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| Cheryl Then |
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| Cheryl Now |
When I was a fourth year medical student I was acting as a "Sub intern" on a medical ward, a sort of audition for internship at The New York Hospital. In those days, internships at the New York Hospital, a gleaming white palace on the chic upper East Side, were not easy to earn and you had to do six weeks where you were watched by real interns, resident and faculty. If you did well, you had a good chance of landing a spot among the thirty medical interns who were selected from Johns Hopkins Medical School, Harvard, Columbia and Cornell.
It all made American Idol look like pretty tepid competition
One day, I was getting bombed with admissions. The admitting intern on each ward worked up every admission coming to the floor, usually from the Emergency Room, from seven in the morning until seven the next morning. Every admission was a ton of work, and if the ER admitted twenty patients over a 24 hour period, you got five admissions, which was about all you could really do over 24 hours because each patient took at least two hours, usually three and you had all the patients who were already in ward beds to take care of, not to mention obligations to go to radiology rounds, chart rounds, ward rounds, attending rounds. So you were pretty strung out on admitting days.
So this morning we got two "hits" at once, a rare thing. The ER called and said there were two patients who needed to be admitted. We knew nothing about them except one was named Gertrude and one was named Karen. One of the other interns, who was not on call for admissions that day, took pity on me and offered to take one of the admissions. "Okay," I said, you take Karen, I'll get Gertrude." He was doing me a big favor, so I took Gertrude who had to be at least 80, just by the name, and Karen might be, well, younger.
As it turned out, Gertrude was 93 and had a urinary tract infection which had become blood borne: She was septic, delirious and a "train wreck."
Karen turned out to be 24, an Eileen Ford model with aseptic meningitis.
My fellow intern was grinning and singing, "No good deed goes unrewarded." He was actually happy, which medical interns rarely are. I was his new instant best friend. I had given him Karen.
Of course, the ward nurses quickly came to hate Karen. All the medical students and interns and residents found reasons to float by her bed, just to be sure she was doing well, to be sure she had enough pain relief, had got her breakfast on time, to be sure the light, which bothered her eyes, was not too bright, the blinds drawn.
The nurses were rolling their eyes and groaning. "I used to respect these guys," one said. "Now look at them, falling all over themselves like fools."
The next day, I was no longer on call, and I had been up 36 hours and was waiting for chart rounds to begin, because once they were over around 6 PM, I could finally go home and crash.
My head was splitting with a blinding migraine. I felt grubby and crawly. I hadn't shaved and my spotless "whites" were now besotted with urine, blood, a little vomit here and there and I can only imagine how I stank. I was leaning up against the nurse's station desk, alone on the ward, waiting for interns and residents to start filtering back to the ward, looking down to the far end of the ward hall, and I saw a figure come through the door moving toward me.
She was definitely not an intern or a nurse. She walked with wonderful grace, in tight jeans and a T shirt. She was carrying a bunch of wrapped flowers and she was coming straight toward me.
She was the most beautiful woman I had ever, have ever, personally laid eyes upon.
"Let me guess," I said to her, when she finally reached the nurse's station. "You're here to see Karen."
"Yes," she said, with an impossibly deeply dimpled smile.
"How did I ever know?" I mumbled to myself and led her down to Karen's room. I asked her to wait at the door. It was a four bed room and I had to check everyone was dressed or behind pulled curtains and I wanted to be sure Karen was awake.
"You've got a friend," I told Karen. "Off hand, a wild guess. She's from Eileen Ford."
"Oh, it's Cheryl," Karen said. "Show her in."
So I showed in Cheryl Tiegs, and she thanked me with a flashing smile and I left to go to chart rounds.
I never saw Cheryl again, but I ran into Karen quite a lot, in one of those strange New York City things, where you just keep bumping into someone on the street or in the convenience store. Karen had shown no interest in the male medicos who were falling all over themselves on the ward, but she was always very nice to me.
