had belly pain ever since they hit and kicked me.”
“That’s a different matter,” I said puzzled. “Show me where you’re having the pain.” He lightly stroked his whole belly. “I’m going to push down on your belly. I pressed lightly on every piece of real estate of his abdomen. He winced each time. It was rare to see a GI bleeder in as much pain as Garcia was. In fact, I had never seen one in that much pain. “Pay attention to me, Jose. Does it hurt more when I push down or let up? It’s important to determine where the pain is coming from.” He winced as I slowly pushed against the center of his belly. But what caused Jose to nearly scream, was when I suddenly let up. He had what is called rebound tenderness. In this he demonstrated there was peritoneal irritation of some sort in the abdominal cavity. Bleeding, if he had it, was pouring into his abdomen. Unless he had an ulcer that penetrated the abdominal cavity, the exam confirmed what he had told me. He had been beaten so badly that his assailants had perforated a blood vessel or two. None of seemed to make sense. On the IV pole that recorded his blood pressure, and it was slowly sinking, like a receding tidal bore.
I asked the ER nurse to get another CBC on him and finished evaluating him, trying to my full extent to determine something else was going on. When the nurse left with his blood sample, I asked her to have them run it stat.
“I went over to Garcia’s bedside. You’re swearing that the two police officers beat you up?”
“Yeah, I do. Now can you just get me something for pain.”
“Can you give him fifty milligrams of Demerol and twenty-five milligrams of phenergan?” I asked his nurse.
Apologizing to Garcia, I had the nurses put another Ewald tube into his stomach. The returning secretions were clear – there was no blood.
I walked over to the doctors’s partition. I took the one unused phone and asked the hospital operator to get the surgeon on call for me. If I had had a hard day so far, I was certain his was just as trying. In a few moments, he rang me back. I started to tell him about Garcia, but he said. “Hold that thought for a minute, Bill. I will be down in a few minutes.” And so I waited.
No more than fifteen minutes later, Hank Bertrand, tapped me on the shoulder, having come up behind me. He sat down next to me. I him as clearly and succinctly what I knew about Jose Garcia. Once or twice he nodded, but I could tell he didn’t believe me. While he was examining Jose, the blood count had come back. His hematocrit had dropped by 6%.
“He needs to go to the OR,” said Hank looking at me haughtily. I could put up with the surgeons’s egos, but not those of the emergency room doctors.
While he did, I called the police station. I asked to be transferred to the desk sergeant. After introducing myself, I told him that the surgeons thought Jose Garcia had some internal bleeding. “Exactly what did happen when the officers brought him in?”
“Well officers Peterson and Martinez brought him in quite intoxicated. He had handcuffs whose ends were joined at his back. At the desk, he mouthed off to them. They tightened the bracelets that were behind his back. When he mouthed off again, they took him outside and talked to him. About a half hour later he was complaining so much about belly pain that we sent him your way. He was crying and moaning like a little kid who’d been in a fight.”
“He was,” I reported to the desk sergeant. They beat him up enough to cause internal bleeding. He’s in surgery right now.”
“There were no questions on the other end of the line. The desk sergeant just hung up on me.”
They finished surgery at about nine-thirty. Hank called me when they finished surgery on Jose. He had one omental and two mesenteric bleeders in his belly. He might well have bled out in the emergency room. I related what the desk sergeant had told me.
In the morning, I went by the Surgical Intensive Care Unit. I always dreaded going in there. More likely than not, Martin Gittes, who was the surgeon in charge of the ICU would throw you out of the unit if you were not a surgical resident. He detested internal medicine residents who had the temerity to encroach on his territory. Hank reassured me that Jose was doing relatively well. To see him through surgery, the surgeons administered four units of blood.
On Monday morning, just as we were finishing with rounds, I pulled Pete Anderson aside before he went to sign off on all the charts. He was my attending physician that month on the wards. I told him Jose’s story. I asked what I should do. There had been a spate of protests against police violence ever since I had been an intern. He said, stroking the fluff of mustache surrounding his mouth, “I wouldn’t mention anything about it. It wouldn’t hurt to tell administration and let the hospital attorney know.
I went up to the administrator’s office, to meet Barbara Hawkins, the hospital’s attorney of record. As I was ushered into her room, she told me that she could give me five minutes of her time. As I spoke, telling for the umpteenth time the story of the unfortunate Jose Garcia. “So your question is what,” she said rather pointedly.
“It seems like I have some place in protecting the patient and bearing witness to this clear physical violation.”
“Listen to me, Dr. Saunders…”
“It’s Spencer. What if it was your brother?”
“It wasn’t.” She shuffled some papers on her desk. “Well for now, just don’t say anything. If anyone from the press approaches you, you refer them to me. Now I need to finish up some loose ends.” Taking the cue I left her office. I didn’t even bother to thank her. It was people like Hawkins who allowed this absurdity of police bleeding to go on.
Each day he was in the hospital, I went by Jose Garcia’s room. He had no recollection of me, so after he had been in the hospital for about four days, I quite going by. When the day came for him to leave, I left him my phone number.
He never used it, though. I have no idea why he didn’t. He would have gotten a good settlement from the city and by my reckoning, would have rid the police department of two bad cops. But he didn’t. I’ll never know why.
It wasn’t a month later that I was in the UNM ER when the ambulance brought in an unconscious patient. He had been arrested for some reason. Using their billy clubs, the arresting officers struck him so hard over his head that he had a depressed skull fracture.
But Jose would go home. Never had I cared for the police in Albuquerque. This did little to change my mind.
Billy Yazzie
Slithering like a leopard through the defiles of the canyon west of town, the freezing waters of the Shoshone River, gathering as tears of moisture that descended from the snow-clad spine of the Continental Divide in the surrounding Absaroka Mountains, poured through western lip of Cody. There they encountered the sulfurous hot springs that sluiced into its cataracts. When the wind was stiff out of the north and the northwest, the sulfurous miasma of the hot springs spread over the town as if it was some hidden portal to the gates of Hades. Inured to the smell, just as he was used to the smell of horse piss and cow deng, Billy almost delighted in it. For him, it was the happy sweet-sour smell of freshly attained manhood. Palpitations erupted just at the smell of it all, as his body flushed with adrenalin. The decaying scent of the excrement and the cauldron odor of the hot springs reminded Billy why he was there and just what his quest in life was; to ride the rodeo. Every night between Memorial Day and Labor Day,
