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Brooklyn
Memoir (3)
Sleepy!
One of the hardest experiences during my residency was the chronic sleeplessness. We had to be on call every third day. The next day following on call we had to work as usual for 8 hours. Therefore, we had to work 32 hours in stretch every third day.
It was in the middle of the night when I was on call during my rotation in pediatrics. While I was taking a history from a mother of a child hospitalized from ER, I became extremely sleepy. My consciousness became cloudy every 5 minutes during the history taking. The patient's mother told me to take some rest. I thanked to her and took a nap for half an hour in the resident on-call room, and then returned to work.
After having moved to an apartment in Manhattan, I was commuting between Manhattan and Brooklyn by car. Driving home from the hospital after 32 hours of work was sometimes very dangerous. If I kept silent for awhile, I was wandering into the next lane. In order to keep myself awake what I did was sing loudly. The problem was there was very few repertories for me to be able to sing till the end. So I always sang Astro Boy's theme, which was very popular TV cartoon series in my childhood. After having sung Astro Boy' s theme for a year or so I received a mail package from Elie, my girl friend in Osaka. It was a music caccette including " Elie my love." It is the English title used for the cover version sung by Ray Charles. The original Japanese title is "Itoshi no Elie," a mega hit ballad by Keisuke KUWATA who was then (and now) the king of Japanese pops. Anyway, from that day on my routine in the car was to listen to "Elie my love" in full volume in addition to sing Astro Boy's theme.
If you find a middle aged man at a bar in Osaka, who looks sentimental
with humming either Astro Boy's theme or Elie my love, it is me. Oh,
my wife's name is not Elie, by the way.