Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs Part 36

None of this, I think, has ever interfered with my ability to do my work. It just interfered with my personal mind-set. In fact, I found much less h.o.m.ophobia than I thought I would. There's much less h.o.m.ophobia in Congress than you'd think. One, you don't get to that level without a lot of real world experience. And two, I think the fundamental truth about America is that the average American is less h.o.m.ophobic and more racist than is officially acknowledged.

And since acknowledging publicly that I was gay, I've had relations.h.i.+ps, and I've encountered virtually no face-to-face bigots. And now, I think if a Senate seat opened up in Ma.s.sachusetts I would have a shot at it. For a long time I thought it just wasn't possible because of being gay. I would still have to think about it before I'd run. But more because it could be disruptive of my life. I mean-you know, having an active social life when you are a gay man in the public eye isn't easy. I had a ten-year relations.h.i.+p that ended in June. The stresses and strains of his being a gay spouse were part of the reason it ended. I'm now dating a guy who I'm very fond of, but he's received a little more publicity than he had expected. [Laughs]

But also-and more importantly-there are two United States senators from Ma.s.sachusetts who I am perfectly happy with. I would certainly never run against either one of them. And that makes it unlikely. Because neither one of them appears to me to be ready to quit. John Kerry might like to do something else, but John just got reelected and he's not up again until 2002. And I'm fifty-nine years old. It's not like you, at the age of sixty-three, say, "Let's start all over again." So I doubt I'll ever run. But we'll see. Politics, I've found, is a much looser situation than most people think it is.

Sometimes the phone sticks to your ear.

POLITICAL FUND-RAISER.

Tom.

I'm a regional finance director for a presidential campaign. Which means I'm responsible for my candidate's fund-raising in an area, a group of several states. The country is divided into eight regions, and I've got one of them. I work under the national finance director, who works directly, you know, for the candidate, our guy, who we hope will be president of this country in 2000.

My role is to provide the money. That's it. Very definitive. The money gets spent on running the campaign and on the media. But I don't partic.i.p.ate in that at all.

I got the job because I did some fund-raising for the candidate before he announced he was running for president. And before that I had done a bunch of different fund-raising jobs for nonprofit and political campaigns. I've been working in fund-raising for the last five years.

Right now, we're essentially in a primary campaign. And the maximum one individual can contribute to a primary campaign by law is a thousand dollars. If we go on and win the nomination, that's when you get into soft money and the very large donations-the unrestricted, unlimited contributions that you can make to a political party. Once we get to that stage-a.s.suming that we get there-then much of my time will be spent soliciting very large checks.

But at this stage, it's just thousand-dollar checks. And you have to literally raise millions of dollars in thousand-dollar checks. So, from my perspective, I cannot take the approach of me going out and asking for checks from individuals. I would drown in the number of checks I need. So what I'm doing is I'm finding people and getting them to help me by going and soliciting a thousand dollars from ten or twenty or fifty of their friends or business contacts or whoever. Essentially, I'm managing other people's soliciting. I've got very much a wholesale approach.

I'm calling people and saying, you know, "Hi, whoever you are. Look, I'm working for this campaign now. I really want to get you involved. There's essentially two ways to do that-I would like immediately your check for one thousand dollars. But then, because we need to collect so many thousand-dollar checks, what I really need is for you to get involved and just look at your list of contacts, your personal folks and your professional folks, and see who you can reach out to." That's the pitch.

It's not hard to find people who'll make a thousand-dollar contribution to a presidential candidate. A lot of people give that to multiple candidates, even to candidates in both parties-either because they have business interests, or because somebody's asking them who they don't want to say no to. What's hard is finding these people I'm calling now. They have to be-you know, they're the real hardcore activists. They're very much involved in politics. Want to be involved in the process. Want to be viewed as having been helpful in electing this particular candidate. And, unfortunately, there aren't that many of them. The same people do this over and over again. It's not like we reinvent the wheel with each campaign. Someone who's done it once is usually going to do it again. So I'm constantly brainstorming with my peers and with-just everybody, trying to find more of these people to solicit for me. It's a major, concentrated effort. There's some just dumb luck, you know, meeting a guy from high school at a c.o.c.ktail party. [Laughs] I find people that way, too. But it's-the whole process is a big challenge.

