I landed a gig as cartoonist for my hometown newspaper, pathetically named The Advertister. The Editor was super excited, and new. My written proposal to send in some cartoons weekly was well received, and I relished the idea of freelancing in this small capacity, hoping to build on the capital. I had, accordingly, no contract, but a lot of free range. I made sketches for me, then sent in two potential finished compositions, and time and again one or the other was accepted, sometimes even both, with week's delay in publication, as the limit was one per week. A crisp 25-dollar check came in the mail promptly the next day after the work was featured in the paper. Yay!

Not much, in the grand avenue, but a cheerful lightness of step in the right direction... Now to the part where it gets dirty. After 7 or so happy such weeks, I received an email from the Editor, in odd wording that the Owner of the paper had received interest from another party... my heart sank. I saw the work of the Other printed shortly the next day, my own (with no false modesty) doubtlessly superior illustrations rejected. I had been extremely cautious. I had curbed my satiricism to the most benign commentary. I had resorted to serving the perceived clientele with "good taste." So, I knew it was nothing that I had opinionated. The Owner of the paper had apparently seen the family Name.

That was blacklisted, a history unrelated to myself except by a dis-nepotism. You see my parents had worked for the same paper a decade earlier. Father as a photographer and Mother covering the local beat with incisive criticism, that was soon suspected to have been Ghost written by Father; and indeed so it was, but nobody could prove it. Nevertheless, the duo had to go, because they were undermining the comfortability of local scoundrels and operatives. They were essentially barred from any such work, by reputation. And I by association was a potential latent threat.

It was an interesting stint, a glimpse through a dirty window of local news.

05.06.2023

Unsavory job challenge @Prose

Have you ever seen someone fall down an escalator? It’s fucking awful, every bit of it. Ever seen how much a human head bleeds? Chances are if you see the reality behind these falls and the aftermath, the rush of people storming over to save someone’s life, you may think twice taking those magic stairs. You may be more careful. I hope to God that you are.

Three days ago, I get back from my lunch break, and someone’s fallen down the up escalator. I haven’t seen the footage, I didn’t see him fall, but there was an elderly man who missed a step, fell backwards, and hit his head hard enough that he started bleeding heavy. When I got back from lunch, they got a defibrillator out, the escalator had been stopped and blocked off as well as the nearby stairway, and right at the top of the escalator, they had him kept as well as they could while the paramedics showed up.

Apparently, no one thought he was going to make it. He was bleeding so hard from his head that he bled through two different shirts they pulled out for him. The guy who brought over the defibrillator thought he was gone, our LP thought he was gone, and even my head manager thought he was gone. By some miracle, the paramedics came just in time, and using a defibrillator of their own, they got the guy back to consciousness. They asked if he knew where he was, what day it was, how many fingers were they holding up, everything. He was breathing and moving his eyes with a pulse when they carried him away on a stretcher. Somehow he survived.

There was a mess to clean, for sure. Have you ever seen how much a head bleeds? Through two shirts, this guy bled, and before the shirts had even come out, his blood had trailed down and hit every single fucking step on the escalator. Every single one. After the guy fell and stopped halfway down, they had it ride him back up to the top so they’d have room to help him out. And while it took him back up, he bled on every stair.

I helped our maintenance guy clean everything. So many streaks of blood, the process took us upwards of half an hour if not longer. It was brutal, and it was reminder, seeing that there, that blood is life. How much of his life had left him on those stairs?

Finally we got it done. He sprayed any small bits we couldn’t fully get to with chemicals to at least prevent pathogens, and the job was done.

So we’re finishing and an older guy comes up to us, seeing that we’ve turned on the escalator again, and asks if we’re getting it open. The maintenance guy said it was good to go, stepped out of the way, and the guy got going up the escalator. I look up to the top.

