“One of the nurses said, 'John Lennon.' I thought, What does John Lennon have to do with it ...

In 1980, Frank Veteran was a resident in surgery at Roosevelt Hospital on New York City’s west side. At 30 years old, he was in his fifth and final year of surgical training Between the pressures of medical school and his job, he’d had little time to keep up with current events, let alone the comings and goings of his childhood heroes.

“I was into the Beatles, and I followed them,” Veteran told me when we spoke in 2005 for a Guitar World Presents special issue. “But by the time I was the chief resident in surgery, I wasn’t listening to them anymore. I was too busy. I didn’t even realize John Lennon was living in New York.”

One of three chief residents at Roosevelt, Veteran was on call for emergencies every third night. There, he attended to the routine injuries of city life.

“Gunshot wounds, stab wounds. You wouldn’t have to be in the hospital all the time, but if anything happened, you’d have to come in and take one of the younger residents through the procedure,” he explained. “When you were chief resident, you were the primary head doctor. You ran the whole show.”

On the night of December 8, 1980, the show was unlike any Veteran had seen before.

He’d spent the evening at his girlfriend’s apartment, on 10th Avenue, across from the hospital. Around 11 o’clock, as they were getting ready for bed, his beeper went off.

“They said, ‘We have a gunshot wound to the chest,’” Veteran recalled. “I asked, ’What’s status of the patient?” They said, ’Well, Dr. Halloran’ — one of the younger residents — ‘is opening his chest.’ I said, ‘Well, if Halloran is opening his chest, you don’t need me.’”

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Opening the patient’s chest, Veteran explained, is a last resort, performed when the heart has stopped and the patient is unlikely to live. “But they said to me, ‘No, we need you now!’”

Source: guitarplayer.com

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