Saturday Night

"Take me, God Almighty, please take me. I don't want to live no more. Why should I live to be tortured?"

On an examination table in Chicago's huge Cook County Hospital, a 70-year-old woman lay limply, pleading for death between long, painful gasps. Her fingernails were blue. She was critically ill of congestive heart failure. The woman's brother, a wizened little Irishman with a patch over one eye, stood beside the table explaining why he had let her go so long without medical attention. "I thought it would pass, and I didn't want to leave her," he said. "I wanted to keep her at home as long as possible." The cop who had driven them to the hospital in the middle of the night grunted: "People got no regard."

Dr. Ed Brucker, 27, intern in "Female Admitting," shook his head and patted the brother on the shoulder. The woman was wheeled away, for oxygen and digitalis, and more detailed examination. The next case, a woman with an injured leg, arrived in a wheelchair.

It was the "hell night" that comes every week to Cook County Hospital--it starts a few hours before Saturday midnight and ends shortly after Sunday's dawn.

Good Neighbor. A young man in mechanic's cap and windbreaker half-carried a little old man down the long green corridor to "Male Examining." "Are you this man's son?" asked Dr. Lawrence Knopp, the intern.

The young fellow shook his head. "No, sir," he said. "My wife and I live next door. The old man and his wife live alone. The last couple of weeks the old man's been keeling over. We've been worrying about him. When it happened tonight, my wife thought I ought to bring him here."

The old man, obviously in pain, could not understand the intern's questions. Dr. Knopp asked for the admitting slip. He frowned over the man's name for a moment, then asked carefully: "Du redzt Yiddish? [Do you speak Yiddish?]"

"'Yah," whispered the old man eagerly.

"Vus is der mehr, Papa?"

"Ich bin kronk," was the shy answer. "Du kenst mir fixen? [I'm sick. You can fix me up?]"

Dr. Knopp said he would do his best. From the old man's wife, waiting in the corridor, he learned that his patient was a diabetic, on insulin for ten years. While he went on with his examination, Dr. Knopp sent the woman off with her young neighbor to be interviewed by a social service worker.

"What Made Him Do It?" Outside, a siren wailed and faded. Two cops brought in a 15-year-old Negro on a stretcher. "A kid with the big ideas shot out of him," volunteered one of the cops. "Tried to hold up a grocery, so the groceryman goes for his .38 and lets the kid have it." Almost as an afterthought he added, "The gun the kid had was empty to begin with."

The boy had been given morphine, but he was still sobbing when an intern bent over him. A neat little hole showed where the slug had entered the lower left side of his chest. "Probably hit a lung," the doctor said. An attendant was getting ready to take the boy to surgery when his mother and father, a packinghouse worker, arrived.

The mother touched the boy's cheek. "What made him do it? What made him do it?" she said in a low voice. The parents and the police followed the boy upstairs. In the surgery, a woman intern began a transfusion of blood and saline solution, slipped a tube through the boy's nose and into his stomach to sample its contents for telltale signs of blood.

"What did you have for supper?" she asked the boy. He whispered, "Cheese and crackers, and a soda pop."

"He ran away from home last Saturday," his mother was saying in the hall outside. "Bad friends, that's what did it, I know it. He's never been in any trouble." Her husband looked at her, then looked away.

"Catatonic Schiz?" In Female Admitting, a handsome Negro girl was brought in on a stretcher. Her eyes were wide open, but she lay motionless. "She went out cold like this all of a sudden, while we were sitting in a nightclub," said her husband. "For no reason, just all of a sudden."

Dr. Knopp flipped the girl's nails and pricked her arm with a needle. No response. Spirits of ammonia held under her nose produced a violent head shaking which stopped as soon as the irritant was removed. The intern spoke into her ear, calling her by her first name. "Ann," he said, "can you hear me? What hurts you, Ann? Can you tell me?" The girl seemed to be making an effort to speak; she got out the word "stomach," and clutched her abdomen.

Her husband said she was three months' pregnant, that she had gone into similar "trances" three times since last August. "I always could bring her out of it with icepacks on the back of her neck," he said. No, he said, he hadn't noticed any peculiar changes in her manner. Yes, their marriage was going well as far as he knew.

"I think it's the fella she used to go with before we were married," he said. "He reminds her of a rattlesnake. She's scared to death of him.

"I work from 4 to midnight, and sometimes he comes around and makes her go out with him. I think she has one of these attacks after every time he's been around bothering her."

The intern marked the girl's chart "Possible 100% HY" (hysteria), noted "no abnormal reflexes, no response to painful stimuli," summoned an attendant to carry her to a sixth-floor ward.

Upstairs, Resident Dr. Paul Crowley began working up her case in earnest. "Looks like catatonic schiz to me," he said. "But until she comes to and we have a psychiatrist in--who knows? It could be a guilt-complex hysteria." He fed the girl emetic soap water, which she promptly vomited up. The second time, she came to, pleading, "Not again. Please, not again." Dr. Crowley entered her name on the roster of patients to be seen by a psychiatrist on Monday.

"Freedom & Democrorsia." Hell night's parade went on. A Puerto Rican seaman brought from jail with possible appendicitis, an ex-coal miner with chronic pulmonary fibrosis, a young boy superficially but painfully hurt in an auto crash. Sixteen babies were born, one by Caesarian.

It was nearly dawn when two men stumbled into the emergency room, followed by a quartet of policemen and detectives. Both men were bruised and dirty; one was bleeding from an ugly gash on the back of his head, the other from a wound in his temple. Both were drunk, and they were carrying on a loud harangue in Serbian. They had been found beaten and half-conscious on a dark street on Chicago's West Side.

No one was making much progress in communicating with the Serbs, although one of them could speak a little English. "I am D.P." the man said, waving an identification card. "Here one years. My friend, he also good D.P."

Off to one side, a detective gave instructions. "The thing to get clear," he told one of the cops, "is--did they get beat up in our district?" The red-faced cop turned back to the D.P.s. "Where were you prior to this incident?" he asked. The D.P.s looked at him blankly. "Just tell us where you were when you got assaulted," said the exasperated cop.

A nurse and doctor were busy giving the pair first aid. "I wake up, I find blood on me and my friend," said the English-speaking Serb.

"Make it they were choking each other and let it go at that," said a detective.

The red-faced cop tried again. He discovered that the men lived in Gary, Ind., and thought they were still in Gary. The doctor announced that they were not seriously hurt, so the police decided to let them sleep in jail for a few hours, then stake them to carfare home. The English-speaking Serb shook off the guiding arm of a cop. "I go myself, gladly," he said. "Here is freedom and democratsia."

Upstairs, the old diabetic seemed to be resting quietly (though, next day, he was to take a turn for the worse and die in the night). The 70-year-old heart patient who wanted God to take her was in the hands of a girl intern, who found she was also suffering from cancer of the breast. "I've got her on oxygen, digitalis and aminophyl-line," the intern said. "Later, I'll get X-ray consultation on the cancer. But I scarcely know what's keeping her alive."

The youngster who had been shot in the holdup had come out of surgery. "The kid was lucky," the surgeon said. "An inch or two either way, and the bullet would have severed the aorta or portal vein or the hepatic artery. As it is, he'll live."

At 7 a.m., another "hell night" was over. The interns went across the street to "The Greek's" for a cup of coffee.

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