There’s a fucking sign at the top of the stairs, and it’s right in the guy’s way. If you haven’t experienced that slow motion effect where alarm bells start ringing and everything feels slow as you mentally piece together the unraveling scenes, know the rush when you realize that you are the only fit person that can do something. The hit that you have to do something, or the guy that’s going up could get hurt just as bad as the guy you just saved. I have never been so afraid of the well-being of someone that’s not my immediate family.

I threw the escalator key to the ground and ran up the stairs faster than I’ve ever ran up a flight of stairs before, I grabbed the sign and moved it out of the way before the guy hit it. He thought it was funny.

“Show-off,” he said, and laughed. I laughed too.

When you’re genuinely scared in a setting of people who are simply living their lives, they will never understand you. It’s like complaining of migraines in a room of people who have never had one. When you fear for someone’s life, there is only their life, and the only person that can prevent them from safety is you. I ran not because I had to but because I was afraid. Because what if I didn’t? I wouldn’t be able to sleep that night or even now if I allowed that guy to try and move the sign himself and not fall down.

Please, for the love of yourself and others, please be safe on escalators. I’m not saying that guy wasn’t, but bad things can happen if you aren’t careful, and it’s not worth the pain of falling down. The escalator will not stop if you bleed, it will stop when you get to the top.

It's the scariest time for a shiny, brand new doctor: July 1, the day after four years of residency and the first day as an unsupervised doctor (or, actually, less supervised). You're thrown into the emergency department for the first time--let go--released--at large, daring disease or injury or mystery illness to best you.

At the beginning of that first day you feel ready, that you know everything. At the end of that first day, you feel completely unprepared, and you don't really know anything.

It's the scariest time for a patient: July 1, when shiny, brand new doctors will engage with them willy-nilly, whether they know the significance of that date or not. If you're going to get sick, you really should wait until June 30, the day before the most experienced doctors leave to hang up their shingles. (They don't do that anymore, but they still leave, looking for a life.)

"So, what's the grossest thing you've ever had to do?" I was asked once.

We have an abbreviation in medicine--TNTC--meaning, too numerous to count. As in, How many malignant cells on the slide? TNTC.

The grossest thing I've ever had to do? Seemingly impossible, because of TNTC. Yet, there is one particularly gross thing I did one day that has stayed with me. (Details to follow.)

I was on the internal medicine rotation, just finishing my rounds--12 patients to a ward. It was the winter, which means that I went 9 weeks never seeing the sun--12 hours each day, arriving before dawn and leaving after dusk. A smarter doctor would have taken vitamin

D supplementation.

I was so ready to go home. The early darkness outside made me feel I was shortchanging myself my time away, so I hurried out. As I passed the door of another ward, I heard her.

"Oh, Doctor, please, please..." and it faded to crying. First with sniffles, then overt weeping.

It wasn't my ward. It wasn't my patient.

I engaged my tunnel-vision and walked past. "Oh, please." I stopped.

Wasn't I a doctor? Didn't I write in my admission essay I wanted to help people?

I turned. I returned to the door and looked in. She was in the first bed, the better part of 500 pounds of postop female.

"Yes," I asked tentatively.

"I'm so blocked up. It hurts so bad. Please help me. My bowels--" and then she let out a yelp of pain. There's suffering, and then there's suffering.

"Call your nurse for an enema, " I offered.

"No, they did that. Twice. It's right there, but it's backed all the way up and--Oh!" she screamed.

I stepped in and retrieved her chart. Postop gallbladder, 5 days after, and loaded with narcotics ever since.

Here's a little science: narcotics slow up the bowels. They constipate. If it continues without some sort of resolution, a fecal impaction grows, making the problem worse.

It gets worse: the bowel wall is weird. It only has pain nerves for distention. You can cut it, burn it, laser it, even remove it...nothing. But if it distends, all hell breaks loose (as opposed to the impaction, which doesn't). This is why babies cry bloody murder when just a little baby fart tries to cross those little baby bowels. We are gas-producing animals, and when there is no way out, the gas begins distending. It won't go back up, because sphincters make bowel traffic one-way.

