The Patient in Room Nine Says He's God Read online

  We were able to stabilize the child and after a prolonged hospital stay, the baby was doing well, though he would require medication and multiple hospitalizations for the rest of his life. I have saved many lives, and it is incredibly rewarding. This was different. I had come within a heartbeat of reassuring this boy’s parents and sending them home, which may have led them to finding their son dead in his crib the next day. It would have devastated both of us.

  Another ER physician may have had the same hunch with the same results, or maybe not. I thank God every day for giving me the patience to look a little closer that evening. Later that month, I received a letter from the boy’s parents filled with emotion. They poured their hearts out, thanking me for saving their child’s life. I found myself suddenly needing to contact those people who played a crucial role in my medical education, which allowed me, as it had countless physicians before me, to be in a position to help a child, to save a life. Ron Galimore was the first on my list.

  In an ironic twist, it just so happened that the U.S. Olympic Gymnastics Federation had recently moved their headquarters to Indianapolis. It was very easy to track Galimore down since it turned out that he now lived in the city and had become director of the U.S. Men’s Olympic program.

  “Hello, I’m Dr. Profeta, one of the ER physicians from St. Vincent Hospital. I’d like to speak with Mr. Ron Galimore.” I always introduce myself in this way if attempting to reach someone important, because it is human nature for others to assume it must be an emergency, and so they always put me right through to them.

  “Certainly sir . . . right away,” came the soft feminine voice on the other end of the line.

  “Hello, this is Ron . . . can I help you?”

  “Ron, my name is Louis Profeta . . . you don’t know me . . . I’m an ER physician here in Indianapolis and I want to tell you a story . . .”

  Ron stayed quiet on the phone for the next twenty minutes while I rehashed the last eighteen years of my life, and most importantly the previous week’s event. “So Ron, I’d like to take you and your wife to dinner to say thanks.”

  “Absolutely . . . absolutely.”

  I now consider Ron to be a very close friend. In 1999 I accompanied him and the men’s team to China as their personal physician. It was sort of like baseball fantasy camp for me. I got to be a part of something I had strived to achieve as a younger man. And after it was all over, I realized I had no regrets. All things being equal, going to the Olympics or being a physician, hands down the latter has been and will always be more rewarding to me.

  So many things shape our destinies. Why are we here, what is our role in life? In 1980 Ron Galimore became the first African-American member of the United States Olympic Gymnast Squad. However, his place in history was lost amidst the political fervor and subsequent boycott of those same games. His dedication, athleticism, and commitment to excellence became a footnote for someone else. But in 1982 a simple act of kindness lifted the spirits of a lost young man, and gave him hope and direction. In 1997 a small child lived to see many more sunsets, to dream many more dreams, and to open many more doors. I’m sure that Ron would consider this perhaps his greatest legacy.

  Chapter Four

  The Cosmos of the K-mart Bombing

  I love fishing. I’ve been told that Jews don’t fish, that’s why God created delicatessens and lox. But I still love to fish. There is something very calming and serene about casting a line that remains very quiet on still water. I don’t know if noise really scares the fish, but if you have someone, especially your children, fish with you, it’s a great excuse to keep them quiet too. Everyone needs to learn how to fish; in fact it should be required in some households. I can just picture a family counseling session where the therapist looks at the group and says, “Okay…I’ve listened to all of you and I think I have a solution.” She reaches under her desk and pulls out an old tin can full of dirt and hands it to the family. “Here are some big, juicy night crawlers. What you all need to do is just be quiet and go fishin’.”

  So, as my third year of medical school was winding down, that was really all I had on my mind. I wanted to take my girlfriend (now my wife) fishing and canoeing in a remote part of Canada. I also thought that a week in the wilderness might be a good way to see if we were really compatible. You see, I was planning on asking her to marry me when we returned. So, when we visited K-mart to shop for some flashlights and other fishing and camping gear, the only thing on my mind was fishing, not how to save a young girl whose frail body had just been blown apart by a bomb.

  Her father, a tall distinguished man, held the door for us as we walked into the store. We nodded and smiled, my girlfriend commenting to his wife about what lovely children they had: two girls, five and about two or three, blonde, angelic and innocent. We made our way over toward the camping aisle and cruised around the store for awhile. I saw the father pushing a cart with the older of the two girls in tow. She stopped and looked at something as I turned away to talk to Sheryl. Seconds later, after rounding the corner of the aisle, out of view of the father and his child, I was lifted from my feet by an explosion. A cloud of smoke and sulfur arose to the air. Gut-wrenching, agonizing screams followed. Sheryl tried to grab me to keep me from running toward the commotion. She missed. There in the aisle, strewn with debris, this same beautiful child who greeted me at the entrance was now lying with her hand blown off, part of which was grotesquely imbedded in the roofing tile some nine feet above my head. Her eye was horribly injured, gelatinous blood trickled down her cheek, and parcels of her delicate fabric were burning. Her father lay next to her, blood and soot coated his glasses. He sat clutching his head in a look of despair that said, “My world has just ended.”

