Dr. Galen’s
Little Black Bag
STORIES
R.A. Comunale, M.D.
MOUNTAIN LAKE PRESS
MOUNTAIN LAKE PARK, MARYLAND
Dr. Galen’s Little Black Bag
Copyright © 2011 R.A. Comunale
All Rights Reserved
Published in eBook format by
Mountain Lake Press
Converted by
ISBN 13: 978-0-9846512-8-3
Cover design by Michael Hentges
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
ALSO BY R.A. COMUNALE
Requiem for the Bone Man
The Legend of Safehaven
Berto’s World
Clover
To my long-suffering secretaries, Virginia and Barbara. Friends and consiglieres of unlimited wisdom, they’ve saved my ass more times than I can count.
PROLOGUE
Hey, Mistah, wanna buy a duck?
He don’ need no duck, kid. He’s a quack.
Hey, Rube!
I know that I’m old … over four score … but I’m not senile.
Just because I fall asleep in my chair, mouth open and snoring to beat the band, I still have all my faculties … I think.
So why the hell am I hearing voices?
I’m up here, Gazoonie!
It sits on my shelf, companion to the stuffed toy dog my beloved Leni brought me that last day of her life.
A black-leather doctor’s bag.
It sits there, mute testimony to over sixty years of interacting with the lives of countless patients.
Did I say mute?
Yeah, Galen, it’s me. You haven’t held me in a coon’s age, have you?
Like me it’s well-worn, the gold lettering on its side now faded and illegible; its surface scuffed and cracked.
Well, ain’t you curious, old man?
I rise from my chair. I reach up, take hold of the handles, sit back down and set it on my lap.
I open it. Its hinges creak stiffly, just like mine.
Inside I see my old friends: bottles, glass ampoules and rubber-stoppered vials with faded labels; worn metal gadgets that would make today’s doctors laugh at the primitive state of medicine once practiced. I do not remind them that such shamanism kept their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents alive to carry on their genetic whirlpool.
Now ya got it, old man. Remember?
Yes, I do. There’s the old scalpel I used in cadaver lab. Don’t know why I kept it. Never used it on anyone living … I think.
Hey, Galen, you really did a hatchet job on me, didn’t you? You got damned big fingers to go poking around my insides.
Harry? You here, too?
Patients who endured the fumbling of a medical student and survived; patients who became my friends and extended family; young patients who stroked my ego by following in my footsteps—all peering up at me from that bag.
Doc, look what ya made us do! Ya sure ya ain’t the devil?
Listen, guys, can I help it if you were foolish enough to become doctors? Crescenzi, Criswell, Shepland, all of you—admit it. You wanted it, too, didn’t you?
Yeah, and you were just some innocent recruiter, weren’t you? Come on, Doc, you conned us into it. We never got our seventy two virgins, either!
Heh, heh, so I lied, guys. Sue me!
I see other things as well: my passions, my loves, my failures and … my few successes? I see the rich, the poor, the famous and the unknown. In the end all shared the same human traits: the boy who shot himself in order to live; the child with Down’s syndrome, who understood more than most; the politicians whose idiosyncrasies would startle and disgust their followers, and the quiet lives of heroes and cowards.
I return it to my shelf, not-so-mute testimony to sixty years of my life.
My little black bag: the one life companion the Bone Man could not take from me.
—Robert Anthony Galen, M.D. (retired)
When Harry Met Sal
Hey, Berto, let me outta this damned thing!
Sal, is that you?
Sho’nuff, Dottore.
What the hell am I doing here, Sal?
Don’t you know, kid?
“Wake up, City Boy! No bad dreams today.”
My roommate, Dave, stood over me wearing only his birthday suit.
“Wha … what’s going on?”
I lay in a cold sweat, almost as naked as Dave, sprawled half in, half out of my dorm bed.
“You were yellin’ at somebody named Sal.”
I shook my head. I couldn’t get the image out of my mind: my dead friend Salvatore zipped up in a rubber body bag.
“Come on, roomie, let’s hit the showers. Can’t keep the dean waitin’!”
“Welcome, sons and daughters of Aesclepius!”
My mind’s eye sees them all: the extroverted, the silent, the hand shakers and the wallflowers. I remember the ones who made it through four years of medical boot camp and the ones who did not.
