Resident Year 3

As a 3rd year resident, I was also acting chief rotating with the solo chief. My duties besides making up the night call schedule was doing lots of surgery, running Gyn clinic and taking care of complicated Ob cases.
One day I was sitting at the nurses station reviewing charts and the unit secretary Frankie said 2 police detectives would like to speak to me. I went out from around the counter and they were standing there holding something wrapped in newspaper. They told me that a 15 yr old young girl’s grandmother said “she birthed a baby and throwed it in the trash pit to burn it up”. And they wanted me to check the girl and examine the burned up baby they had recovered from the ashes.
I had the nurse put the girl in a room for a pelvic exam and found that not only had she not been pregnant she was a virgin. I then went out and got the package that they had brought so I could check it before I sent it to the pathologist for an autopsy. Lo and behold the charred body was a burned up rubber monkey. Laughing, I took it to show the detectives who were totally embarrassed at their error. I went back in to question the girl and she stated that her grandmother who was raising her was always accusing her of having sex so she pretended to be pregnant. And since her grandmother was so nosy she threw the monkey in the fire pretending it was a baby and she knew that she would try to find out what was there. She fished out what she thought was a baby and then called the police.
One of the classic stories about Dr Smiley was that he was absent minded when focused on something important and he never wore underwear when he operated so as not to get them soiled with blood, especially during a C-section which happened frequently.
I was again sitting at the desk when Smiley came out of the operating room and approached the nursing station counter which was about waist high. Frankie nudged me to look and I stood up and Smiley had on his long white lab coat and had shed his soiled scrubs and not put on a clean pair and was butt ball naked underneath. He turned and went in his office unaware or his nudity and she and I rolled on the floor with laughter.
Another time we were doing a C-Section and the anesthesiologist who was a little slow asked…… ready? And he meant was Smiley ready for the patient to go to sleep and Smiley thought he meant for him to cut. And cut he did as the patient’s who was strapped down was still able to grab his hand when the scalpel slashed her open. By that time she was asleep and the baby was practically out and Smiley was whistling his usual operatic musical passages.
To see him operate was a thing of beauty, no wasted motion and I learned a technique that no one I ever saw before use. He used a hemostat as a forceps and his reason was……. You always had a clamp at the ready for bleeders. I made that technique a part of how I operated and I would have surgeons criticizing me that it crushed the tissue; but after observing how gentle I could do it they accepted it. And if any one were to see it done they would know that it was something he passed down to me and I passed on to my students.
Of all the specialties in medicine OB is probably the most stressful because you are dealing with two lives in situations than there are long hours of boredom and suddenly moments of sheer panic. Every woman that has a baby bleeds. It can be a few ounces or literally by the bucketful. And if this doesn’t tighten your sphincter nothing will. Decision have to be made instantly and death is always in the room. There are times when you have delivered a baby and stabilized the mother and as you leave the room the nurse says “Doctor I think she’s still bleeding” and before you can regown the patient is in shock. These are times that try your soul and I thrived on the ability to handle these crisis’s, but later in my career the rush was gone and I gave up OB.
You may have heard the phrase “white is right ”which I don’t ascribe to yet this story goes a long way unfortunately in their perception. We had a young girl about 17 who had eclampsia (convulsions in the 3rd trimester of pregnancy) and it was important to know her due date in order to induce her for delivery before further complications killed her or her baby. The only way to judge due date and maturity of the baby back then was by measuring the uterine size and knowing the last menstrual period.
Though this was not precise it gave us a rough idea about survival based on weight at delivery for the baby. The nurses, the intern and 3 or 4 residents had asked her repeatedly if she remembered when she had her last menstrual period. Finally I spent time with her trying to establish roughly when the period was. I asked her was it before Thanksgiving or around Christmas, nothing triggered any date that we could use. We were having staffing rounds and Dr Monat “ The Great White Father “ was conducting them and said we weren’t asking the right way! Then in his imperial way he asked “ young lady when was your last normal menstrual period” to which she replied “ November 20th doctor”. I could have kicked her ass right then for giving the white man an answer that made us look like fools. Once we were out in the hall Monat proceeded to go on and on to us about not knowing how to elicit reliable information which thoroughly pissed me off.
Every year there was always a classic incident that occurred with a wife trying to catch a husband in an affair. One of the Ob residents who was on call was caught at a nurses house by a fellow resident who was trying to date her. He called the wife who was at a party with some other wives and she rushed to the hospital to confront him. When she asked the switchboard operator to page him they called him. He told them to tell her he was in surgery and wait in the lobby, then rushed back to the hospital entering by the back and going up to OB. There he put on a scrub suit and splatter it with blood and went down to the lobby, There he asked what she was doing there before she could explain he chastised her for calling him out of C-section and sent her home. Quick thinking and a friendly switchboard operator saved his ass. It ended up costing him a 6 pack of beer for the operator, well worth it.
The 3rd year was ending and having been acting chief already, I was set for my last year.