I've gotten quite far in the The House of God but today I am revisiting something I read last week from early in the novel:
"I don't get it," I said. "This isn't medicine, this isn't what I signed up for. Not writing orders for cleanouts for the bowel run."
"Bowel runs are important," said Fats
"But aren't there normal medical patients?"
"These are normal medical patients."
"They can't be. Hardly any of them are young."
"Sophie's young; she's sixty-eight."
"Between the old people and the bowel rins, it's crazy. It's not at all what I expected when I walked in here this morning."
"I know. It's not what I expected either. We all expect the American Medical Dream - the whites, the cures, the works. Modern medicine's different: it's Potts being socked by Ina. Ina, who should have been allowed to die eight years ago, when she asked, in writing, in her New Masada chart. Medicine is 'bedrest until complications,' Blue Corss payments for holding hands, and all the rest you've seen today, with the odd Leo thrown in to die."
A friend of mine who is a resident told me that the majority of patients will get better no matter what you do for them. The remaining minority are the ones who depend on intervention and those are the ones that we trained to treat in medical school. These are the exciting cases. The ones that really make us feel like we accomplished something.
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