Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital by Eric Manheimer Page A

oncoming Q train.”
    I knew the story from a middle-of-the-night phone call from Jamila, the night administrator, whose calm and sonorous Middle Eastern accent took the edge off even the worst events. I realized what all the activity was in front of the family waiting room down the hall and now could make out sobbing more distinctly. The young man had never felt anything, and his heart was strong and beating when the ambulance picked him up. They had controlled the bleeding with pressure, then radioed ahead and brought him to the trauma slot.
    My meetings with city leaders the next morning had been scrubbed—they headed to Albany in a shiny black SUV to lobby against the looming cuts to the public health system—so I walked down to the child psych emergency room. Tanisha was sitting having breakfast dressed in street clothes: skintight blue jeans, a long-sleeved tan T-shirt, and black Converse sneakers with fire-engine-red socks. She was talking to another girl, a late-evening admission, who was showing her a grade school black speckled notebook. She looked up and saw me through the glass in the nursing station. I nodded a hello, which she ignored and went back to eating and listening to the girl.
    Coming into the emergency area, I had passed through the cramped waiting area past a fashionably dressed middle-aged couple. While waiting to get into the nursing area, I had said good morning, introduced myself, and asked if I could get them anything. The wife was attractive, with sharp-cut stylish dyed-blond hair and wearing a dark gray business suit. She gave me a weak, tense smile but said nothing. Her husband stood up and shook my hand. His tailored Italian suitfit his trim body like a glove. They were clearly exhausted. In a deep voice, he looked me directly in the eyes and began thanking me for the excellent care his daughter, Emily, had received overnight. I gave them my card if they needed anything during the hospital stay and showed them where they could get a cup of coffee two hallways down to the left.
    Ingrid Thomason, the social worker, was in the nursing station writing up her report from the night before on the new admission, Emily Abeloff. I pulled up a chair on wheels next to her. Ingrid was a polyglot thirty-five-year-old who had spent several years in Rwanda and other centers of genocide in Francophone West Africa before decamping at Bellevue. She had just returned from her honeymoon in Mali with her Senegalese psychologist husband, and I congratulated her. We shared an interest in the music mix from the griots of Mali infused with Cuban Son and traded favorite CDs. The concerts were fantastic affairs that continued into the wee morning hours and sold out the first day tickets went on sale.
    “Your patient Tanisha has taken up with Emily. They were up most of the night talking and writing. The nurses suspended the bedtime rules since the other kids were watching a movie together and it was more like camp here than a psychiatric emergency room for once.”
    “What’s up with Emily?” I asked.
    “Sixteen years old, same age as Tanisha, transferred from Methodist Hospital in Park Slope last evening at the family’s request. Her parents called 911 when she told them she was filled with suicidal thoughts and they couldn’t leave her or talk her down. The nearest hospital from their brownstone is Methodist, which has only a small emergency room and a tiny pediatric inpatient unit. The parents called around and the private uptown units were full. Their neighbor is an NYU professor who knows you and he told them to transfer her here. Said their daughter would get the best psychiatric care in the city!” I made the connection. I could smell the barbecue and look into their backyard from my friend’s house.
    I nodded and started to ask her for more information when she went on. “She has a long psychiatric history with multiplehospitalizations and twice as many diagnoses. Evidently, she started to fall apart