One of the residents told me later told me Karen had asked about me, whether I had a girlfriend. He said I had missed my chance with her. She was lovely, but my life was just too complicated at that time.
Besides, I thought, beautiful women like that are just so...besieged. She ultimately married one of the gynecologists on staff, a guy twenty years her senior.
A couple of years later, I met Karen at Penn Station. She was married by then, wearing a ring on her left hand which might have financed a fleet of yachts, and the topic turned to Cheryl and what had happened to her.
"Why didn't you ever ask her out?" Karen asked.
"Oh, right," I said. "Between Sports Illustrated cover shots, she would have needed a clip board to look up some young doctor she had met on the ward at New York Hospital."
"You never know," Karen said. "I wound up with a doctor."
I thought about Cheryl Tiegs. She was exactly my age. She had moved from California to New York and her career had exploded. She was flown all over the world, paid immense money to smile into the camera and she was told constantly she was a superstar. And I thought about what her life must have been like. She made her career on being among the most visually beautiful women of her generation. And beyond the career and the money, a beautiful woman in New York City is constantly pursued by men who are rich, powerful, charismatic. What must that do to you?
The arc of my life, the arc of the life of any doctor or engineer or lawyer, is one of slowly building strength, of humiliation, humility, keeping your head down, moving forward painfully, slowly, soldiering through mistakes and growing and persisting, moving forward.
The longer I stayed in the hospital, the more I had begun to look at women differently, as I moved through medical training. Good looks were nice, but women who were really competent, brave, kind became more interesting.
Cheryl is no longer twenty four. She's forty years older. Still beautiful, but what does a woman whose life is about visual beauty do as she ages and those qualities start to fade? If your main pleasure in life, if your sense of personal potency has been turning heads, causing a commotion in every room simply by walking into it, what happens when that is lost and you become relatively invisible? How do you move from deriving pleasure from something so deeply embedded in your psyche to deriving new pleasures elsewhere?
Or is that what aging is all about--transforming your mind to derive satisfaction from new places?
And, when it comes to women, I think again of that deep, abiding truth, from the movie Roger Rabbit when Eddie asks Jessica Rabbit, that femme fatale, what she sees in Roger the cartoon rabbit. "He makes me laugh," Jessica says.
And that's as good an answer as I've ever heard.
It all made American Idol look like pretty tepid competition
One day, I was getting bombed with admissions. The admitting intern on each ward worked up every admission coming to the floor, usually from the Emergency Room, from seven in the morning until seven the next morning. Every admission was a ton of work, and if the ER admitted twenty patients over a 24 hour period, you got five admissions, which was about all you could really do over 24 hours because each patient took at least two hours, usually three and you had all the patients who were already in ward beds to take care of, not to mention obligations to go to radiology rounds, chart rounds, ward rounds, attending rounds. So you were pretty strung out on admitting days.
So this morning we got two "hits" at once, a rare thing. The ER called and said there were two patients who needed to be admitted. We knew nothing about them except one was named Gertrude and one was named Karen. One of the other interns, who was not on call for admissions that day, took pity on me and offered to take one of the admissions. "Okay," I said, you take Karen, I'll get Gertrude." He was doing me a big favor, so I took Gertrude who had to be at least 80, just by the name, and Karen might be, well, younger.
As it turned out, Gertrude was 93 and had a urinary tract infection which had become blood borne: She was septic, delirious and a "train wreck."
Karen turned out to be 24, an Eileen Ford model with aseptic meningitis.
My fellow intern was grinning and singing, "No good deed goes unrewarded." He was actually happy, which medical interns rarely are. I was his new instant best friend. I had given him Karen.
Of course, the ward nurses quickly came to hate Karen. All the medical students and interns and residents found reasons to float by her bed, just to be sure she was doing well, to be sure she had enough pain relief, had got her breakfast on time, to be sure the light, which bothered her eyes, was not too bright, the blinds drawn.
The nurses were rolling their eyes and groaning. "I used to respect these guys," one said. "Now look at them, falling all over themselves like fools."