Once I get these activists...o...b..ard, then I manage them. I make sure that I'm very responsive to them. I service them. I do things like, you know, if they have a picture of themselves with a famous politician, I try to get a signature on it. Dumb stuff like that. It's not selling government contracts or anything. It's like just being responsive to stuff. Maybe they're going to the ballet and there's going to be somebody of note there politically, I try to see if I can get them to come over and say hi. Most people are doing this because they are invested emotionally in it. So you have to respond to their emotions and give them things that make them feel good.

You always have to determine how to talk to them-how they want to be engaged. If they want the sort of pomp and circ.u.mstance that comes with politics. Or if they want to have like a backroom conversation, an off-the-record conversation. If they want a cut-to-thechase conversation-some people, you know, if you talk to them with all this window dressing and how big a deal they are, they'll know that it's bulls.h.i.+t. They'll feel like you're not taking them seriously. Everybody needs to be engaged the way that they want to be engaged. And I'm good at figuring out what they want, and that's what makes me good at fund-raising.

I'm often flabbergasted how much it is all about ego-how much the people who are drawn to this are drawn to it because of the ego push that they derive from having a visible world leader call them and wish them congratulations on their son's bar mitzvah. Or getting a picture of themselves with the president, you know? It's astonis.h.i.+ng. And what happens is that these are all bright, intelligent people, and so they begin to need more than just that picture. Like they don't just want a picture. They want a picture of the two of them actually talking. Or they want-you know, they don't want to just ride in the motorcade. They want to ride in the senior staff van of the motorcade. [Laughs]

Luckily, I work for a big enough apparatus that there's nooks and crannies to place blame on when I have to say no to this stuff-so that I don't have to take responsibility for saying no. [Laughs] But I don't always say no, and I definitely take credit every time yes is said.

If my activists don't meet their goals, I pressure them. I call them. I call them and call them and call them. I find somebody else to call them. Then I call them again. Maybe I try a little carrot and stick. Essentially like, you know, maybe if they haven't gotten to their goal I'll invite them to something that they should only have gotten invited to if they had met their goal. I say, "Come to this dinner, a ten-thousand-dollar dinner, for people who've raised ten grand, even though you're only at five grand." And then I can kind of hold it over them. I'll say, "Hey, you know, you came to this dinner that was for ten-thousand-dollar people. Come on, you've got to meet your commitment."

I work at least sixty hours a week. Average day, usually I'm on the phone about four hours. Just reaching out to these folks-firming up their commitments to fund-raise, checking on how they're progressing with their fund-raising, or trying to get them to make a commitment to fund-raise. You literally-sometimes the phone sticks to your ear. A physical vacuum develops. [Laughs] Then there's socializing at night sometimes. We do a lot of special events. And I work weekends too, a couple of hours minimum every day.

My goals are based on the past performance of this region and what the candidate's needs are. And I can definitely get fired if I don't meet my goals. [Laughs] That happens. I mean, I got my first job in fund-raising when the finance director of the campaign I was on got fired. But a lot of goals aren't one hundred percent met. It's not as outlandish as you might think. There is methodology to it. And there's some flexibility. Not too much. But, I mean, I was a little short for this last filing period. I told them I was going to be a little short. And they were fine with it. And from a financial perspective, my candidate is doing very well. The fund-raising is going great. But still, you know, I worry about my goals a lot.

I have a spreadsheet for all my commitments and all my calls. And I probably-if there's anything I look at the most during the day, it's my spreadsheet. It has each name of somebody who is doing something for me. You know, their name. Their phone number. What their current status is in terms of their progress. And their total goal. And it's just name after name after name after name. I get visions of my spreadsheet in my head. [Laughs] I dream about my spreadsheet.

They're usually stressful dreams. They're usually-you know, I mean, is this person going to make their goal? Am I going to make my overall goal? It gets numbing after a while.

It's a weird job. It can be very exciting. [Laughs] It can feel like a total waste of time and energy-like a lot of things in politics. It's kind of hard to explain. My family and friends, I think, don't understand what I do. They either kind of aggrandize it or they diminish it. I mean like, you know, there's parts of them that think that all I do is sort of act like a telemarketer. And then another part of them thinks that, you know, my candidate thinks about me [laughs] and calls me and asks me how I'm doing. And both are kind of off.

