To clarify whether the mass was indeed cystic (that is, fluid-filled) and not solid, I needed to have an ultrasound. Because it was such a new technology in 1976, Holy Cross did not have an ultrasound scanner, and so on Friday we were sent back up to University Hospital for the exam. My dad had to work and since we had only one car, our neighbor, Peter Nordhoff—an emigrant from Holland, memorable to me both for his accent and for only having a thumb on his right hand, the other fingers having been lost in an accident at the Kennecott copper smelter—drove my mother up to Holy Cross, where they picked me up before heading up to University Hospital. Rather than asking Mr. Nordhoff to wait, my mother said we’d take a taxi back to Holy Cross.
When the ultrasound was over and my mother had talked with the radiologist, she called for a Ute Taxi cab to take us back to Holy Cross. She was crying quite a bit. While we waited for the taxi, a radiologist called us back into the hospital. I sat in the hallway, thinking about my mother crying, thinking about all the sick people I had been surrounded by as they waited for their radiology exams, thinking about the blood leaking from my kidneys.
Much later when she came out of the office, my mother was even more upset. The radiologist had called us back into the hospital to pressure my mother into dropping Dr. Middleton and having my care managed by surgeons at the university. She resisted and when he finally relented, my mother exited his office, grabbed my hand, and we briskly walked away. When we got back outside again, we couldn’t see a Ute Taxi anywhere. Assuming it was better to call a different company after having missed the previous cab, she called for a Yellow Cab, and we started waiting again, my mother occasionally breaking into tears. Just as we saw a Yellow Cab pulling up toward the hospital entrance, a beat-up Ute Taxi pulled in front of us and the gruff driver yelled through the rolled-down passenger window, “Lady, are you the woman who called for a taxi to get to Holy Cross Hospital?”
“Yes,” my mother answered timidly.
“I’ve been driving all around this goddamned hospital complex looking for you!”
“We got called back in by the doctors after I called,” my mother explained.
“How long does it take to make another phone call?” he growled as he jumped out of the car and opened the rear passenger side door, as if to insist that we now get in his taxi. My mother got in the car and I followed her, sitting next to her on the black vinyl seat. The cabbie continued to rant as we drove back to the hospital. My mother sat in the back seat crying, not responding to anything the driver said. I sat in terror of, and anger at, this driver who was making my mother cry.
My mother has no memory of a rude taxi driver. She only remembers crying because the ultrasound exam had shown the tumor to be a solid mass, thus likely a malignant tumor.
Later that afternoon I was discharged to spend the weekend with my family, but we were instructed to have me back at the hospital Sunday evening.
Original Documentation
Discussion Questions
This day is a nice illustration of fragmented nature of medical care. I was admitted to Holy Cross Hospital but they did not have a diagnostic ultrasound device, so I go up to the University of Utah hospital. Neither the documents I received from Holy Cross Hospital or from Dr. Middleton’s office have an evidence of the ultrasound study. As indicated in the image above, there was a procedure performed at the University of Utah on April 2, 1976, but no report came with the documents sent by the University of Utah Hospital. Even though I had been in the hospital from March 31st through April 2nd, there is no discharge summary for this hospitalization. The discharge summary for the April 4th through 14th hospitalization makes no mention of the US or the April 1 [pyelogram](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyelogram#:~:text=Pyelogram%20(or%20pyelography%20or%20urography,vein%20into%20the%20circulatory%20system.).
- Was it appropriate for the radiologist to pressure my mother to switch my care to the Univesity Hospital?
- Is there any surprise that the US report seems to be missing?