The next day, I was no longer on call, and I had been up 36 hours and was waiting for chart rounds to begin, because once they were over around 6 PM, I could finally go home and crash.
My head was splitting with a blinding migraine. I felt grubby and crawly. I hadn't shaved and my spotless "whites" were now besotted with urine, blood, a little vomit here and there and I can only imagine how I stank. I was leaning up against the nurse's station desk, alone on the ward, waiting for interns and residents to start filtering back to the ward, looking down to the far end of the ward hall, and I saw a figure come through the door moving toward me.
She was definitely not an intern or a nurse. She walked with wonderful grace, in tight jeans and a T shirt. She was carrying a bunch of wrapped flowers and she was coming straight toward me.
She was the most beautiful woman I had ever, have ever, personally laid eyes upon.
"Let me guess," I said to her, when she finally reached the nurse's station. "You're here to see Karen."
"Yes," she said, with an impossibly deeply dimpled smile.
"How did I ever know?" I mumbled to myself and led her down to Karen's room. I asked her to wait at the door. It was a four bed room and I had to check everyone was dressed or behind pulled curtains and I wanted to be sure Karen was awake.
"You've got a friend," I told Karen. "Off hand, a wild guess. She's from Eileen Ford."
"Oh, it's Cheryl," Karen said. "Show her in."
So I showed in Cheryl Tiegs, and she thanked me with a flashing smile and I left to go to chart rounds.
I never saw Cheryl again, but I ran into Karen quite a lot, in one of those strange New York City things, where you just keep bumping into someone on the street or in the convenience store. Karen had shown no interest in the male medicos who were falling all over themselves on the ward, but she was always very nice to me.
One of the residents told me later told me Karen had asked about me, whether I had a girlfriend. He said I had missed my chance with her. She was lovely, but my life was just too complicated at that time.
Besides, I thought, beautiful women like that are just so...besieged. She ultimately married one of the gynecologists on staff, a guy twenty years her senior.
A couple of years later, I met Karen at Penn Station. She was married by then, wearing a ring on her left hand which might have financed a fleet of yachts, and the topic turned to Cheryl and what had happened to her.
"Why didn't you ever ask her out?" Karen asked.
"Oh, right," I said. "Between Sports Illustrated cover shots, she would have needed a clip board to look up some young doctor she had met on the ward at New York Hospital."
"You never know," Karen said. "I wound up with a doctor."
I thought about Cheryl Tiegs. She was exactly my age. She had moved from California to New York and her career had exploded. She was flown all over the world, paid immense money to smile into the camera and she was told constantly she was a superstar. And I thought about what her life must have been like. She made her career on being among the most visually beautiful women of her generation. And beyond the career and the money, a beautiful woman in New York City is constantly pursued by men who are rich, powerful, charismatic. What must that do to you?
The arc of my life, the arc of the life of any doctor or engineer or lawyer, is one of slowly building strength, of humiliation, humility, keeping your head down, moving forward painfully, slowly, soldiering through mistakes and growing and persisting, moving forward.
The longer I stayed in the hospital, the more I had begun to look at women differently, as I moved through medical training. Good looks were nice, but women who were really competent, brave, kind became more interesting.
Cheryl is no longer twenty four. She's forty years older. Still beautiful, but what does a woman whose life is about visual beauty do as she ages and those qualities start to fade? If your main pleasure in life, if your sense of personal potency has been turning heads, causing a commotion in every room simply by walking into it, what happens when that is lost and you become relatively invisible? How do you move from deriving pleasure from something so deeply embedded in your psyche to deriving new pleasures elsewhere?
Or is that what aging is all about--transforming your mind to derive satisfaction from new places?
And, when it comes to women, I think again of that deep, abiding truth, from the movie Roger Rabbit when Eddie asks Jessica Rabbit, that femme fatale, what she sees in Roger the cartoon rabbit. "He makes me laugh," Jessica says.
And that's as good an answer as I've ever heard.
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