Internship

I asked a friend from IU who was a 2nd year Ob/GYN resident what it took to be a good intern and he said “ you have to love to work, hate to sleep, hate to eat and….. when the chief ask is it? You say done” That became my mantra from then on.
Now we had call the Fourth of July weekend starting at 6 AM on a Friday and weren’t scheduled to get off until noon Monday the 7th. During that 72 hrs, we operated on everything from gun shots, stabbings, fractures, auto accidents, rat bites, bowel obstructions, etc. I have never been so tired in my life and as soon as I would try to grab some sleep I would be called to do another patient workup. I all most got in a fight with the 1st year resident who was trying to dump patients on me. On Monday morning, I was coming out of a particularly gruesome case my scrubs and shoes covered with blood. The supervisor of surgery, Ms Mable Norcross, a wizen gnome of a lady, who had been at the “G’s” since it opened, stopped me and said in her Mississippi way “doctu whar in d’ worl ar you goin lookin lak a butcha; get in some clean cloz and clean off dem shoes, befo you see da fambly”. “You heah!” That was an admonishment I have never forgotten. If she liked you she gave you a pair of brand new bandage scissors to keep. She indeed grew to like me and said when she gave me my scissors I had the hands to be a good surgeon. Which was as high a compliment that an intern could expect from her. Nurses at the “G’s did not suffer fools easily
When we finished our call Maxwell told us to clean up and get in our civilian clothes because he was taking all of us to the “Pine Knot”, a bar where the hospital employees hung out. It was about 1PM and no one had much sleep. The residents begged off but I was an intern and he insisted I go with him. He proceeded to get me drunk and delivered me to my door stoned at 11PM that night. My wife had not seen me for 4 days and all I could do was pass out in the bath tub. Needless to say she never took to Mays Maxwell

There were 4 surgical teams and each was assigned a specialty but all took trauma call. We were the Gastro-Intestinal team and
Mays was soon on his way to adopting me and becoming my rabbi. The event that bonded us was a GI bleeder that had esophageal varices.
We were all surrounding the bed of a patient that was literally spewing blood like a geyser from his nose and mouth. There was a cadre of observers including student nurses that everyone was also checking out. There was a device that no one had used called a Blakemore-Sanstaken tube that was inserted in the nose and down the throat into the stomach which had a balloon that when inflated compressed the esophagus and another balloon that anchored it in the stomach. Mays was reading the directions and getting ready to insert it when I said I knew how they worked, that I had put them down at the VA hospital in medical school. It had been developed at IU. He said “ no shit, then do it”. I had the patient chew on some ice, lubed the tube and slipped it in his nose and down into his stomach, inflated the balloons and anchored it to the head of the bed. When I was done he said “ son of a bitch, you do know how to put them in”.
From that day forth he made me his main assistant on all cases, showing me how to do cases the 3rd year ordinarily would do. I learned diagnoses and procedures, suture techniques and how to properly use instruments. I was given cases that no intern would dream of being allowed to do. Mays motto was we work hard and we drink hard. Needless to say my wife disliked him even more. But the saying goes “ medicine is a jealous mistress” and it wins every time at least it did with me and I was bent on soaking up every thing Mays could teach me.
Mays tried to convince me to consider the General Surgery residency and I was swayed but it was a pyramid system where they took 16 or so and cut to 4 after the first year and I didn’t want to waste a year. So, though I hadn’t declared yet I still favored OB/GYN.