I do have some contact with the candidate. Essentially, when he's in my region, I spend some time briefing him. I prepare written materials that go directly to him. And I see him at events and-he knows my name. Usually. [Laughs] I don't spend the weekend with him or anything. [Laughs] It's just, well, you know, usually a briefing lasts five, six, seven minutes. They're basically held in an anteroom to whatever room he's about to walk into. He's got his little setup there where he's hanging out, and I go in right before he walks out to the main room, and I say we're going to have a great event. Then I talk about the people who played the largest role in pulling together the event. And I try to give little personal tidbits, so-and-so just had a grandkid. You know, you saw so-and-so last week at such-and-such event. You haven't seen so-and-so in ten years-they would be so thrilled if you remembered them. This is your wife. [Laughs] You know, just things like that.

I feel like he's a good guy. You know what I mean? I feel like he's a guy I can be proud of. And I don't feel like I'm working for something that, you know, I would be ashamed to let my kids know about. But the thing I've learned overall in politics is that there's a disconnect between the individual and the office. And you can spend a lot of time getting caught up in that disconnect-you know, his policy on this is so bad, but he's such a nice guy. What does that mean? You don't know. You'll never know. Instead, you have to just recognize we're talking about two different ent.i.ties. A person and a public office. And you can't have unreasonable expectations of people, you know, of the actual candidates. They're human. They might be in a bad mood one day. So you just sort of try to keep the whole big picture in mind and not get caught up.

To get by-much less to thrive-in the political arena, you have to concentrate on your job and enjoy it and get something out of it for what it is. So, for me, my favorite thing is getting the money. Just getting it. You know, meeting my goals or surpa.s.sing my goals. Raising more money than other people. Because there's a thrill, an adrenaline rush, and there's also a real sense of accomplishment. Of doing something tangible. Which is great.

I have seven peers across the country who have regional areas that are theirs. And, you know, we've all got our own individual goals and whatever, but theoretically, we're also in compet.i.tion with each other. Whoever raises the most money will get a one-on-one meeting with the candidate. Not a six-minute briefing, but a real meeting. A conversation. And I really want that one-on-one meeting. [Laughs] I don't know what I would talk about. [Laughs] I don't know any policies well enough. I'm not an expert on anything. [Laughs] But I want the meeting. And I think there's a decent chance I might get it. So pray for me.

Are there any spills on the floor? Are all

the wheelchairs put away? Are any of

the exits blocked? Is the pantry cleaned?

NURSE.

Beverly Arlene.

In high school, I guess I was what you'd call highly motivated. I took all of my subjects as fast as I could, so when I got to eleventh grade, I only had to go to a half a day of cla.s.ses. So I went to nursing school for the other half a day. I liked it and I kept at it for both eleventh and twelfth grades and then I went into the Bronx Community College and studied nursing. I graduated from there ten years ago. Since then, I've been working as a nurse pretty much constantly.

I work on a per diem basis, which is basically like being a temp. I get my jobs through an agency, like a temp agency for nurses. I'm registered with several different ones. I studied all the regular nursing specialties in school-pediatrics, maternity, child health, psychiatry- so when I want a position, I just call up my agencies and say like, "I want to work the night s.h.i.+ft at a hospital. I'll work pediatrics or psych or whatever." Or I'll say, "I want to work private duty somewhere in the suburbs."

My agencies can usually get me an a.s.signment like what I want. I may have to be a little flexible sometimes-maybe the position will only be for a week when I want it to be for a month-but generally they can get me what I want. So I've never worked at one particular place on a permanent basis. I'm a generalist and I move around. I've worked in hospitals and private homes. I've worked in drug and alcohol detox, and with mentally r.e.t.a.r.ded and developmentally delayed patients, group homes for adults and for teenagers. Lots of things. My longest a.s.signment was six months, I think, and that was too long.

I like being self-employed, but nowadays, there's basically nothing else I like about this job. [Laughs] I'm just tired of it. It's changed so much. You no longer really have time to devote to your patients because of the cutbacks and whatnot. Where they would have had three nurses doing something at one time, now they have one. It's very difficult. Your workload is extremely heavy and this is really a thankless profession. People are more concerned about tipping a cabdriver who did basically nothing for you than trying to give a decent salary to a nurse who's saving your life-someone who makes it possible for you to live another day.

You may have read in the newspapers that there's a big demand for nurses, but that's a lie. Nurses are being fired left and right. The new buzzword is "downsized." I can get all the work I want because I am experienced and I am willing to be a self-insured, temporary employee. I'm not looking to get on staff, get benefits and all that. So I've got plenty of work, but there's no support anymore. Staffs have gotten so small that it's just overwhelming.

