Personal history

Abstract

The ambulance slipped quietly down the twenty blocks of upper Broadway past the entrance to the George Washington Bridge. This was not the Great White Way of midtown Manhattan, with its brightly lit animated billboards, theaters, and tacky movie houses. Here—the northern tip of Manhattan Island—the street was lined with gray, nondescript apartment buildings, kosher butcher shops, bodegas, Chinese laundries, and other 1950-style small stores. It was already dark, the evening dreary and overcast. The ambulance moved silently, stopping at an occasional red light. No screaming siren or flashing lights—on purpose. “The lights, the noise, it makes people crazy,” the driver said, turning to me in the next seat. “They crash into things. Besides,” he continued, looking back at the old man lying on the gurney, “he looks like he'll make it to the Neurologic Institute just fine.” This driver seemed to know what he was talking about. He was a calm, old, experienced hand and I wasn't calm or old or experienced—in fact, I was young and terribly upset. It had all begun earlier in the evening. I was a third year medical student assigned to the general medicine wards at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and had just returned home to Bard Hall, the student dorm on Haven Avenue. The note I found in my mailbox read, “Urgent. Please call Mrs. Katz, your uncle's housekeeper. He had a stroke.” I called her right away. Uncle Sidney was my favorite relative. Most of the older family members called him Friedl, short for Siegfried, but he'd Americanized his name when he immigrated to New York. Sidney lived just five blocks from the hospital. I'd seen him just two days before, as I did nearly every weekend. “Ludwig,” Mrs. Katz said on the phone, her heavily accented voice trembling with urgency, “I found …