Quotes, the House of God

Another two months away from internet.

Been reading The House of God. Here are some quotations.

Gomer = Get Out of My Emergency Room

"Gomers are human beings who have lost what goes into being human beings. They wan to die, and we will not let them. We're cruel to the gomers, by saving them, and they're cruel to us, by fighting tooth and nail against our trying to save them. They hurt us, we hurt them." -chapter 2

" The people I saw seemed strange, as if they should have some disease that I should be able to diagnose. No one had a right to be healthy, for my world was only disease." -chapter 3

" He uses the standard method: admit the LOL in NAD, do a test, produce a complication, do another test to diagnose the complication, get another complication, and so on until they're gomertose and non-TURFABLE. " -chapter 3

"In the center of the room was a stretcher. In the center of the stretcher was Anna O. She lay motionless, her knees bent up toward the ceiling, her shoulders curved around toward her knees, so that her head, unsupported and rigid, almost touched her thighs. From the side she looked like the letter W. ...... The Fat man took off his stethoscope, plugged the earpiece into Anna O.'s ears, and then, using the bell like a megaphone, shouted into it: "Cochlea come in..." Suddenly the room exploded. Anna O. was rocketing up and down on the stretcher, strieking at great pitch and intensity : ROODLE ROODLE ROOOOOOOO...DLE!" -chapter 5

"From that night on, I might be everything else, but I'd never again be panicked in the House of God. It was a thrilling thought ... until I realized with alarm that I hadn't learned how to save anyone at all ... and that what I was thrilled about was learning how to save myself." -chapter 7

" So this is it ... four months into the internship and I've become an animal, a moss-brained moose who did not and could not and would not think and talk." -chapter 8

"Each ward has a Sociable Cervix (p.s. social service), whose responsibility it was to get the gomers placed. It was an impossible job. No one wanted the poor gomers. The nursing homes would say the gomer was too well and didn't need them, and the families would say that the gomer was too sick and needed a nursing home, and the House Privates wound say the gomer was way too sick and needed the House of God Blue Cross care, and the terns would say we couldn't stand having Broccoli Ladies who blasted us for keeping them alive, and wound the Cervix kindly get them the hell out. The gomers offered no opinion." -chapter 9

" A mind-boggling thought: the delivery of medical care consisted of BUFFING and TURFING the seeker of care somewhere else. The revolving door, with that eternally revolving door always waiting in the end." -chapter 10

"My father, adrift with the question of how to handle a single elderly parent, had found his solution in the standard middle-class ethos: 'ship them to the gomer homes.' Cattle in box-cars. I was mad ... How much my grandfather had gone through, and how little was left for him now. He would turn into a gomer. ... An ominous thought came to me: as he began to get demented, I'd visit him in the home, a syringeful of cyanide like a bar of candy in my pocket. He wouldn't be a gomer, no." -chapter 11

"With the delivery of medical care this swiftly revolving door, with every doc on the planet frantic to BUFF and TURF elsewhere, these people had gotten expert at finding a static center and hanging on. These people didn't give a damn about their diseases or 'cures''; what they wanted was what anyone wanted: the hand in their hand, the sense that their doctor could care." -chapter 12

"It shits. Addicts trying to dupe you for dope, drunks, the poor, the clap, the lonelies - I hate'em all. I don't trust anyone. It comes from being vomited on and spit at and yelled at and conned. Everyone's out to get me to do something for them, for their fake disease. The first thing I look for now is how they're trying to take me for a ride. It's paranoia, see?" -chapter 13

"A horrible thought crossed my mind, horrible because for an instant it didn't seem horrible, like seeing a baby and thinking of putting an icepick through a fontanelle of its skull, the thought, Yes, Saul, I'll do it, I'll finish you off." -chapter 15

"He lay there in his own feces, a mass of tubing and tape and bruises and rotted skin and empty bone poking through at the ribs and elbows and knees. ... The memory of ... Saul saying to me, 'Finish me off, do I have to beg you? Finish me off!' ... Angrily I uncapped the syringe and found the IV outlet and pushed in enough KCL to kill him. I watched him gasp for breath as his heart depolarized, and I watched his breathing become laborious, and his hand give a little twitch, and then a stillness come over him, a peace" -chapter 17

" You and the other interns obliterate each day, in order to start the next one. Forget today today. Total denial. Instant repression. ... It isn't the medical skills you learn, it's the ability to wake up the next day as if nothing had happened the day before, even if what happened is a friend killing himself." -chapter 18



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Somehow I've realised I am repressed enough to inject IV KCL into a gomer without even a flicker of hesistation in my heart. Certainly I will do this to my dad and mum if they become a gomer. Isn't death the eternal peace? Returning to where they come from, before birth. Eternal peace, away from the shit the urine the vomit the sputum the blood the pus.