. But most of all, they were fascinated by the guy who at that moment had me shaking with a mixture of anger, sadness, and terror. So I did what any other mature, sensible grown-up man would do in this situation; I cowered in my office until they arrived.

  There was a knock on the door. Beverly and Gaynell were there. Both had smiles on their face, fighting back laughter. “Dr. Profeta . . . Mrs. Reich and her son are here,” with emphasis on son.

  “We got your back, Doc. Don’t you worry,” said Beverly. They both laughed again.

  I walked into the patient’s room and re-encountered the spawn of Hitler. Twenty minutes later, he was inviting me to play golf.

  I had not seen Kris Reich for nearly 29 years, and now this monster, this giant with horns and fangs, with claws the size of a grizzly’s and muscles like a pro wrestler, had morphed into a five-foot-four-inch, 150-pound blue-collared librarian. He wore a small ball cap, was missing a few teeth, and he had spindly arms with a small beer belly to boot. He looked about as threatening as my grandma. The nurses just stood staring, watching the story within the story. “This is not Kris Reich,” I said to myself. “No way.” The nurses kept averting their eyes to keep from laughing.

  “Profeta . . . you’re not Louis Profeta?” He looked at me questioning himself.

  “Yes, I am. You’re Kris, aren’t you?” I asked, staring intently at him.

  “Man, I haven’t seen you in probably 25 years. So, you’re a doctor. Wow, that’s great.”

  “Yeah,” I said simply.

  Then he paused, looked around for a second, and let out an uneasy laugh. “Yeah, we used to mix it up a little when we were kids.” He moved his fists around in the air in a boxing caricature. “Though, it looks like you could probably take care of me now.”

  “You better believe it,” I responded, my arms triumphantly folded across my chest.

  “Yeah . . . well, I wasn’t the best kid in the world back then. I had a lot of problems, got involved with the wrong crowd, you know.”

  And with that I felt like a complete dickhead. There you have it, an apology 29 years in the making. The next hour or so was spent discussing his aunt, catching up on our families, the old neighborhood, and our lives. He invited me to go golfing with him and thanked me for taking such good care of his aunt. And with that he left the ER.

  I have no doubt that this was Aunt Maria’s intercession, along with divine providence. I am certain that it was her departing gift to me. It was her way of saying, “Let it go. Don’t hold grudges, people change, and life is too short to fill your heart with hatred. Energy spent hating someone is a wasted heartbeat.” It used to be that when I thought of Kris Reich I would be filled with pure unadulterated anger. Now, all I can do is smile.

  Chapter Ten

  “Besides . . . I Ain’t No Russian”

  I’ve never really understood racism. Having been raised Jewish, the reality of the Holocaust and religious and ethnic persecution seemed atrocious to me, and as alien as walking on Venus. On the other hand, I love being a member of a small religious minority, a family per se. There is something very warm, friendly, and inviting about being a part of something bigger, but not too much bigger than myself—a home away from home.

  When my wife and I moved from Indianapolis to Pittsburgh for my residency, I knew that I was moving to a city with a large Jewish community and expected to be welcomed. I knew the transition would be quite easy. The landscape of mezuzah-clad doorways that lined the community of Squirrel Hill would feel familiar. There was the Katz Deli owned by Koreans, which sold the best lox, a huge bagel store, and kosher groceries and pizzerias. The Jewish Community Center was a seven-iron shot away from my front door, if you played a fade. Orthodox children scurried to school past Pinsker’s Bookstore. It just felt right, even to a modern guy like me. Mind you. I grew up in Indianapolis: the pickle-loaf, white bread capital of America.

  There is sort of an unspoken language among Jews as I am sure there are with other minority groups: we are all in it together, and share very similar values, pasts, hopes, and aspirations for the future. That being said I can also understand that to others that may be viewed as clannish, isolated, and perhaps even sinister. So, when the specter of anti-Semitism raised its vile head in the ER, I was ready to strike back. I just didn’t count on it to be so damn funny.

  “I hit a deer,” he said, slurring his words.

  “You hit a deer?”

  “No, I said, ‘I hit a deer.’”

  “Okay . . . did it hit you back?”

  He was about 35 or so, dirty, blond-headed, ragged, and of course, drunk. He was dressed in a filthy T-shirt, jeans, and scuffed work boots. He smelled of sour beer and cheap cigarettes, and peered at me through cloudy, bloodshot eyes. His faced was covered with broken glass; part of his upper lip dangled down from a large tear below his nose. His skin was a sea of road rash and asphalt burns. A myriad of small lacerations and missing divots of skin lined his bare tattooed arms, decorated with a slew of swastikas and satanic symbols.

  “Do you think it’s funny?” he snapped back, his eyes boring into me.

  “Yeah, actually, I guess I do,” I replied. He let out a stifled grunt trying to keep from laughing, staying in his tough-guy role. I continued my physical exam, looking over all his injuries, making sure that nothing more serious was occurring, like brain or spine trauma, a ruptured spleen or a cracked liver. In the end, I was left only with miles of road rash to clean, glass to remove, lacerations to sew, and one ‘five-pack’ of beer to drink.