For instance, I was working at a nursing home recently and this doctor was coming the next day to do physicals, so the supervisor wanted me to prepare the charts for him. Used to be, this was a job for more than one nurse, now it's just me. And there were forty patients per floor in this nursing home-which is typical-and everybody is having different tests and things and all of it is generating different papers. Each patient has five or six different test reports, each a couple of pages long, and all those papers have to go into their charts. Multiply that by forty. So I have to go through all of this, the names and numbers and all this paper and put it all together into the chart. Then they want me to pull out the form that the doctor actually writes the physical on, so he can just come in and write whatever he wants to write. Then they want me to do his job-take the patient's temperature, the pulse, the respiration, weigh the patient-all so he doesn't have to do it.

I'm not legally responsible for any of this, but I'm supposed to take my time to do it when I have dressings to do and I have to pull out their medications and all the other things that I was hired to do. It was a terrible position. Just impossible. Things like this are what I don't like, and these days they are the norm.

At a lot of my nursing home jobs, I don't stop moving except during two fifteen-minute breaks and my hour meal, especially if I work the night s.h.i.+ft. One director of nurses said to me, "At night, you have a lot more downtime." And I asked her, "Where is this downtime? Because I need roller skates." [Laughs] Of course she didn't answer. These nursing homes are just very tough and the hospitals aren't much better. And I'm sad to say that private duty is getting harder and harder to come by for someone like myself because the people who hire a private nurse to come into their homes usually have money, which means they are usually white. And generally these people don't want a black minority taking care of them. If they can get a Filipino or any other minority, they'd prefer that.

We have too many foreigners in the country, foreign nurses. A lot came here during the quote-unquote "time" when we were supposedly having a "nursing shortage." The early 1990s, this was, if it ever was. But my thing is, if that was true, it is no longer true. So they should rescind their licenses and send them back to their countries. But they are not doing that. They pa.s.sed all kinds of rules and laws, and they are allowing people to stay here, get their working papers or whatever they are doing. It's really not fair, and it is really, really sad, because what it does, especially in New York, is help encourage racism, as far I'm concerned.

Another big problem is that people have become so litigious. Most nurses I know, if somebody dropped dead or fell down, they would run in the opposite direction. So would a doctor. And it's not even just getting sued anymore; now you can be brought up on charges. You can be held legally liable.

Let's say you made a mistake. You gave someone aspirin when they should have got codeine or something simple and harmless like that. Well, if you report that you gave so-and-so the wrong medication-even if it did no harm-you could be fired. They can report you to your agency and they will fire you. They can also report you to the state that gives you your license or your registration board so that you can't practice anymore. Or they can bring you up in front of their board and they can say, "Why did you made a mistake like that?" And maybe you say, "Oh, I was upset that day. My kid. My boyfriend." And they say, "Oh, so you were upset? Okay, you must be under psychiatric care for a year. We're going to suspend your license and you're gonna have to pay to take a medication course." It's really rough.

They are also trying to make us have a lot more accountability, even for things we have no control over. For instance, in a nursing home, you have your nurse's aides and your nurses. The nurse's aides are basically there to a.s.sist and to clean, they are more like maids than nurses and they are not responsible for caring for patients. Well, these days, if the nurse's aide makes a mistake, then the nurse- the person with the license-will be blamed. The nurse will be held legally accountable. I had a girlfriend in one nursing home who got fired because of her nurse's aide. A patient laid in his own urine all night. When you opened up the door you could smell the urine. It hit you in the face. My girlfriend had nothing to do with it; it was her aide's job to change the sheets. But because she signed on the accountability sheet-which everyone just signs at the end of their s.h.i.+ft because they have to-because she signed that and thereby said that patient had been taken care of, she was ultimately responsible. And she had worked at that home for years.

Nothing like this has ever happened to me, thank G.o.d. But only because I'm very careful [laughs]-I am very, very careful and I make sure that when the supervisors try to get me to do things that I know I shouldn't do, then I don't do them. I do what I'm legally bound to do and I watch my behind. One time a supervisor gave me an accountability sheet to sign and I refused, so she asked me what I hadn't done. I said, "I've done everything that I was supposed to do. It's all done. All the medication is done. The forms are done. The this-and-that are all done." And she said, "But you didn't sign the sheet." Well, let me tell you what else is on this sheet-things like, "Are there any spills on the floor?" How am I supposed to know? Somebody could have vomited on the floor back in the back room. I wouldn't know.