  At first, the young girl did not respond. The scene was a sea of utter chaos where everything was moving so quickly. I cleared some burning material from her face, smothered the flames on her shirt, and cleared open her airway. I was rewarded by a large breath and a long hard scream of the living, of a survivor. Naturally, there was panic; people were fleeing to the exits, veritable confusion. Fortunately, John Moriarty, an off-duty firefighter, showed up to help and together we did our best to try and simply bring some sense of control to a situation that bordered on pandemonium, a scene that had us just as scared, just as confused, looking around to see if we were next, forcing us to immediately come to terms with what we were witnessing.

  Someone yelled that she had been shot, that it was a grenade, a bomb, a light had exploded: All sorts of theories…we just didn’t know…and neither did they. We administered aide to the young girl and looked around, praying that nothing else would explode. Her parents were obviously frantic; her mother was screaming over and over, “Who did this…who did this?” Einstein says time is relative to those experiencing it. Take into account the speed of light, the time space continuum, E = mc2, and… well, you get the picture. In situations of pure terror time moves at a snail’s pace; one minute is twenty, an hour equals two.

  I hear this from patients all the time, when their husbands or wives have suffered a heart attack or a cardiac arrest, that it took fifteen or twenty minutes for the medics to arrive, and by that time there was nothing to be done to save their family member. In actuality when the ambulance data and run sheets were reviewed, the medics almost always arrived under eight minutes. But when your loved one is dying any wait is an eternity. By my estimate, it took two days for the medics and the police to arrive and I had aged twenty years.

  Before the medics showed up, we tried to collect the blown-apart fingers, placing them in a plastic bag. Towels from house-wares were used to control the bleeding; we even got a turkey baster to suction out some of the blood from her mouth. Medics finally arrived and took charge, stabilizing the young girl. A medical rescue helicopter dramatically landed in the parking lot. The white noise from the rotor quieted the crowd, offering a reprieve, a line cast on still water. She was airlifted to a local trauma center. Unfortunately, they could save
neither her arm nor her eye, but she survived.

  Agents from the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) told me that it was a homemade pipe bomb that someone had sadistically placed on a shelf, in, of all things, a pump toothpaste container. The young girl had found it among some boxes of trash bags, peered inside and saw all the colorful wires, and removed the top and the rest was history. We stayed with police for a few hours, answering questions. “Why were we here? Did we see anyone suspicious? What car did we drive? Did you know the family?” Most, if not all, of the information was useless.

  Fittingly, that month I was on a psychiatry rotation at Wishard Hospital. My days were filled with, “So, sir, why are you here?”

  “They made me come here just because I went to the restroom at the Subway Sandwich Shop downtown,” said the little man with a flat affect and little concern.

  “Why would that cause you to be committed here?” I asked, certain there must be more to the story.

  “Because he used the floor in the middle of the shop to go number two,” replied the nurse, not even looking up from her chart.

  I had to be on rounds by 8:00 a.m., late in the morning as far as medicine goes. On other services, 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning was the norm. Around 7:00 a.m., a phone call from a local radio station woke me up. I was naively unaware what a big story this had become over the last eight hours. I quickly spoke with them about the events of the night before and said all the typical “golly, gee” garbage about how any medical student, nurse, or EMS personnel would have done the same to help out. Images of Kevin Costner in Bull Durham flashed across my brain…particularly the scene where Costner is instructing pitching sensation Tim Robbins on how best to answer the press, teaching him all of the typical baseball clichés.

  “I’m just trying to do my job, be part of the team, give 100 percent, trying to contribute,” says Robbins.

  So, I filled them with my “oh-gosh-gee” clichés: “I’m not a hero” and “I’m sure anyone would have done the same”. Then, I informed the radio personalities that I had to leave for school. They thanked me for my time, I wolfed down a pop tart and hurried to get to the medical center. By the time I had driven the thirty-minute route, I had heard my on-air interview three times. With each broadcast, the morning personalities overplayed my role dramatically. The fish, well, it just kept getting bigger. As I walked to the hospital I passed a television satellite truck outside of the Medical Sciences building. Must have made some big discovery, I thought, oblivious to the fact that they were there to see me.

  I arrived at the psychiatric ward nurses’ station, among the line of blank-eyed patients standing and swaying, popping Thorazine and other psychotropic drugs, or whatever it took to keep them from talking to Jesus, Satan, Martians, or the president. One of the nurses looked up and immediately embarked on the task of embarrassing the medical student, making a big deal of my involvement in the tragedy of the night before. At first I ignored it, then she held up the front page of the morning paper for all to see. All I could think was, “Oh shit, move over and give me some of those pills.”

  “IU Medical Student Saves Girl’s Life in Bomb Explosion!” the headline read in big bold letters. Suddenly, I received my first lesson on how the world needs both heroes and villains. When it came down to it, the story was an innocent exaggeration of the facts, as most newspaper stories are. The most important exaggerated point being that I (or for that matter, we) had saved her life. We didn’t: She would have lived regardless of whether I was there or not. I didn’t save anyone; I just brought some sanity to an insane situation. John and I kept our cools when most everyone else was frantically out of control. The headline should have read: “Carmel Firefighter and IU Medical Student Aid Girl Injured in Bomb Blast. Child Expected to Recover.” I guess it just wasn’t eye-catching enough…not enough dirt, not enough drama. I read through the article, suddenly feeling somewhat uncomfortable. I went on with my daily rounds and hoped the whole thing would fade away…but then the suits showed up looking for me.