If the impaction isn't dealt with, rarely, the bowel can even burst, resulting in peritonitis or death. But before all that, it hurts. It hurts really bad--in fact, unimaginatively bad. There is colic, and then there is colic. On a scale of 1-10, it's, right, TNTC. You even wouldn't want Hitler to have this kind of colic. (Well, maybe--I'll have to think that one over.)

So, should I be a shit bigger and harder than the one she couldn't pass and just leaver her? Not my problem? That's when I realized, if I don't do it, no one else will. She will lie in agony all night and maybe be given just what she didn't need--more narcotics.

I knew what I had to do, and she had a pretty good idea what I had to do.

I found gloves and approached her with gloved hands raised. (It's this thing we do.) She raised her knees. I used both my hands to serially move back the fat folds on her thighs and slowly made progress to her anus. A long and winding road. Once I found it, I looked back up at her.

"Please," she pleaded. For her, it was an emergency. "Please," she repeated more frantically.

And I did. I digitally explored her rectum and dug out the TNTC rock-hard fecal boulders piecemeal. I made progress slowly but surely. Finally, I must have struck gold, because a huge whoosh of gas decompressed her abdomen.

I rolled up the sheet under her, top and bottom and side and side, making a tidy little basket of surprise for the linen people.

I looked at her again, and she was crying in gratitude. She thanked me TNTC. She asked my name. (But did I really want to be the go-to guy to dig out her impactions from now on?) I gave her my name, and I could tell by the way she asked she would never forget me.

And I would never forget her. Gloria was her name.

So, when I'm asked what's the most unsavory thing I've ever done in my profession, it's Gloria. And as disgusting and gross as it was, it's also the thing in my profession of which I'm the most proud. I had stepped in when no one else would. I was true to my admission essay.

All the doctors who had deserted her--even her doctors--are the shits in Medicine--the hard, rocky shits--that cause the moral impactions of the profession. For them, no enema is strong enough; and for folks like Gloria, no enema is worthy.

“I wouldn’t, if I were you.”

The defeated guy with the disheveled hair and sunken eyes who said it sat alone at a table for three. On the table were three empty cocktail tumblers, while an angry waitress held a maxed out credit card in her hand beside it. But the guy wasn’t paying any attention to the waitress. He was looking at me, while I was looking at a girl. His would probably have been good advice if an unworldly youngster at that age could have given a care what anyone else thought to start with.

You see, when a young man like I was back then sees a woman like the one I’d just seen he doesn’t think of how much money it takes to look like she looked. He doesn’t think about the cost of the tight, low cut, hip-hugging dress, or the incredibly high-heeled Versace shoes that she somehow manages to dance in, much less walk. He doesn‘t consider her December tan, her professionally applied nails and foundation, or her Coach purse. He doesn’t account for the pearly smile, the rounded boobs, the muscled calves, or the dyed and highlighted hair. All the poor son-of-a-bitch thinks is, “Damn!” And that’s exactly what I thought.

She was with an equally well-coiffed friend. Together the pair pushed easily through the throngs, somehow finding an unoccupied one of those high sitting tables that nearly every nightclub has near the dance floor, as girls like these two seem to always find whatever it is they desire conveniently free. They climbed/hopped/struggled up onto the high table’s high barstools where they proceeded to wiggle and grind to the dance beat in the most seductive of manners, as it was entirely too loud in their current location for effective conversation. As I watched them, I looked back once more to see that my soothe-saying friend was being hauled bodily from the bar by a gigantic bouncer. Looking back at the grinding girls I thought the only other thought that could come into a young man’s mind in such a moment. “Shit!”

Being an “aware” type of person I read the room, clearly seeing the hurdles on the track before me, yet I was too inexperienced and too hungry to be deterred by them. I was aware of the uselessness of approaching and attempting conversation above the musical din, so I did not. I was also aware that it was too early in the evening for dancing with strangers, and that mine was not really the look or type to pull much of an impression out of such a divinity in any event. No, if I was going to cross this finish line first it would have to be by a more devious route.

