I managed a department in a large suburban hospital in Houston for eight years followed by another long stint working for the Corporate Offices. The Medical Staff was knowledgeable, professional and committed to providing the highest possible quality care. I greatly enjoyed working with most of them.
My favorite physician, an internist and cardiologist was a big bear of a man, a natural leader, the unofficial conscience of the Medical Staff and the favorite of the Medical and Nursing Staffs. He loved a funny story, and he loved helping others, and he once spent a raucous half-hour describing a long Sunday night treating a patient’s sick parakeet over the phone.
Another night, one of his patient’s drove into the hospital parking lot and staggered into the ER. His chief complaint was, “Bad night in Nacogdoches.” With timely treatment, the patient survived food poisoning.
If he had a off-color joke he wanted department employees to hear, he would sit in a doctor’s dictating booth with his back to the main workroom, call a physician friend and tell the joke to him loudly enough that everyone present could hear. He was old-fashioned and would never tell a dirty joke to ladies.
He routinely reviewed patient records in the department and dictated DISCHARGE and DEATH SUMMARIES. Often, he would mutter under his breath, “Poor old Mr. So- and So-.” It pained him to lose a patient. He didn’t lose many, but he did lose the Nursing Administrator of the Cardiac Care Unit. Along with many others, I worried that her death would kill him. I don’t think he ever got over it.
At the height of his career, he suffered a massive heart attack. He coded, and emergency CPR had to be administered. We all feared he would die, but he eventually pulled through. A few weeks after he returned to work, he told me that while so very ill, he suffered an out-of-body experience. He was a very learned man and a scientist. Like me, he was probably skeptical of reports of such experiences before it happened to him. He described floating upward and hovering just below the ceiling in his ER treatment room. The CPR team was working on his body below, lying on the gurney. His body was clinically dead… no heartbeat, no respirations, pupils fixed and dilated. They shocked him with the defibrillator numerous times before they finally got him going. Then he floated down from the ceiling and re-joined his body on the stretcher.
He spent another fifteen plus years practicing medicine, but a second heart attack took him. His mourners were legion, city-wide. Everyone missed him.