you know.”
“Oh, God, what was I thinking? Oh, ouch. Egads!”
“What happened?”
“Electric shocks just came out of the sky and are piercing my head. Pain, pain.”
“Do you see the rock in front of you?”
“Yes, I see it. Oh, the lightning is burning my hair!”
“Pick up the rock and hold it over your head and the shocks will bounce off.”
Sarah’s arms reached over her head holding the imaginary rock, then held steady.
“Well?”
“The shocks are bouncing off. The pain is going away.”
“We’re here now, Sarah. I’m placing you on the stretcher. Keep your arms over your head. I’ll see you soon.”
Sarah was only nineteen. She was admitted to the hospital psychiatric service for five days. The terrifying hallucinations slowly receded. The psychiatrist remarked that her lion roars could be heard in downtown Detroit. As Sarah was rolled to the elevator to the psychiatry ward, an orthopedic patient was brought back for Ben’s attention.
“You won’t believe this,” Ben stated, looking incredulously at Bev and me. “Orthopedics. What is more straightforward than bones and joints? A cast here, a brace there, it’s fractured or it’s sprained. But this next patient has two broken tibias, both fractured in the same place? How could that happen? I asked the patient to explain this as I was placing him in traction and waiting for the on-call orthopedic surgeon.”
The patient hung his head and replied. “My wife said, ‘Don’t do it. Just call the tree guy.’ But I could see the cracked limb. I could reach it with my extension ladder. As I climbed up, I noticed the full moon, just behind the limb. I went into a trance, I think. I began to dream of the first time I took my wife out on a golf course with a blanket and a bottle of wine. We were so young and everything was so new. I climbed out on the limb, the saw in one hand. Somehow I could get a better grip by sitting on the limb. The moon was so bright, my wife so young, and her skin so soft. I sawed away and the limb cracked and fell, and I fell too, straight down and landed on both feet, twenty feet down. I guess I’m lucky it was just my legs.”
Ben smiled and looked at Bev. “I guess that’s the last of the lunar crazies?”
Bev reached for the phone at that moment. She listened for a while, her whole face turning into a frown.
“Just a minute, Sir, I have the doctor here. Let me see what he thinks.” She punched the hold button. “You are not going to believe this. It could be a prank call, but the guy seems like he’s in a real panic. Will you talk to him?”
“How could it be worse then what we’ve already seen?” I asked.
Bev punched the hold button and handed the phone to me.
“This is the Doctor,” I said.
“We got trouble here, Doc,” a man replied, breathing heavily. “Real trouble. I was making love to my girlfriend. We were really going at it. Then I was done, right, so I began to pull out, but I’m stuck. Every time I try to exit I seem to get caught, and she screams bloody murder. So we’re lying here, see, and I don’t know what to do.”
“Don’t try to come out again. Give the nurse your address and we’ll send an ambulance out to bring you both in. Wrap up in a blanket and I’ll see you soon.”
Twenty minutes passed and the couple was brought back on the stretcher in the missionary position. The girl explained that they had been drinking a lot and looking at the full, radiant moon. Her boyfriend opened the window to let the moonlight in, and then they really went at it. When he was done he tried to withdraw, but each time it felt as if he was pulling her insides out.
The pelvic exam was difficult, with the boyfriend pushed to the side. The light illuminated her vagina and the man’s uncircumcised penis could be seen ensnared with the laces from her intrauterine device. Each time he moved, the captured penis tugged on the cervix, pulling the uterus forward. The cuts of the laces were tight, but eventually the man and the penis were free. The gynecology resident removed the IUD. The couple were grateful but embarrassed, and for some reason blamed the moonlight, not the IUD for their trial.
The night slowly wound down. Ben was in the surgical suite sewing up a forehead laceration of a young boy who had fallen off his new bike, which he had decided to ride in the driveway in the moonlight. Bev pushed the wheelchair occupied by a balding, middle-aged businessman in a tailored sports coat and red silk tie across from my desk. Bev’s weary face now had a permanent frown, and her left eyelid twitched rhythmically.
Bev paused the wheelchair across from me and said, “He has chest pains, Doc. He said he’s had crushing mid-sternal chest pain for an hour.”
The businessman looked up from the wheelchair and said, “Look, Doc, I don’t want to be here. What are you, just an intern? Jesus Christ, I told those damn medics to take me to my private hospital, but ‘Oh no,’ they said, ‘You’re having a heart attack, and we’re taking you to the closest ER, Wayne County. Time is really important.’ So here I am.” His face was as white as the moon, and perspiration was apparent on his upper lip.
“What were you doing when the chest pain began?” I asked, noting the contrast between his Harris Tweed jacket and his dirt-stained hands.
He looked embarrassed and hesitated for a moment, but like most men whose lives are in the balance, decided to tell the truth.
“I woke up at 4 a.m. and couldn’t go back to sleep. The moon was huge and shining through our bedroom window. I figured I might as well dress for work. I work for GM in Rochester. After I dressed, I looked out the window again, and the moonlight had illuminated the whole backyard, particularly the part I had been raking last night, but didn’t finish. I’d left the wheelbarrow half full of leaves and those damn walnuts. So I thought, well, might as well finish the job. I loaded up the wheelbarrow and was pushing it up the hill to dump it in the mulch pile when it felt like a vise had grabbed my chest and was clamping shut. I became short of breath and broke out in a sweat. I made it back inside, and yelled to my wife to call the rescue squad. As we drove off in the squad car, you could see the whole yard lit up by the moon. Strange.”
As the man said “strange,” his voice trailed off. After a moment he began to tremble, then shake, and finally his arms and legs began to twitch in tonic clonic movements. Suspecting he was developing ventricular tachycardia during the acute ischemic stage of his heart attack, I leaned across the narrow work desk and hit him firmly in the sternum. An external cardiac thump had been known to cardiovert ventricular tachycardia. After a brief pause, the seizure stopped, he regained consciousness, and said, “Damn, Doc, that really hurt. Why’d you do that?”
Bev nodded at the cardiac room and rolled the stretcher quickly back. Rapidly we undressed him, slid the gown on, and placed the cardiac monitor leads. I slipped an intravenous catheter into his arm and Bev drew up the IV lidocaine. As we checked the monitor, his cardiac rhythm switched from rapid sinus tachycardia to ventricular fibrillation, a serious cardiac arrhythmia that cannot support blood pressure or life. His tonic clonic seizures resumed.
Bev wheeled the defibrillator to the bedside. I pushed the IV lidocaine through the new IV as Bev cranked up the voltage on the defibrillator.
“Ready
