J. Paul Waymack - Well, Doc, It Seemed Like a Good Idea At The Time!: The Unexpected Adventures of a Trauma Surgeon

Copyright 2017 by J. Paul Waymack, M.D., Sc.D. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Edited by Elayne Wells Harmer

Cover design by Ivica Jandrijevic

Cover illustration by Darren Nelson

Interior layout and design by www.writingnights.org

Book preparation by Chad Robertson

ISBN: 978-171-9944595

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication Data:

Names : Waymack, J. Paul, M.D., Sc.D. author | Wells Harmer, Elayne, editor.

Title : Well, Doc, It Seemed Like A Good Idea at the Time!
The Unexpected Adventures of a Trauma Surgeon / J. Paul Waymack.

Description : Independently Published, 2019.

Identifiers : ISBN 978-1-7199445-9-5 (Perfect bound) |

Subjects : Surgeon | Hospital Residency | Memoir |
US Military | Medical Training
Classification : Pending

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to all the nurses who kept me out of troubleor at least tried toduring my surgical career. I give special thanks to Jane, Randi, and Andy, three of the finest nurses in the medical profession. It was truly a privilege to work with them.

I also dedicate this book to the unknown student who slipped into the computer science registration line at Virginia Tech just five seconds before me in July 1971, taking the last spot in a class I needed for my major. Had he arrived after me, I likely would have led a normal life as a chemical engineer and would have witnessed none of what I am about to relate. That student completely changed my life.

CONTENTS

Figure 1. Sino-American Burn Conference
in Chongqing, China.

Figure 5. Captain Conen and Major Waymack
with Russian doctors.

I began recording the events in this book in the 1970s, when I was a third-year medical student. The journaling continued through my surgery residency, graduate school training, academic surgery career, and my service in the U.S. Armys Institute for Surgical Research; I finally stopped in the mid-1990s, when I worked at the FDA. By that time, the narratives were all stored in Word files on my hard drive, where they stayed, untouched, for twenty years.

One night several years ago, I had dinner with John Harmer, a friend and colleague. I mentioned offhand that I had kept a journal of memorable events, and John asked me to email him a copy. He had written and published half a dozen books throughout his distinguished political and legal career, and had a seasoned eye for a good narrative. After reading my 500 pages of journal entries, John insisted I turn the manuscript into a book. He asked if he could share it with an accomplished writer and editor, Elayne Wells Harmer, who happened to be his daughter-in-law. I agreed.

For the next six months, Elayne expertly condensed and edited many of my anecdotes and created this book. I will be eternally grateful for her efforts and Johns encouragement. But for them, these stories would never have escaped my hard drive.

I would also like to thank all my professors, from my undergraduate years at Virginia Tech and medical school years at the Medical College of Virginia to my surgery residency and subsequent graduate school years at the University of Cincinnati. Their training enabled me to become a successful physician and surgeon and to experience what I am about to relate.

Finally, I would like to thank all my patients. Although it is true that at times some of them showed a total lack of judgmenthence the common refrain, Well, Doc, it seemed like a good idea at the timemost of them showed incredible courage in dealing with lifes greatest struggles. Such courage was always a source of amazement and inspiration to me. I hope I can show half the courage they did when I am faced with such challenges.

J. Paul Waymack, M.D., Sc.D.

September 2017

In July 1976, I began my third year as a medical student at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond, Virginia. After two cloistered years studying textbooks and cadavers in classrooms and labs, I was relieved and eager to finally move over to clinical rotations in a handful of Virginia hospitals.

My first rotation was in the emergency room of Riverside Hospital in Newport News, an hour east of the Medical College. As I drove to the hospital that first sunny morning, I was filled with excitement at the prospect of finally spending my days seeing patientsbut more than a little nervous about the probability of making mistakes in front of them. Still, I was naively confident that I would be skilled, professional, and respected, and I thought I knew something about the types of cases doctors handled. I expected patients would present with fevers, chest pains, a broken leg, or maybe even a gunshot wound. I expected patients would look and act the way my family had always behaved when we visited the doctors office.

In other words, I was utterly unprepared for the insanity I would encounter that day, or during the years that followed.

That morning, I didnt envision myself chasing naked patients around the ER parking lot in the middle of the night. I never imagined Id use a horse sling to transfer a seven-hundred-pound patient. I certainly didnt expect to be treating a patient who, after running away from the hospital, leaped into a passing convertible and then swallowed the cigarette lighter. And I most definitely never guessed that one day I would be a major in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during the Cold War, on orders of the president and with a KGB agent hot on my tail, or that I would find a long-deceased corpse in the intensive care unit in a remote hospital in the Soviet Union.

In my wildest dreams I never imagined most of what I experienced as a doctor, but these stories are all true. I couldnt have made them up if I tried.

As I began to realize that my career as a trauma physician would not be at all what I had anticipated, I started keeping a record of the various insane events I witnessed. This book is a look back at some of the more memorable ones. Of course, I certainly witnessed my share of tragedies and discouragement, but it was the lighter side of human behavior that I chose to record. Much like the novel and television show M*A*S*H*, based on a surgeons memoirs of his service behind the front lines of the Korean War, this book tries to capture the humorous anecdotes in the life of a surgeon.

The experiences recounted here are authentic. In most instances, names of patients and doctors have been changed to protect their privacy.

19761978

On my first day as a brand-new third-year medical student on rotation in the emergency room at Riverside Hospital, I cheerfully introduced myself to the ER director, the intern, the nurses, the receptionist, and anybody else I passed. Although I was just a medical student, I had the self-assurance and buoyancy of a promising doctor, and I was eager to meet the staff and get to work.

The director showed me the doctors lounge. It was located right in the middle of the ER, and doctors retreated there to read charts, write notes, review X-rays, make phone calls, eat, and drink coffee. One wall was lined with bookcases filled with various medical textbooks. A refrigerator, coffee maker, and other odds and ends filled another wall. Windows took up most of a third wall, providing a lovely view of the parking lot, and the final wall displayed the X-ray viewing boxes. Youve seen those on TV: rectangular boxes with bright lights in the back. You put the X-ray film on the box, turn on the light, and thoughtfully squint at the film.