Free On Call: An Original Short Story by Michael Palmer

On Call
    July is a very bad month to be sick at Eisenhower Memorial. In truth, it’s the worst month to be admitted to any teaching hospital anywhere, Washington, D.C., being no exception. Medication errors rise by at least 10 percent. Death certificates spike like a child’s coxsackie fever. The sick seem to get sicker, and those teetering between breathing and not have a statistically higher probability of getting toe-tagged. So why would one chunk of the calendar be deadlier than the rest? July just so happens to be the month when all the newly minted interns, three weeks from their med school graduation, suddenly find themselves MDs.
    On this particular early July morning, the Silverman Auditorium at Eisenhower was half-filled with about two hundred well-intentioned but exceedingly anxious interns and residents, most of whom were sitting as close to the front as possible. I was in the back, sandwiched between my two best buds, Paul Brosnan on my right, and Lou Welcome on my left. For years, they had called me Cowboy, on account of my Wyoming pedigree—Cowboy Gabe Singleton. But given as how my rodeo skills have waned since I took up big-city living, the moniker no longer quite fit. Over the four years since we arrived at EMH, the three of us had become known as “Los Tres Médicos.”
    Paul, two years younger than I am, and a year older than Lou, is more than just a swarthy, brown-eyed, handsome man with an academic GI practice in his future. He’s also the new chief resident of the Department of Medicine. He’s effectively a role model, problem solver, morale booster, intellectual leader, and team mascot—which is to say, everything that I am not. The truth is, I couldn’t get Paul’s gig even if I wanted it. A year ago, still troubled by a fatal automobile accident I was involved in during my third and last year at the Naval Academy, I took a leave from my training, and haven’t gone back. I’ve been working as a lab assistant for the second-year students, and picking up hours wherever I could while waiting for some celestial sign as to what I should do with my life. Sweet Lou, as I call him, is done with his medical residency, and is doing a year of pathology research in Professor Hannah Radcliffe’s lab while waiting to take his ER boards.
    Los Tres Médicos.
    Thanks to managed care and the politics governing patient treatment, I’ve developed an ennui surrounding my profession, and haven’t yet decided if I even want to be a doctor. My pals seem to have other ideas for my future. The few but increasing times I’ve threatened to move back to my beloved Wyoming, they have taken it upon themselves to send me photos of ranch hands inseminating cattle, a reminder of the future awaiting me in the plains outside of Cheyenne. Not pretty.
    Onstage at the moment was Dr. Annabelle Stern, aka the gloriously gorgeous, raven-haired, high-cheekboned, wholesomely delicious Annabelle Stern, aka our outgoing chief resident. In just a few minutes, she will ceremoniously hand over her stethoscope (our equivalent of the beauty queen’s crown) to Paul, who will assume her duties for the coming year. Seated to Annabelle’s right was George Kincaid, lean, brilliant, and distinguished. George is the chief of medicine, and someone I have always admired, although not as much as I revere his wife, Professor Radcliffe, an icon in the medical school community.
    This being our fourth orientation lecture, we knew exactly what was coming before it happened. For Los Tres Médicos, the scene came off like a long-running Broadway play. After Annabelle finished her speech about what to expect in the coming year, Dr. Radcliffe went through the orientation schedule. Then she made a few stale (to us), slightly risqué jokes and introduced her husband. As he ambled to center stage, one or two of the women in the audience whistled approvingly. He was slapping a long, hefty bone against his palm.
    “Can someone tell me what this bone is?”