Man's 4th Best Hospital: The Sequel of The House of God - Softcover

Buch 2 von 3: The House of God

Shem, Samuel

 
9780593097786: Man's 4th Best Hospital: The Sequel of The House of God
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593097785 ISBN 13: 9780593097786
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

The sequel to the bestselling and highly acclaimed The House of God

Years after the events of The House of God, the Fat Man has been given leadership over a new Future of Medicine Clinic at what is now only Man's 4th Best Hospital, and has persuaded Dr. Roy Basch and some of his intern cohorts to join him to teach a new generation of interns and residents. In a medical landscape dominated by computer screens and corrupted by money, they have one goal: to make medicine humane again.

What follows is a mesmerizing, heartbreaking, and hilarious exploration of how the health-care industry, and especially doctors, have evolved over the past thirty years.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Samuel Shem is a novelist, playwright, and a member of the faculty of the New York University School of Medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center. His novels include The House of God, Mount Misery, Fine, and The Spirit of the Place. He is coauthor with his wife, Janet Surrey, of the hit Off-Broadway play Bill W. and Dr. Bob, the story of the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous (winner of the 2007 Performing Arts Award of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence), and We Have to Talk: Healing Dialogues Between Men and Women.

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I had always wanted to be “the one at the end of the ambulance ride.” Now I figured that even if I might have my usual trouble working in big hierarchical systems, I would never doubt my competence in, and caring about, what I at best called “healing.” And with Fats again? Driving into Man’s 4th Best, I mused on a kind of medical heaven.

I parked in a six-story lot and got lost. I had been here often during med school, but everything had changed. On the crest of a hill, the glorious Art Deco Pink Building and garden and the 1816 neoclassic granite Blue Building were darkened by skyscrapers. I forgot the building name and asked Information for the office of hospital president Jared Krashinsky.

“Oh, that’s your Twitter Building.” She handed me a map, as complex as linguine.

A whispering rocket ride to floor 40 and out. Staggered by the sheets of morning sunlight backlighting a panorama of sea and threads of bleached clouds and then nothing but magical realism blue. The meeting was in the dimly lit, hushed board room, leather and chrome. On a giant bright screen was a slide. As my eyes adjusted, I saw, at a square glass table as big and blocky as my Prius, the Fat Man in a florid and horrific Hawaiian shirt. Beside him was Humbo, a young, compact Hispanic guy in a short white doctor coat. And then what he’d called his “A Team” from the House of God: Eat My Dust Eddie, Chuck, Hyper Hooper, the Runt, and Gath, an Alabama cracker who’d been a surgical resident. A nurse, Angel Jones, the Runt’s wife, sat beside him. I hadn’t seen most of them for many years. Also, a woman doctor, I guessed from India. I slipped into a seat. Panting, wiping off sweat. Way late.

Jared Tristram Krashinsky, of the Lithuanian Krashinskys, Man’s 4th Best president and titan of industry, stood at a lit screen in dim light, a power suit reading a PowerPoint:

“—this slide shows Core Concept One: Mobile Self-Management. Notice the two-headed arrow. I manage up, and I manage down. Man’s Best Hospital uses world-class managerial material of the BBS—the Best Business School. I use both hard and soft power. I go down hard. I come up soft, and—”

“Hraaak-a-hraaak!” coughed Eat My Dust Eddie, our giant, red-haired, wild-man master of irony, straight from a lucrative Newport Beach cancer practice and wife-lucrative divorce. He kept fake-hraaacking and, doubled over, exited.

The Krash stopped. Pissed at Eddie? Nope. He was staring at the screen calmly, with eyes closed, smiling, sucking on something. He was a short, fit-looking guy with a handsome face—lips plump, dimpled cheeks, and, for Lithuania, a reasonable nose. Silky dark hair carefully cut, combed over. Appealing, in a boyish way. He was what my immigrant grandmother, Molly, had called me, in Yiddish, a “zeesa boyala”—a sweet boy.

I looked around. My guys had been sitting there listening to him for a while. They did not look happy, rolling their eyes at one another and me.

Krash shifted the sucking into a pouch of a cheek.