There were all these questions on this form that didn't have anything to do with my job. "Are there any spills on the floor? Are all the wheelchairs put away? Are any of the exits blocked? Is the pantry cleaned? Is the utility room cleaned?" These are questions for the janitors and I didn't know the answers, and I refused to sign because if I'd put my John Hanc.o.c.k down there and then maybe something happens like there's a fire and one of the exits was blocked-well, I could have ended up in court. I could've been charged with something because I signed that form. It's really pathetic. But hospitals and nursing homes and everybody is trying to protect themselves and nurses are getting the blame.

You don't make friends acting like this. When you refuse to do certain things, they don't like you and they may not want you to come back and work there anymore. So it's very difficult, but at least I'm still working steadily, although I really would just like to quit and do something else. If there was any other way for me to make decent money, I would. Unfortunately, for the time being, I am stuck.

Originally, when I started out doing this, I was just a kid in high school and I really did believe that nursing was a good thing and I thought I was helping people and I enjoyed it. Now I feel like there's no room to do what I like to do. There's no time to give personalized attention. No time to actually sit down and listen to what the patient's fears are, or maybe even give them a nice back rub, or lotion them, or something just to make them feel better. Walk them around the hallway. Things like that to make them feel better and to help them help themselves. With so much suing and everyone so short-staffed, you can't do that anymore. And then you look at other nurses and they're like, "I'm just here to get a paycheck." And they truly, truly don't care. And being a person that cares, and you try to do what's right, it's just not worth it. But I understand the other point of view: nursing simply is not what it is cracked up to be.

They just go to sleep like an angel.

ANESTHESIOLOGIST.

Mahin Hamidi.

I was born in Tehran in 1936. My father was just a simple merchant. When I was young, we always had-we read a lot of books. We didn't have a lot of summer fun that the children have here when they grow up, you know? And I always had a dream that I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to wear gla.s.ses and I wanted to put all my hair back and make it into a bun, you know, like a real scientist woman. I always imagined myself being a very respected, strong person.

I took the entrance exam for medical school in 1956. There were about five thousand other people who took it with me, and of this they would only choose three hundred, okay? And back then, we didn't have television. They announced the names of the ones who pa.s.sed on the radio. And my aunt, she sat next to the radio all day, she kept pulling her earlobe and listening, and finally she says, "Oh, Mahin! They mentioned Mahin!"

So I entered medical school. And we went through the years of basic science and all that. Then one day we were walking down the hall in the corridors, and they came and they said there is a man from United States giving a lecture in the lecture hall. And I see this man is showing slides from United States and there is green gra.s.s in front of every hospital. He was saying if we came to United States they would pay us and we would become an intern in the hospital.

At that time, if you became an intern in Iran, you didn't get paid. But here they were offering to pay us to come to United States to learn about the latest methods of medicine and all that! But you had to take an exam for foreign medical graduates. I did not know English, but I pa.s.sed the exam. It was-there was a lot of words like I didn't know what-I didn't know what's belching. You know, belching. I said, "What's belching?" [Laughs]

But I pa.s.sed it, and I came here and I started my interns.h.i.+p in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. And I ended up marrying my husband here, who was also from Iran and studying to be a doctor. He had come a year earlier than me. And we got married, and then we moved to Chicago. He got a surgical residency in Mount Sinai and I got an interns.h.i.+p in Saint Anne's Hospital.

This was in 1964. We lived in a very small, one-bedroom apartment across the street from my hospital. We had a little two-feet by two-feet kitchen, and this plastic sofa that the hospital gave us, which was very cold in wintertime, and very sticky in summertime. [Laughs] So much for the glamorous life of doctors. People think things come easy. They don't. But my husband and I were very happy.

At that time, I thought I would be an ophthalmologist. I was fascinated with the back of the eye, you know, with the fundoscopy. Because it was like the whole world was there. But then I got pregnant with my first child. And when I finished my interns.h.i.+p it was very difficult to get into a program, because when I went for an interview, well, I was pregnant, I was a woman, and I was a foreigner. Those were three good things going for me. [Laughs] So I got rejected from the programs, and that was so much for ophthalmology.

