Let’s be clear: if you’re actively dying, suffering any type of heart attack from mild to fuck it, or bleeding from the orifice of your choosing, do not, under any circumstances, walk through the sliding doors of Baptist Medical Center. If you’ve been shot in the face, stabbed with a trident, or run over by a cement mixer, it’s still a better bet to go 300 miles out of your way to another facility. If you’re helpless and hopeless and strapped into the back of an ambulance, use whatever strength you have left to beg the driver to find some other location. Any location. A back alley, a Starbuck’s bathroom, or even Old Ned’s place out on Route 9. If it’s your dying breath, you’ll know you done good. Gave it your best. Knew the score and at least pushed for a reasonable outcome.
Simply put, Baptist Medical Center is a death house. Auschwitz with cleaner beds. Only the beds ain’t clean. Hell, not even bedbugs would stoop to infest the place. It’s the single worst hospital in the history of modern medicine, and I’m including the era when we bled folks for a sore throat. You arrive, you check in, you die. No exceptions. Their mortality rate is a full-tilt 100%, and that includes the children. Especially the children. They’d have shut the place down by now, only the records mysteriously disappeared around 1982. There’s talk of an electrical fire, but we all know every last doctor got together and did what they had to do. Lawsuits were pending, and the malpractice insurance ran out somewhere around Nixon. If they had it at all. Not a man involved is board certified, and there’s loose talk they simply flew people in from a nearby mental institution to cut costs. And don’t get me started on the nurses. Half the bitches can’t even read.
So naturally, when rape came a-callin’, Kersey grabbed a taxi, a bereft Rodriguez, and sped along a charred landscape to ol’ BMC. While he should have just grabbed Rodriguez by the lapels and gently told him to start dating again, Kersey felt the pangs of conscience and acted as a friend. For once. He knew damn well Maria was dead and gone, but he also knew Rodriguez would want to hear it for himself. After all, hadn’t the nurse on duty dismissed the whole thing as a simple broken arm? Sure, Maria also had the seed of a baker’s dozen inside her obliterated vagina, but we can focus on that later. A fracture, we can fix. Slap on a cast, kiss her forehead, and sign the discharge paperwork. Home by sundown, with dinner on the table. Only everyone forgot where they were. Here, medicine is the last fucking thing they think to practice.
Seems the staff was a bit hasty in minimizing the damage. Looked like a mild bruise at first blush, only to get Maria in the OR and notice she was all shot to shit. What happened here exactly? Was she flown in from Pamplona after a particularly horrible bull run? Raped by the entirety of the New York Jets? She wasn’t breathing when she got here, but hell, let’s still open her up. A liquified nightmare, so they sew her back into shape. A rush job, so most of her is still on the table. How to cover for our initial misdiagnosis? Ahh, yes, the old “blood clot” excuse. When in doubt, you go there because it sounds like science. Most can imagine it, and even fewer will understand. But the shattered survivors will affix a signature to the waiver nonetheless, keeping the courts at bay. BMC lives on to kill another day.
And how about that doc? “She expired,” he states, plopped forth with all the compassion of a Mafia hitman. Rodriguez, all hopes and smiles as he enters, exits broken and battered. A man on the brink. Fist pounding on a table the only remaining act. Any future options reduced to that of a mindless killing machine. BMC is lucky he didn’t start with the ER. Where was this doc trained? Even with a correspondence course, you’ll get fifteen minutes on bedside manner. This white coat wanted to wound. Mock. Treat a fellow human being like absolute dirt. We all know doctors need some level of detachment, but this fuck has detached all the way to another species. Still, we strive to understand. In this meat grinder, feelings get you nowhere. Compassion was dropped somewhere around the ribbon cutting. You could hug, and weep, and offer condolences, but grandma is still stone dead. It’s much easier not to give a shit from the get-go.
I know what you’re thinking: Bennett checked in and remained afloat, so how bad could BMC be? After all, Bennett was beaten into a near-coma by a plunger-wielding mob, so clearly it was more than just a matter of tossing him a Band-Aid. There had to have been prep, surgery, and the administering of some sort of medication. Could a death house accomplish all that? It’s a fair point, and one that contradicts the initial stat that every last patient ends up on a slab. But as they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day, and even hell on earth has a bit of luck floating around. Bennett is one tough SOB, and having lived in a war zone all his life, he’d learned how to take a fractured skull with grace and humility. He’ll be the lone survivor. For now. But when he’s sodomized with a pool cue some lonely summer night, his good fortune just might run out. And he’ll bring BMC back to where it belongs. At death’s door, with a staggering bill to match.
Leave a Reply