When the Chips Are Down, Big C Is There

              Metropolitan View
When the Chips Are Down, Big C Is There
By ALLAN KATZ
"They laugh and joke and make nas-ty
cracks about the Big C and they say
they wouldn't come here if their lives
depended on it. But, when the chips
are down and their lives do depend on
it, where do they come?
"Why, to the Big C, of course."
The author of that comment was Dr.
George Cook, an assistant director at
Charity Hospital here, which is known
to those who work there as "the Big
C." That stands for Big Charity to
differentiate it from the state's other
Charity Hospitals, which, presumably,
are Little Charities.
Dr. Cook made the remark, which is
aimed at some unfounded middle-class
attitudes toward Charity Hospital, as
he and Dr. Patrick Breaux, an assis-tant
clinical director, tiredly peered
into their coffee cups about 8:30 a.m.
Monday morning.
BOTH HAD BEEN UP the entire
night working with scores of other
Charity Hospital people to save the
terribly burned survivors of the Up
Stairs Lounge fire that claimed 30
lives.
There could have been more dead
last Monday morning but at least six
lives were saved at Charity. The in-jured
fire victims were brought into
the emergency room at Charity with
more than 50 per cent burns on their
bodies. It was touch and go but they
were somehow saved.
Dr. Breaux was on duty when the
victims were rushed in. Dr. Cook
wasn't, but like dozens of other Chari-ty
personnel in an emergency, he
came in voluntarily to do what he
could.
That's the way the Big C is in an
emergency, whether it be the Rault
Center fire, the Howard Johnson Motel
shoot-out or the Up Stairs Lounge fire.
AS DR. BREAUX says, "This town
has been having too damned many
emergencies lately."
For my own part, I've always felt
that Charity Hospital is a lady, a lady
of many moods. Charity is at her best
when she is the belle of the ball, when
all eyes are upon her, when the stakes
are high. And, Charity is an excellent
money player because she is very,
very good when the chips are down, as
was the case Sunday night and Mon-day
morning.
In that sense, Charity typifies the
image we Americans like to have of
ourselves. Very cool and blase under
ordinary circumstances but very, very
intense and extremely competent when
the real crunch comes. While not a
doctor, I believe that I saw three lives
saved in the emergency room on Sun-day
night that could have been lost had
any of the doctors or nurses—almost
all of them young people in their 20s
and 30s—played it cool or blase. They
didn't.
THAT ISN'T to say Charity is always
perfect. As noted, she is a lady of
moods. A friend of mine named Bill
Quigley had a terrible experience at
Charity a couple weeks ago and wrote
a letter to the editor of The States-
Item about it.
Bill, who works in the St. Thomas
Project, had brought in someone who
had badly cut his hand. They sat
around for hours while people snapped
at them. Ahead of them were gunshot
and knife wound cases and no one
seemed to want to be bothered with a
simple ol' cut-up hand.
The truth is, unfortunately, that
while Charity can be the belle of the
ball, she can also when the mood
strikes her, be the tired old street
walker still plying her trade long aft-er
the necessary gusto has dried up.
It's just a fact of life that you get
more and better attention at Charity if
you're an open-heart surgery case or
just got shot in the throat than if
you've got a sprained ankle or a cut
hand or a bad stomach ache. Maybe it
shouldn't be that way, but it is.
THERE WAS yet another important
element to the drama of Sunday night
and Monday morning. A number of
police officers called to the fire, in-cluding
some of high rank who should
certainly have known better, spoke of
the dead and injured at the Up Stairs
Lounge as "those queers." The infer-ence,
intended or not, was that the
patrons of a gay bar don't count for as
much as other people so it wasn't real-ly
a serious matter.
There was none of that at Charity
during the crisis, at least as far as I
could see. Perhaps it was because the
doctors and nurses and technicians
were too busy saving people while the
few policeman who had time to go
around making public statements
about "queers" didn't have enbugh to
do.
Of the people at Charity, it can be
said that w h a t e v e r their private
thoughts about the patrons at the Up
Stairs Lounge, they could not have
been more gentle,more considerate or
more concerned in caring for the in-jured.
The proof of the pudding is the
fact that several who could have died
that night are still hanging on and
seem to be improving a little each day
although they are far from out of dan-ger.
As Dr. Cook said on that bleak Mon-day
morning when everyone at Charity
had their fill of death and the smell of
burned flesh, "They only tell nasty sto-ries
about Charity when they don't
need us. But, when they really need
us, when the blood is dripping on the
floor, they thank God we're here."