So I came home disappointed, and I told my husband, and he said, "Well, why don't you go into anesthesia?" And I said, "I don't like anesthesia. I don't like their personality. They're always behind the drape in the operating room. And they just-their personality is not significant. They're always eating in the back there, you know." [Laughs] They were fat people, I thought. And they looked like they were not paying attention, and the other people never paid attention to them. And really, I just didn't know too much about anesthesia. I didn't even know what's nitrous oxide.

But I also didn't know what else to do, so I went into anesthesia. I was hesitant for a few months, but then, after I started learning it, I liked it, you know? Because my personality came into play. I found out that the anesthesiologist wasn't just someone off to the side, you partic.i.p.ate in the whole thing. You're part of a team in the operating room.

An anesthesiologist is responsible for having the patient go to sleep so they can be operated on, to bring them to the level of unconsciousness that they don't have the pain. And then you keep them alive during the operation, you hydrate them, make sure they have enough fluid, and then you wake them up. You pull them through the surgery, really. And you have to know their chemistry, their physiology, what drugs they can handle. And you need to know, you know, everything about the type of a surgery they're going to do. You go to same school the surgeon does.

It's detailed chemistry, really. And it's also very much dealing with the patients. It's fascinating, I think. And I did it well. I started being friends with surgeons and, you know, I found that it really makes a difference if you have a good anesthesiologist in the operating room. In fact, it makes a huge difference. Many times during my career I have found that if I wasn't there things would have not got done as well as they did. Because, you know, people can die.

When you give any intravenous medications that put people to sleep, like sodium pentothal, it affects people's respiration, and it affects people's cardiovascular system. They can stop breathing. So you have to watch them very closely, and you have to help them breathe and stay oxygenated. If you don't have enough oxygen in your body, you get brain dead.

There are many millions of things that can go wrong in the operating room. The equipment can malfunction. They could have wrong drugs. They could use wrong dose, you know. I could write a book about the mishaps of the operating room. [Laughs]

I've had so many important moments, incidents where I helped someone. Once, I remember, I had this little girl on the cart. She was dripping blood from everywhere, she'd come from emergency room, like this ER that you see, you know? This tiny little girl who was like four-foot-eleven. I think she was eighteen but just a tiny girl. With a BB gun they shot at her, and they just-with the BB gun on her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, on her legs, on her arms-you know, it was just a big mess. The story was that she-her boyfriend was in love with her and she was in her apartment and he broke the window and started shooting at her and took-I mean, he tore the girl to parts.

So to keep this person alive, the first thing you have to do, you have to be able to give blood and give her fluid. And just finding a way to do that was very difficult, because there was not a single site that was available, that was intact for the IVs, because it was just holes of this BB gun. And the fact that I was there and I was able to keep this person alive while they found a way to save her, well-it was just such a challenge. And many of these trauma cases have happened where I've thought, I'm glad I was there to make a difference, you know?

I really, really enjoy taking pain away from people. I get very philosophical about that. You know, this power to take away pain and put people to sleep and help them. [Laughs] I can get very romantic about it. Sometimes on a morning when I'm here, just before an operation, I just put my hand on the patient. I touch the person's face, and I say, "Oh, my G.o.d. This is just so beautiful. This is amazing." And that last second when they close their eyelids, you know, then they just go to sleep like an angel. And then they wake up, and the operation is over and they're okay. They are safe. It's a beautiful thing.

And then the other power that is wonderful is, well, my favorite operation is childbirth. Because you give something to the patient. You take away pain and help give them a baby. That's so wonderful. I have my greatest memories from that. I have patients that I have done, they have eight children. Every Christmas they send me a card. And every child in that card, its anesthetic was given by me when they were born. I love that.

I think I've had a wonderful career. It's unbelievable the advances in anesthesiology since I started. Like before it used to be they just poured ether on the people's face, and they became unconscious, and the surgeon started working. It had a very, very high mortality rate-one per six hundred people died in the operating room. But now the mortality is like one in two hundred and fifty thousand. That's how far advanced it's gone and how much better it has gotten, you know. And this is because of what the American Society of Anesthesiology has done. Because the people have seen to it to bring the practice to this excellent level. Of course, part of the credit goes to the drugs-to the people who invented those drugs. And technology is part of it, too. But it's not only technology and not only drugs. The people who go into anesthesia today-I mean, I came to it as a second choice, but now it's amazing, the brightest students have gone to anesthesia. There are very, very good doctors in anesthesia. Anywhere in the country you go they have good anesthesiologists, and they do safe practice.

