Yield

YIELD

My high school chemistry teacher was also a forensics investigator.  He specialized in arson, burned bodies and flammable chemicals, and he entertained us with sometimes-gruesome stories from more than twenty-five years of duty.  There was the skeleton of a woman, average height—which is to say five foot four—somewhere around thirty years old, reduced to blackened bones and cinders in a house fire.  He gave us two clues: “For example, the middle finger on her right hand has a large calcification on the top section, like you might have if you wrote heavily with a pencil, for example.”  He said ‘for example’ at the beginning and end of everything.  “For example, she also has a tiny indention, a notch, in her front tooth, also the right one, for example.”  It was our job, eager students, wound up by the grisly details, to figure out her occupation.
 

Work changes you.  It shows itself on your body.  In the same way that a carpenter’s hands are tuned to the nuances of hammer and nail, the way wood can talk to you through your arms, my hands listen to numbers on files, to injection records and saturation levels, to painful and courageous histories.  I filter through the hundreds of thousands (could be millions) of dead medical records at St. Vincent’s Hospital, and line them up in ascending order by year of admittance.
 
The files begin with a complaint.  Something like “My back hurts and I don’t know why,” or “My leg is broken,” or worse things—usually only one sentence, typed up by someone in Admitting.  Then a social and family history, which is dictated to the nurse by the patient, and hand-written.  This is where the nurses fill in what’s really happening, the stuff that doesn’t show up in the complaint: “Woman claims to have walked into door,” or: “Child has bruises on back and legs, father says they are from falling off the bed.”  Then a medical history, a list of procedures performed, if any, and finally billing information.  Sometimes there are x-rays, sometimes there are sonograms.  Sometimes there’s hardly anything—a blurry carbon copy and illegible signature.  The files are stored vertically on shelves in thirty-two rows.  They’re accented by six different color-coded stickers (green for first-time emergency visit, orange for same-day dismissal, red for D.O.A., yellow, brown and light blue for what I haven’t been able to figure out yet.)
 
My fingertips are tough, callused by the constant shuffling and reshuffling of paperwork and paperclips, removing the tiny staples, and my cuticles are often rubbed red and raw from jamming my hands in between two folders, cut open on the sharp edges of the files.
 
From:  YIELD. Copyright © 2010 by Lee Houck.  All rights reserved.  Published by arrangement with Kensington Publishing Corp.