“You may be wondering why I’m waiting, as if I’m doing nothing. I’m not. I’m doing Core Concept Two: Maximum Meditative Mindfulness. Man’s Best Wellness Program, directed by Bernard, Llama Llassi. Nickname, Mango. Mango Lassi.” No one laughed. Click. And there he was, Mango Llassi: shaven head, a diamond in his nose, looking like everybody’s Uncle Louie.

“What if my religion prohibits meditation?” asked Runt. He’d come into the internship mortally scared of doctoring. In Denver Runt had become an orthodox Freudian psychoanalyst. Now he was wearing a lime green bicycle helmet, as if a lid for his id. “What if it prohibits Mango Lassi?”

“Why, then, you, so to speak”—Krash smiled, a boyish smile meant to be friendly—“choose your poison. Or none at all.”

“Y’mean, man,” Chuck said, “if the sacred ain’t sacred to you at all?” He was black, a gentle soul, a magical basketball player and singer, from a poor family of eight in Memphis. At first the higher-ups thought he was just a dumb affirmative action guy. But he was the best doc of us all—and the kindest. He and I loved to play basketball and drink. Looking back, our internship floated in alcohol! I’d come to love Chuck. Now I was startled by the touch of gray in that “cool”-cut hair. Last I heard he’d gone home to Memphis to be a family doc. He was not the kind to stay in touch.

“If it’s not sacred,” Krash said, “try the ‘No-Name Chapel.’”

“But!” cried Hyper Hooper, our high-octane, competitive manic from California, rocking back and forth. His mustache had gone gray, his wavy hair receding. He’d been “into death,” winning the prize for most autopsies. But by the end he’d succumbed to MOR—Marriage on the Rocks—separated from his Sausalito wife, and taken up with an Israeli pathologist in the morgue. He wound up in LA, and through an aqua-nude-couples therapy group, he had repaired the marriage, had kids. A science genius and skeptic about Big Pharma, he’d founded at UCLA the Hyper-Winfrey Nutrition Center, and published a bestseller: Eat Red, Live Long.

“But but but!” he went on. “The quote ‘No-Name Chapel’ is a name. Faulty logic.”

“Holy shit!” cried Runt. “And Jesus Christ!”

Gath, our House surgeon, now a Man’s 4th Best orthopedic surgeon, grabbed Runt, surgically whispered in his ear. Runt quieted right down.

“Goodgood,” Krash said calmly. Click. On he droned: “‘My plan is six ambitious capital tranches . . . derivatives trending to seven aspirational targets at a min 20 per . . .”

I looked around the table. We’re back! The heart of our team, right here, right now. Back in the foxhole together with the guys you never forget but you rarely stay in touch with after—for fear that they’d changed or that they’d not. With one another, we are known. Things had happened. Life had happened.

We had staggered out of our internships and scattered. Each of us with a sense of failure. Down on hope. It would turn out that each of us had done our best to patch up our lives and move on. But we were not doing all that well. And then who should show up? Fats! Was he too still hurting and drifting? I looked at him. He was beaming! Here he was, going full blast into new life. Wanting to do it over again with us, do it good.

“This will be different,” he had said, “because I’ll have the money and power. Man’s 4th Best is at my mercy. Our clinic’s gonna be a bullshit-free zone.”

All at once I felt hope. Not blind hope, but tattered hope, cautious hope—and yet hope nonetheless. All bound up again with our gargantuan leader.

We’re here, hope rising. We’ll be free together. A thrill went through me. Buckle up.

Later, Fats would tell us about Jared T. Krashinsky—a childhood friend. Raised in Brooklyn on high-test yeshiva. His pop a slumlord in Jersey, Mom a force in Hadassah. Pop gave 2 million bucks to the Best College to get Krash in. But Krash quit and enlisted in the Israeli Army for two years—trained as a sniper. Married a sabra soldier, had children, Tel Aviv college. Went to med school on the island of Grenada, but quit....

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593097785
ISBN 13 
9780593097786
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
385
Kontakt zum Hersteller
BERKLEY
https://www.penguin.com/?s=BERKLEY

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