But it's too bad, because I think it's all changing because of insurance. Because of the American system of health care. For instance, you know, sometimes I stay up all night. Say, when people come and have babies, I'm on call at night. And these people, they come in, they want an epidural, which is a method of pain relief. You give them a shot on the back that relieves their labor pains. They can go through labor easier. Okay?

Well, some of these people don't have insurance. They just walk in. Okay? And so after twenty-five years of practice in medicine, I stay up all night injecting drugs in their back and watching them, because you have to watch them. And I don't sleep all night. And do you know how much the government pays for that night? Fifty-four dollars and sixty-eight cents. This is public aid. If you call a plumber to your house, he rings the bell and he charges sixty dollars right there. Just ringing the bell to step into your house!

No one would want to be a doctor if all we were paid was fifty-four dollars a night. Because-it's simple. Any job you have, if you don't get rewarded, you know, the bright people won't go to it. The brightest students say, "Why should I go to this if I'm not going to be paid?" I mean, here the mentality is all-you know, in the United States everything is money. Everything is for money. It's the money that talks.

So to pay us reasonably, the hospital must charge the other people, the people with insurance. So their bills are very large and the private insurances have to compensate for that. And the people who have private insurance, they pay very high premiums. Because they are paying for the fact that America does not give everyone insurance.

And the worst of it is, with all they pay, even then, I think they get very bad treatment from their insurance. Because with these HMOs, well, they are trying to practice medicine without being in medicine. And they are making professional decisions that they don't have the knowledge to make. Every human being is different. If you do an arthroscopy in a patient, which is a knee operation, say you have a patient who is a weak person. And he can't go home. Well, the HMO says this is a same-day surgery, you have to send the patient home same day. Because it's cheaper for HMO, right? But you look- after you put them to sleep, say you wake them up and they have some problem, like they have an irregular heart. So you say no, we can't send this person home. We have to keep him overnight.

Then, instead of using your energy and effort to take care of this person, you have to go through this battle with insurance companies and HMOs. You have to call downstairs, you have to get the HMO people on the phone. And you know who answers? Some dropout from high school or something. [Laughs] And we have to say, "Miss Sanders-whatever your name is-we have to keep this patient overnight." And she says, "No, it's not possible. It's not permitted on his insurance." And-I mean, what do you do with this poor person, you know? It's ugly. It's so ugly. I mean, we know it's dangerous for him to go home. He should stay overnight. Just because the HMO has set a formula, not every human being fits in four-by-four, you know.

This country-there are some great people here. Great, great people here. I was treated very nicely. I love it here. And I think-well, myself, I think I've had a wonderful life.

But at the same time, I think I have been very lucky that I came here when I did and became a doctor when I did. I would not want to start all over today. Because, again, today, what's happening is the s.h.i.+ft of economy in medicine. With the HMOs, it's just so much harder to be a doctor and simply help people. They don't let the doctors practice medicine. They force us into the administrative part of it, you know. Which they shouldn't really. Because we were trained to treat patients. We were not trained to negotiate and be administrators. When you go to medical school they don't train you for those things. But these lawyers and administrators, they intervened and they took over. They try to control the doctors now.

So I think I was just lucky to have this wonderful career when I did. I lived at a good time. And you know what I remember best? It was when I first came to this country and my husband and I were living in that tiny apartment here. That was the happiest time of our life. We only had our white coats, and we went across the street to our work, and we came back. And when I got my paycheck, it wasn't much. It was like two hundred dollars or something for two weeks. But many times I forgot to deposit it. [Laughs] Because you didn't need that much money, you know what I mean? And I didn't think of being rich. You know? I just wanted to be a doctor.

Your hands are in their body.

ORTHOPEDIC SURGEON.

Dane Andrews.

Growing up, I was always curious about what was inside of things, what made things work. In my grade school, there was this science fair every year. And it started off I wanted to dissect a frog. So the science teacher gave me a catalogue, I ordered the frog and a manual, and my dad and I sat in the bas.e.m.e.nt and dissected the frog. This was like third grade. And each year it escalated. I went from a frog to a fetal pig, then it was a dogfish shark. Then a cat. I did all these animals. Everybody was waiting, "What's Dane gonna cut open this year?" I was a weird kid.