Free Travels by Michael Crichton Page A

Accounting got nervous about the expense and decided to get her out.” He sighed. “But you wait. She’ll be back in a few weeks, covered in lice, just like before. Crazy old bitch.”
    * * *
    Two months later, I was walking through the lobby of the outpatient department when I felt a pain in the ribs. Somebody had banged into me. I grunted and kept going.
    “Hey! Doctor!”
    I stopped and turned. A rather elegant woman stood there, wearing a green cape and a beret set at a rakish angle. She smoked a cigarette from a long ivory holder. She carried a cane in one hand. She was staring at me expectantly.
    “Don’t you say hello, Doctor?”
    Patients never understand how many people you see, how many faces pass before you, particularly in the outpatient clinic. You may see fifty in an afternoon. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but do I know you?”
    She cocked her head, and seemed amused. “Miss Vincent.”
    I hadn’t a clue. “Miss Vincent?”
    “Emily.”
    I stared, still not recognizing her. I tried to dredge up anybody named Emily Vincent. And suddenly it all fell together. Emily! The lady who was lousy on admission!
    Seeing her now, her stance, her dress, her manner, I understood. Emily was a bohemian. In the 1920s, she had been one of those rebellious, independent, artsy women. Of course she knew all about artists and writers. Of course she had never married. Of course she swore and smoked and was fiercely independent and advanced. Of course she was contemptuous of the doctors around her. Of course she liked to say shocking and outrageous things. As the years went on, Emily would have been in turn a flapper, then a wartime riveter, then an aging beatnik. Of course she said things like “Daddy-oh.” Emily was a hipster.
    “Emily,” I said, “how are you?”
    “Quite well,
Dottore
. You may call me Miss Vincent.”
    “You’re coming to the clinic?”
    “They say I have a little something with my thyroid, and I take pills,” she said, puffing on her cigarette. “Frankly, I think it’s crap, but my doctor is so handsome, I indulge him.”
    “You look wonderful, Miss Vincent,” I said, still trying to adjust to what I was seeing.
    “You, too,” she said. “Well, I must be off.
Ciao
.”
    And, with a dramatic wave, she turned, cape flying, and was gone.

Heart Attack!
 
    A major disaster befell the medical wards of the Beth Israel Hospital. All the interns and residents went around shaking their heads. The disaster was that, by some quirk of fate or statistics, two-thirds of the patients on the ward had the same illness. Heart attack.
    The residents acted as if all the theaters in town were playing the same movie, and they’d seen it. Furthermore, most of these patients would be here for two weeks, so the movie wasn’t going to change soon. The home staff was gloomy and bored, because, from a medical standpoint, heart attacks aren’t terribly interesting. They are dangerous and life-threatening, and you worry about your patients, because they may die suddenly. But the diagnostic procedures were well worked out, and there were clear methods for following the progress of recovery.
    By now I was in my final year of medical school, and I had decided I would quit at the end of the year. So my three months at the Beth Israel were going to be all the internal medicine I would ever learn; I had to make the best of this time.
    I decided to learn something about the feelings the patients had about their disease. Because, although doctors were bored by myocardial infarcts, the patients certainly weren’t. The patients were mostly men in their forties and fifties, and the meaning of this illness was clear to them—they were getting older; this was a reminder of their impending mortality;and they would have to change their lives: work habits, diets, perhaps even their pattern of sexual relations.
    So there was plenty of interest for me in these patients. But how to approach them?
    Some time earlier, I had read