Act 2: the RISB

Except for the lack of a sauna, the Rehabilitation Institute of Santa Barbara (RISB, or RizzBee), could pass easily for an upscale spa. It has a capacity of only 20 patients at any given time, this for the sake of better focus on each patient. It includes a spacious room full of all sorts of gymnastic equipment, a commons in which all of the patients eat their meals, all of which (the meals) are very well prepared and a staff equally so. The commons has among its many amenities a 21 inch computer at which I was able daily to check on, and to reply to, my e-mails. The nurses all were highly competent and accommodating as were the many therapists.(Nurses make up a strange lot, about which more later. Or perhaps not.)
The doctors at RISB are among the vainest creatures on earth, and I do not except George Steinbrenner, say, or Diane Keaton. Come to think of it, how can it be otherwise? Jerome Groopman in How Doctors Think pours syrup over the word, but, bottom line, it is vanity. "[Dr. Richard Selzer] showed the young Terry Light [a medical intern] that a surgeon has to have a high level of confidence to operate, or, as Selzer had written, the 'audacity to take a knife to another human being.' A certain bravado goes with being a surgeon, Light admitted." Aluminum siding salesmen need bravado; surgeons need the confidence that sprouts out of vanity. This came home to me during one appointment with my surgeon, when he raised both hands in front of him and said simply, "magic." And you can bet that he believed it. I wouldn't have had it any other way.
By this standard, the two doctors who prowled the halls at the RISB were the souls of diffidence. One or the other, and for the most part both, were on call most hours of long days. One was an epidemiologist, the other a specialist in the things physical rehab does. (It bears an inkhorn label.)There was much confusion concerning my medications; neither seems to have heard of Byetta so that I ended up taking both Lantus and Byetta and inherited a prescription for a three month's supply of Lantus, which I paid for – it’s quite pricey -- and did not need. However, both of the physicians seemed more than competent. One spoke to my nephrologist (whose services are strictly precautionary). This resulted in a downshifting of some of my prescriptions for the next order cycle. The wizards giveth and the wizards taketh away.
With as many as 20 patients in their charge, the doctors were kept quite busy with a lot of people complaining about one thing or another, with very little patience to spare waiting their turn at a receptive ear. I wondered at the energy and equanimity shown by these two wardens. My fellow internees constituted a mixed bag worthy of a novel (for which I don't have the time). At one point, I found myself in the nostalgic embrace of Old Brooklyn Heights with the long-since retired director of publications for the Jehovah’s Witnesses who (the Witnesses) had colonized the Heights even before my reluctant emigration. I was divertingly attracted too by a Kerr-like (Think Tea and Sympathy) woman whose charge was a brilliant Japanese girl whose problem (the girl’s) I did not inquire about, I having grown prematurely polite. And that is but a small sampling of my encounters at the RISB.