Word: patients
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...will never be set free as long as there’s a ghost that you can’t see.” Facing a slow death in the late stages of Parkinson’s Disease, Cash’s performance is a patient, sensitive rejection of the steeliness so many have ascribed to him. He is a ghost, a specter in the American imagination of the stoic hero, a musical John Wayne. Yet like Wayne, whose heroism faded when his off-screen WWII draft-dodging became public, Cash’s immortality is a fiction?...
...could, apparently, put your lips over that slot and, with a hard inhalation, suck a token back up out of the machine. Then you could ride the subway for free, or sell it to someone for something less than a dollar. This was, of course, illegal. My patient had been spotted doing it. He had run, the cops had chased, and he had crossed the track just in front of an oncoming train, but then...he tripped...
...then a second-year resident in general surgery on trauma call. The radio said they were coming from Roxbury with a gunshot wound to the groin. Four Boston policemen "accompanied" my patient through the electric doors. He had been resisting arrest, even tried to run down a cop with his car. That probably explained why one of the cops had my patient's face mashed down into the black vinyl foam pad that covered the gurney, in the process asphyxiating him. The other two were taking turns yanking his arms up behind his back and punching his kidneys. The fourth...
...best attempt at gallows humor-"You can't actually suffocate my patient in here, officers"-got a bit of a smile out of them. Gasping, spitting and biting, the patient came up for air long enough to curse everyone and say that he would find and kill each of them. This got his face shoved back into the plastic again, but now he was on his back; I was sure they were going to break his neck. So I started the biggest IV I could and just pumped in morphine until he shut up. We spent the rest...
...patient, he turned out to be about as hateful as anyone I've ever met. They took him away to Shattuck, the prison hospital, the next day. But he kept his leg. We eventually learned the trouble started with an innocent accident: a third party had backed up into his Cadillac and a heated but non-violent argument ensued. When an unmarked police cruiser pulled up, Cadillac man jumped into his car and took off. Yes, the cops probably could have let this one go too, as the token sucker story reminded me. The feeling was now familiar...