  They dress in pinstripes and they carry no stethoscopes, no patient note cards, just ID tags that say things like Administrative Rep, Hospital and Corporate Communications, or Medical Liaison…fancy terms for public relations. They strongly encouraged me to take part in a press conference at the Medical Sciences building. “It would mean a lot to us and looks good for the medical center,” the voiceless, faceless suits said mechanically.

  I left rounds, threw on my white coat with the little IU Medical School logo, and followed the pinstripes to a conference room. Thus, by the end of the day this average medical student, who just barely passed physiology in year one, was a Warhol celebrity.

  Life is funny that way. One minute you can’t get a parking space at McDonald’s and the next you walk into a restaurant and people are clamoring to buy you drinks. I became familiar to hearing conversations begin by, “Hey, weren’t you the doctor...”

  There are always consequences to being a celebrity, no matter how fleeting. I could tell it was a bone of contention for some of the other students. I guess they thought it somehow made me more competitive or allowed me some leeway on my rotations. It didn’t. What it did give me was the experience of closing my eyes at night and replaying the horror and the carnage that I saw. They did not hear the screams, the sounds, the smells. They did not put severed fingers in plastic bags or lie there with a mutilated child wondering if another bomb would go off, or if someone was in the store trying to kill them. They would not have wanted to crawl into my skin, even for a second.

  For weeks, every loud noise, every slammed car door, every car backfire sent me back, an amazing brief lesson into the world of the war vet. I can only imagine how innocent Israeli children responded to the barrage of suicide bombings during the Intifada.

  I was still young, still very naïve, and not prepared for that kind of trauma or even more for the kind of evil that would do this to a child. I was still a kid when it came to medicine, to life and death. So with the weight of the imagery pounding in my brain, I tuned off. Someone knocked a tray of food over in the cafeteria and the explosion of dishes sent me into panic. I broke down crying and had to be escorted by my fellow students to our attending physician’s office. Fortunately, as I said earlier, I was on a psychiatry rotation that month. Two weeks or so after witnessing that horror first-hand, I got my introduction into post-traumatic stress disorder, and a part of me gladly returned to just being a human being.

  I had hoped all of it would die down quickly, but it didn’t. There was a city council resolution proclaiming John and me as “heroes”. There was a Red Cross hall of fame nominating ceremony; thank goodness they gave the award to someone else. There were the ongoing investigations, multiple news stories, and the unfortunate inability to find the person(s) responsible; all of this just kept it going. But mostly what kept it all in the psyche of the community was the shear randomness of the crime, the absolute horror in which a young girl, anyone’s child, just went on a simple errand with her parents and ended up losing an eye and an arm. The emotional shock wave was devastating. Everybody saw their children, their loved ones in this crime. Everyone wanted this case solved, they needed it solved. They needed God to answer for this. As much as they needed their heroes, though, they also needed their villain. I, on the other hand, needed to get out of the city and get out of the limelight. I could imagine myself starting my residency as a young physician, doing the wrong thing, and then having my face plastered all over the paper, “K-mart Hero Found Liable for Malpractice.” It seemed so feasible, so possible. So I asked my girlfriend to become my wife, and a few months later we packed our bags and left for Pittsburgh and vanished into another town and another time.

  Just prior the end of medical school, about a year after the bombing, the city got its villain. It was not some bearded terrorist or some swastika-clad anarchist. It was a teenager; probably a prank, who knows? The tragic ending was that this young man killed himself just days aft
er the initial bombing. His devastated parents notified police months later after finding items in their home that pointed to their son. His suicide suddenly made sense. I knew nothing of this family, but I felt a profound sense of loss for them, more so now that I have become a father. Their tragedy was certainly greater than anyone’s, because not only was their emotionally salvageable child dead, but they were faced with the realization that he perpetrated this horrible crime. So for years I pondered over these events, wondering what they meant, why nothing good seemed to come of it. I went on with my life and relegated the K-mart bombing to a recess in my brain that would only pop out with the occasional case of nocturnal indigestion. Little did I suspect the mysticism of the universe, like a dormant tulip, was just getting ready to open up.

  I got a taste of this mystic bud emerging a few years back when I got a strange call. The Carmel City Council, or some similar organization, wanting to honor me in a “Parade of Carmel Heroes”.

  “Wow…what an honor,” I said to the lady on the other end of the line. I assumed it was to thank me for all the patients I had cared for in my years of service at Carmel St. Vincent Hospital. I was wrong again. I guess that stuff wasn’t sexy enough. As it turned out the master of ceremonies was one Richard Jewell. You might remember him as that poor guy who was a suspect in the Olympic Park bombing. He was the security guard who, by moving the crowd back, almost certainly saved many lives only to be later accused of the crime for which Eric Rudolph is now serving the rest of his life in jail for committing.