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red ink in top margin 11-21-76 Chi Sun Times
red ink in left margin Jack arrow pointing to author of article A friend for 30 years ...I thought you might like this... arrow pointing to author of article ... and a beautiful person Was in the Southern marches in the 60's, mending busted heads. Was the first US doctor to volunteer and go to Israel during the Yom Kippur War.
Newspaper article FEELING SORRY LONG AGO By Irwin M. Siegel, M.D. It was early November, it was late afternoon, and it was raining. I was completing the sixth month of my internship, assigned to the Cook County Hospital emergency room; I enjoyed it. However, the rain had cut visibility and business both to zero. The hospital guards were even permitting some of the local indigents to escape from the cold and wet of the streets into the somber warmth of the dingy waiting room where some lay stretched out on hard wooden benches, covering themselves with newspapers for blankets.
My change of shift was 20 minutes off. I was thumbing a text on the emergency treatment of acute poisoning while intermittently staring through a dirty window at the dirtier street outside, pelted with waves of seemingly endless rain. Just as I was about to fix my third cup of coffee, he appeared at the door.
He was black, middle-aged, drenched to the skin and shivering. Also he was blind. You have to understand I have this thing about blindness. A friend of mine studying to be a psychiatrist once told me it was an upward displacement of an unresolved castration complex. Well, maybe. Anyhow, my feelings about the blind have always been gut-strong. His was a familiar story. He was on welfare, living alone in a basement apartment. Borderline nutrition and the dampness of his flat led from a simple cold to a persistent cough with chills and fever. He couldn't afford public transportation. He walked to the hospital for help. By the time he arrived, he was so wet you couldn't tell the color of his clothes.
Fortunately, my examination revealed nothing beyond a severe upper respiratory infection. Certainly no pneumonia; early bronchitis at worst. I dressed him in hospital garb, putting his wet clothes to dry on the radiator, gave him a cup of hot coffee, and wrote two prescriptions, one for an antibiotic, the other for cough syrup. I really wanted to hospitalize him, but he wasn't that sick, and I would have been severely criticized for unnecessarily utilizing a bed. The pharmacy was due to close shortly and I didn't want him to get lost getting there, so I decided to walk over with him.
The pharmacy was closed when we arrived, the service window shut, and the over-varnished door locked. I rang the emergency bell. No answer. I rang again. Still no answer. I rang once more, this time insistently. The door opened and I was confronted by an elderly man.
He was shorter than I, and what little hair he had was gray and disheveled. He badly needed a shave. He wore a short dirty hospital coat with the sleeves rolled up. It was wrinkled and stained and missing one or two buttons. In is right hand he held a piece of fried chicken, a bite of which he was still chewing.
"Well," he snapped, "what do you want?"
"I have a patient here with a bad respiratory infection. He needs two prescriptions filled."
"The pharmacy is closed," he replied. "He can get them filled elsewhere or come back in the morning." He started to close the door.
"But he hasn't got the money to pay for them privately, and besides he's blind, and it's difficult for him to travel."
"I told you we're closed. I've worked all day and now I'm finished."
At this, he turned and walked toward the back of the pharmacy. I followed him through the door between shelves of bottles and jars into a room heavy with pungent medical odors. "Look, I'm sorry to be late." I was begging by now. "And I'm also sorry I interrupted your dinner, but this poor man could really use the medicine today. It would be a mitzva if you could take a few minutes to fill the prescriptions." I hardly expected the vigor of his response.
"Mitzva!" he exploded. "You speak to me of good deeds! What do you call working in this crummy place day after day, having to spill out the rest of my life serving endless lines of miserable people, if not a good deed? Isn't that enough? Can't I even have my peace at the end of the day? You can feel sorry if you want. I stopped feeling sorry long ago. I tried it and it doesn't change a thing. Do you think I was always employed in a place like this? Before the Depression, I used to have a store of my own. A fancy place in a good neighborhood...but the competition of the big chains was finally just too much. I lost everything, and here I am, in the back of a crummy county hospital pharmacy, eating a chicken dinner out of a greasy paper bag. So don't talk to me about good deeds."
We found ourselves quietly looking at each other. He had been gesticulating wildly in the air with the chicken, but his right arm now hung limp at his side. After a few minutes of silence, I turned to leave. I was almost to the door when I heard him mumble.
"Oh, what the hell, give me the prescriptions."
It didn't take long to prepare the medication. I tried to thank him as he handed them to me.
"Forget your thanks," he said. "Just leave quickly, so I can finish and read my newspaper."
It was still raining we walked back to the emergency room. It was also dark outside, and the unshielded light fixtures in the high ceilings cast a naked glare on the cold, cracked walls of the hollow corridors. I was caught somewhere between that bitter disillusioned man's loneliness and the ever renewing excitements of my young enthusiasm. The blind man was also in there someplace. In fact, as we walked silently along, with his arm gripping mine for guidance, I had difficulty telling where his hand ended and my arm began. It suddenly seemed to me as though I would never be wholly rid of him, and I felt strangely as if I were my own father.
italics Irwin M. Siegel, M.D., is now an orthopedic surgeon, practicing on Chicago's North Side. File:Drawing of two shadowy figures walking arm in arm toward a city skyline; both are wearing hats, one has a cane and the other a medical bag