  During our encounter, I felt slightly uneasy and perhaps a little threatened by his hostility. After all, he was somewhat physically imposing, not to mention being wild-eyed and drunk. It was evident that this guy lived on the fringe of society, in that dark world of methamphetamines, acid rock, and racism. He said very little and stared through me as I did my exam. I focused my attention on one large laceration in particular on his forearm. It was the size of a silver dollar and coursed around the top of his wrist, elevating one half of a quarter-sized swastika as is burrowed into the fatty layers of skin.

  “You ain’t one of them foreign doctors, is yah?” he inquired in a thick drawl after a while.

  “No,” I said, probing around the laceration with a pair of tweezers. “But I am Jewish, and I find these swastika tattoos very offensive,” I responded as I looked up from my work and stared him down. He dropped his eyes for a second and cleared his throat.

  “Uhhhh, doc, that don’t mean nothing but goddamn independence . . . besides . . . I ain’t no Russian.” I coughed to keep from exploding with laughter. “Hell. It don’t make no difference. You can cut that motherfucker out if you want to,” he said, pointing to the large laceration.

  “No problem,” I said. So, with a little extra lidocaine and creative excision work, I did my part to rid the world of a small piece of racism. I folded the flap of skin in a patch of gauze, and, with a satisfactory smile, dropped it in the trash, closing the lid with a satisfying clap.

  I remember thinking briefly as I worked on him that this guy was so dumb he wasn’t even a good racist. But then I felt a bit ashamed of myself, that I had prejudged him based on his hard appearance, his low-life persona. I think this guy hit the nail right on the head. His swastika was not about racism; it was about belonging. We all need to feel that we are part of something bigger, an extended family. If we are not so fortunate to have grown up in that environm
ent, we seek it out anywhere we can find it. For many, it is church or religion; for others, it is the military; and for some misguided individuals it is a shadow-world alliance, but one that still serves the basic need of belonging, no matter how perverse its venue.

  Later that week, barely sober but pleasant, he returned to have his sutures removed and to bring me a present: dangling from an empty plastic ring was a five-pack of Blatz beer. To this day it was the best beer I have ever tasted.

  Chapter Eleven

  Louis, Pick Up the Phone…It’s God

  If you knew my sister Marni when she was a student in high school and college, and then met her ten years later, you would not recognize the woman by her outward appearance, though she would tell you that she is the same person. Marni now lives in a foreign world of Orthodox Judaism, comfortable in a provincial lifestyle of long skirts, modest dress, family, and prayer. She went from being a flamboyant officer in her college sorority, one of the most popular and best-looking girls on campus, to a modest, Conservative Orthodox Jew married with four children on the north side of Chicago. She is devoutly religious and spiritual, somehow making a profound leap from the secular world of a go-to-temple-on-the-holidays Jew, to the steadfast observant world of kosher foods, daily prayer, and strict adherence to the ancient doctrines of Torah and Talmudic study. If you were to ask my sister what led her to pursue this pathway, she would tell you, for lack of a better metaphor, that she was always a ‘closet’ Orthodox Jew. She always knew she was deeply religious with an unwavering belief in God and committed to the traditional ideals of Judaism. Marni understood this from an early age, but did not feel comfortable practicing it until she was an adult and the commander of her own destiny.

  You could always tell, from her youngest of years, that Marni made choices in life with a deep appreciation of how her actions or words would honor or disappoint a higher authority, that being God. She had a special relationship with our grandmother, who lived with us in a garage converted to an apartment. She was a woman who was ‘straight off the boat’; after living in the United States for some seventy-five years, she still spoke English like she stepped ashore at Ellis Island yesterday.

  Widowed at a young age, our grandma, or Nona as we called her, lit the Shabbat candles every Friday night, kept a kosher kitchen, and started most sentences with a Jewish version of a Ladino ‘a dio’, or ‘dear God’ to the rest of us. During Midwest thunderstorms, she could be found huddled on our stairwell, frightened by the sounds that took her back to childhood, to a time when war raged in Salonika. At such times, Marni could be found huddled with her. Before she died, she made me promise her one thing: The photos of her three sons that adorned her TV set would never be separated, even if my dad and one of his brothers had not spoken for some thirty years.

  It was this brother-on-brother imposed exile that set the standard for us as children and young adults. It, in essence, gave us permission to hold onto anger for months and even years, pontificating on how we were right and the other person was wrong. For whatever reason, Marni and I fell into some stupid conflict about six months prior to her marriage. I can’t recall exactly what the fight was about, but I am absolutely sure I was right and she was wrong, or it may have been the other way around, probably the latter. Anyway, we did not talk or want to have anything to do with each other after that. In fact, I don’t even think I sent her a wedding gift. So when I got the call at the ER that a drunk driver had killed her father-in-law, who at the time lived in South Africa, I was hit with a deep sense of sadness that greatly overshadowed my foolish animosity toward her and her husband. I was overwhelmed with loss, and also a feeling of profound guilt that I was not there for her.