The “Moonshot” was a little known, potently secret confection devised by this very establishment’s top barkeep. I was only aware of it because I had happened to be ordering a beer earlier while he was perfecting it, and was happily offered a freebie if I would be his Guinea-pig. His Moonshot had been like drinking a candied buzz, only better. This mind bending delicacy could be my “in” if I could only manage to get close enough, quickly enough, to present her with one before her honey drew other flies.

So I waited my turn at the bar and ordered three. Thirty-six bucks plus a tip for the concoction-mixer later I picked the three shooters up with both hands and made my way towards their table, where I allowed the crowd to bump me into my angel’s little friend, for which offense I pretended to nearly drop my liquid cargo while profusely apologizing for “the mob hanging around the dance floor’s unabashed rudeness.” I then continued on my way. Once out of their sight I waited two slow minutes before making my way around again, loitering beside their table, pretending to be hopelessly searching for someone just long enough to ensure that I (with my hands still uncomfortably full) got noticed, and then I wandered off again.

Two minutes later I orbited around once again, only this time I stopped at their table, a pitiable look on my face. “I can’t find my friends,” I yelled above the pumping music. “Would y’all mind helping me with these?” Anyone can refuse a drink, but what woman can refuse an offer for assistance from one as obviously useless and helpless as I seemed to be? With appropriate drama I made a show of setting all three of the shooter glasses on their table and flexing my fingers afterwards, as though they were cramped from an impossible weight. I slid a shooter glass in front of each girl and picked up the remaining one myself. I held mine out over the center of the table, allowing the girls time to tap it with their own before downing it in one swallow and begging my leave. As I walked away I looked back to see them inspecting the strange color in their glasses before sniffing suspiciously at them, but I was not concened. They would try it. And when they did they would like it. Curiosity kills every cat.

Twenty minutes later, alone at the bar with my beer, I sensed rather than saw a presence around me. Turning I found them behind me, grins plastered across their tipsy faces. “Still haven’t found your friends?” My beauty asked over the noise. I sadly shook my head in the negative.

”Lucky for us!” She squeezed herself in closer. “What was that drink? It was sooooo good!” The other girl nodded with enthusiastic approval.

”It’s called a Moonshot.”

”Well, your Moonshot has got us going! Come dance with us?” It was not a question. Without waiting on an answer I was grabbed by either hand and drug willingly to the dance floor.

It was a grand, if exhausting three week whirlwind; late night clubbing, all night love-making, early morning work hours, paying for drinks, filling her gas tank, and stopping for “after clubbing food-calls” day after day, night after night, waking early and sneaking out for work while she slept in, calling during breaks or lunch to find her at the salon, or at the gym, or somewhere shopping with her Daddy’s credit card. When I finally told her I could not keep it up any longer, and begged her for a quiet night at home, she only frowned. “Ohhh pooh… and we were having so much fun!”

I suppose it’s easy to hurt others when you are immune to pain.

It was a rough few nights afterwards, driving home from work, passing by the club, seeing her BMW glimmering there beneath the parking lot lights. I stopped in one Friday night, still not recovered, arriving early before she was there, ordering a few drinks while I waited. I had nearly given up on her, and had asked my waitress for the tab, praying there was enough on it to get me the hell out of here when she made her appearance.

She and Candi arrived together, as always, both as hot as expected, but I could not do it again, could I; being leached of both money and time? They passed right beside my table without even noticing. As always, their table by the dance floor was free. Taking it over they proceeded to wiggle familiarly for each other, grinding along to the music. Beside my table I heard the utterance of a chiseled young man in jeans and boots as he stepped past my table and stopped, a familiar slack-jawed and hungry look in his eye. “Damn!”

Her next meal. If he heard my words of advice there was no outward sign of it, but then, what untried young man could give a care what anyone else thinks, anyways? But I uttered those words regardless, a fair warning from one fool on a stool to another.

”I wouldn’t, if I were you.”