***
I gave up on my brain, shouldered my backpack, and trudged up the stairs to freedom. I opened the metal fire door to see the sun was exploding fire into the Mediterranean sea. It was a strange transition from the fluorescent lights and fomalyn smell of the Neuroanatomy lab to the beauty of Tel Aviv in late autumn. The fire spread across the sky, leaving behind the blue newness of dusk. Palm trees swayed in ocean breezes, exotic birds warbled, woodpeckers pecked. I took a deep breath trying to expel the toxins from my lungs.
Natural beauty was only a part of the scenery. Brice, a brash Canadian that looked more like a hockey player than a medical student, called Israel ‘the land of milk and honeys.’ The white sand beaches beaches and grassy parks were thronged with lithe scantily-clad Israeli women. Vending machines on the sidewalk rented hardcore pornos. The sidewalk cafes were lined with hip youngsters in black like Paris or Milan, drinking their espressos and talking politics. The only difference here was that along with cello cases or notebooks, the young Israelis carried M16s and Special Forces berets.
When I first considered medical school in Israel my main concern was safety. Every time I turned on CNN in the U.S. it seemed there was another terrorist bombing in Israel. The reality is that Israel was perhaps safer than most major U.S. cities. I felt comfortable walking alone downtown in the middle of the night. My biggest worry was a bird man who kept whispering into my dreams.
Week Nine:
I had my first hospital shift that week, with a smiling British endocrinologist I nicknamed the Surfing Rabbi. Dr. Niven’s fat fingers dropped the insulin pen several times while demonstrating its use, but was gentle with his patients and seemed to care about his work. I admired him and wanted to be like him.
He took us on a tour around the hospital. He showed us the newborns in the nursery, grimacing and thrashing their way into life. He showed us the Emergency room, where sluggish patients roamed around waiting to have stitches taken out or children’s fevers checked. Then we encountered our first real patient.
Mrs. Weizosczki had sixty-seven years of life in her, and I could see them in every wrinkle of her pale, frightened face. She had survived Jewish pogroms, two husbands, had bore three children and eight grandchildren. Now she was as helpless as a child. She clutched the bed sheet and looked at us with wide pleading eyes. The oxygen mask helped her to breathe, medications kept her heart rhythm stable, but no one could talk to her. She only spoke Russian.
I felt as helpless and frightened as she. I knew techniques for stabilizing trauma, for bandaging wounds and massaging dying hearts back to life, but I had nothing to ease her pain. I couldn’t even speak Russian. The only thing I could do was to sit next to her and hold her hand.
The bird-man had come to me that night, except that his face was the old lady’s face. Instead of speaking, it sang a lamenting song.
“All that was immortal, inspired, innocent and fresh,
is now chained to Earth by cracked bones and torn flesh.
swollen with agony, gouted with spite.
rocked by the thundering of each heartbeat,
pierced and splintered by each ray of light.
I am no neurochemical engine simple and clean;
no jellied goo of cells and molecules, impulses and streams.
I am the gaunt spirit in the haunted house;
The doomed ghost in the mortal machine.”
I tried to get the song out of my mind but I couldn’t. I kept seeing her face. Her face, with the bird-man’s body.