  I immediately called her and told her how sorry I was. The anguish in her voice was palpable, and it only served to remind me how much I cared for her, and how fragile life is. Marni and her husband readily accepted my offer of airline tickets to fly to Johannesburg to be with his family. After all, I had never bought her a wedding gift. So it was partly guilt money. Maybe it was also divine providence: God’s plan to further my understanding of myself, by giving me an opportunity to come to the need of someone other than strangers in the ER, my family in fact.

  Interestingly enough, when I called Marni to inquire about some of the issues dealing with the timeline of the story, Marni reminded me that we had not spoken for nearly two years, prior to getting back from the funeral. If you had asked me, I would have said maybe six months at most. It highlighted how sensitive Marni was to this event, and how removed I was or caught up in my own world.

  I really have no recollection as to what our fight was about in the first place. Marni, however, knows the issue, but will not remind me. Well, I’m not sure I want to know anyway. What is more amazing and perhaps more providential is that Marni tells me that just one week prior to this devastating event, I sent her an e-mail apologizing to her, reminding her that I wanted her and her husband in my life and in my children’s life, essentially washing the slate clean. Amazingly enough, I don’t recall sending that email. It was as if God stopped me for a second and said, “Louis, fix things with your sister, make her smile, put her at ease, because I’m about to send her and her husband a doozy.” So for nearly two years, that’s 104 weeks, we had no real contact until that one week prior to perhaps the worst day of her life. At that moment I listened to God, not with my ears but with my heart.

  So often in the ER we meet families that are at odds: separated parents bringing in children with false claims of abuse and neglect to support some custodial claim, children fighting over the wishes of their dying parents, spouses fighting spouses, sister battling a brother, and on and on. For the most part I could care less about what led to their conflict; I just try to remind them about how brief our lives are here on earth. For separated parents, fighting over the welfare of a child, I remind both of them how much more they have in common, their children, than their differences. I am so astounded how people, who could profess their love for each other until the end of time, could with the passage of time come to hate each other, wanting nothing but the worst for the father or mother of their child. They are so consumed by their anger, by petty disputes and affronts, that they lose sight of the heaven around them: glorious sunsets and sunrises, a child’s simple smiles, and the soft touch of hands reaching out for comfort that makes life so beautiful.

  My relationship with my sister has never been better. Though she, unknowingly, makes me feel slightly guilty for eating shellfish, or driving on the Sabbath. I suppose it’s a fair exchange for my numerous off-color ‘sham-religious’ inquiries like whether oral sex is kosher.

  So while it came to a surprise for many in the family that Marni made the transition back to the more formal and traditional style of Judaism, it also made complete sense to me. Knowing the relationship Marni had with our Nona: the years she spent cuddled on her bed, holding her hand, and helping her in her old age, and knowing what a beautiful mother, wife, and friend she has become, it is obvious that like me she was not running from something she feared but instead running to something she truly desired: a higher level of understanding of herself, and a personal relationship with God.

  Chapter Twelve

  A Peek Under the Makeup

  It sickens me to see ‘child’ and ‘abuse’ together in the same sentence. I was always on the lookout for its telltale signs in children, especially on late-night visits to the ER, but it never really had much of a visceral impact on me until I had children of my own.

  When Damien came to the ER, this small, angelic child was a battered mosaic of blues, purples, and dark green bruises against a pale ebony canvas. I tried in vain to bring this poor child back to life, but the massive brain and liver trauma, brought about by being slammed to the floor for crying, was more than his two-year-old frame could sustain. As expected the culprit was the boyfriend of the teenage mother, who was unprepared to care for any child, let alone one that was not his own, taking out his hidden
, real, or imaginary life frustrations on the easiest target at hand.

  I was asked to testify at the mother’s trial on neglect charges. She claimed to have not noticed all the bruising coating the corpse of Damien—bruises that reflected a pattern of repetitive trauma. The prosecutors came to my home, a manila folder in hand stuffed with autopsy photos of a bloody scalp peeled back to reveal the fleshy undersurface now covering the child’s face, which exposed the deep linear skull trauma that contributed to his death—his murder.

  The day he died in the ER was one of the worst days of my career. I could have dealt with the accidental nature of his death but not with the intentional sadistic abuse and neglect at the hands of this now-incarcerated animal; he pled guilty and was sentenced to more than fifty years in prison. I came home late in the evening, numb and confused. How could God allow something like this to happen? A question that I am certain many ask about the Holocaust, or even natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina for that matter.

  I walked to my eldest child’s bedroom door and looked in on him fast asleep, not a care in the world, and I started to cry. I quietly climbed into his bed, stroked his soft brown hair, and holding him close while taking in the sweet smell of talc and baby shampoo, my lips pressed against his small cheek. Though he never awoke that night, I promised Max to love him with every heartbeat God grants me and with every breath God provides. I also made a promise to say the Jewish prayer for the dead for Damien every day for a year. I am sure I missed some days, but I tried. Part of me figured that, if his parents did not truly love him enough to keep him safe in life, at least I could do my part in death. I think part of me also wanted to tell God, “I’m different from the man who killed this child. Do you hear me God? He is not me and will never be me.”