Over the past 45-plus years, I have only told this story to three or four other people, so by putting it out there, maybe something more will be unearthed, and with it, some kind of closure can occur. Otherwise, the memory of these young women very possibly dies with me. That’s not the way it should be!
If you believe that the censorship we have seen over the past four years during the Covid response is a recent phenomenon, think again!
This immediately brought to mind a situation that I experienced during the summer of 1978, as a second-year Internal Medicine resident at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, NY. I'll present this event exactly as I remember it, and I'll then correct a few small details that I came to know during August of 2020 when I researched the incident I am about to describe.
If, during CPR, the chest wall is opened, such that you can place the patient's heart in your hand in order to squeeze it directly to try to pump blood into the circulatory system, that's known as open cardiac massage.
Getting back to the event at hand; on the day that it happened, I was either the on-call second-year medical resident to the Emergency Dept or it was the month where I was stationed in the ED as one of the senior medical residents.
They were all very beautiful and they were all dead! We saved no one that day.
Several days later, I was channel surfing, something I rarely, if ever, do, when I saw a notice that the West Indian Day Parade to be held on Labor Day on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn was going to be canceled due to Covid.
I immediately realized that the event I described did not occur during the Rastafarian Day Parade; it was during the West Indian Day Parade; an event that has been held every year on Labor Day on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn since the mid-1960s.
https://brownstone.org/articles/censorship-in-medicine-is-nothing-new/
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