#754. Watches Left on Dying Men in the ER

"I might not be a doctor, but I play one one TV."

Who doesn't remember that famous commercial? Everyone loves doctors, yet few care to invest the time and effort into the proper education to be certified to take the Hippocratic Oath. In fact, doctors record some of the highest trust levels from the general public (amid a number of different vocations).

How many TV shows have centered around the hospital and the various eccentricities and nuisances of life in the ER?

Face it: we are a nation that loves watching life in the ER on television and also in trusting doctors to constantly give us the best advice for our health.

We love doctors, for they might give us unpleasant news occasionally, but it usually comes with a lollipop at the end of visit. Everyone loves lollipops.

However, SBPDL will be focusing on the ER and the entire medical profession the next few days, and we recently came across a most fascinating story concerning a member of the medical fraternity that tarnished the halo around the M.D. title a few degrees:

"Dr. Cleveland Enmon is an emergency room physician at St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Stockton . Dr. Enmon is accused of abandoning attempts to resuscitate a patient from cardiac arrest to instead pocket the dead man’s valuable Rolex wristwatch. The suit, filed by the adult children of Jerry Keith Kubena, Sr., alleges that Dr. Cleveland James Enmon on June 1 “formed the intent” to swipe the Rolex from Kubena’s wrist while treating the man at St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Stockton."

The nursing staff assisting Enmon soon noticed that Kubena’s flashy timepiece was missing; “Where is the wristwatch?” the suit quotes one as uttering. Two more nurses allegedly noticed a wristwatch-shaped bulge in the doctor’s pocket. Security was called to investigate the disappearance. Defying security’s orders, the lawsuit notes Enmon walked out of the operating room and into the parking lot, a move caught on hospital security cameras. A nurse claims she saw Enmon toss a small object into the grass and she subsequently led security personnel to that exact area and recovered the watch."

This story is a shocking reminder that life in the ER isn't always glamorous and one can't be to careful with who they entrust their Rolex too guard, especially when they struggle to cling to each breath.

Enmon was the former chief resident of Emergency Medicine in King-Drew Emergency Medicine, one of the nations worst hospitals ( you won't see any TV shows glorifying this ER ):

"King-Harbor found itself under public criticism once again after different stories ran in both the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly in late May 2007 citing serious lapses in care, one fatal, at the renamed hospital.

The case of patient Edith Isabel Rodriguez, who bled to death on the emergency room floor after being ignored for 45 minutes, in particular became a cause célèbre about the failures and bureaucratic indifference of both King-Harbor as well as political and health leaders in the Los Angeles area; creating or reinforcing fears that the health care system will not take care of people in a time of dire need."

Black people in the Los Angeles were horrified at the prospect of losing the hospital, especially one named after one of the patron saints of the new America, Martin Luther King Jr.:

"Let's be honest," said Dr. Dennis S. O'Leary, president of The Joint Commission, a hospital accrediting group, "if this were a hospital different from King/Drew, this would have been over a long time ago."

He and other experts interviewed by The Times said the government would have moved much faster and more aggressively if King-Harbor, formerly known as King/Drew, didn't have a unique history and special standing in the community.

The hospital was one of the few gains from the 1965 Watts riots and still is one of the few places poor people in South Los Angeles can turn to for acute care. African American politicians, in particular, have embraced its salvation.

...The most recent problems began in January 2004, when inspectors found that nurses lied in charts about patients' conditions, failed to give crucial medications prescribed by doctors and left seriously ill patients unattended for hours -- including three who died."

So Dr. Enmon was a product of this hospital, that was universal decried as perhaps the most ineffectively run ER in the country, where patients were routinely left to rot? Any Rolex watches reported stolen at that prestigious hospital, before its doors were shuttered?

Dr. Enmon was a by-product of Morehouse College, a school which recently adopted new rules in a move to try and deter negative stereotypes about Black people. Something tells us this recent display of petty larceny, coupled with systematic indifference to the patients well-being is a shining example of the caliber of graduates Morehouse educates, as Dr. Enmon represents the Morehouse man with gusto!

Worse, another event recently transpired - this time in Philadelphia - where homeless, cracked out bums (obviously encouraged by Dr. Enmon's example) robbed a dying man of his watch!:

"A school counselor suffering an apparent heart attack died in a Philadelphia emergency room after waiting nearly 80 minutes for help — and a trio of homeless drug addicts nearby stole his watch instead of seeking aid, police said.

Joaquin Rivera, 63, died before seeing a triage nurse at Atria Health's Frankford Campus over the weekend, police said.

Rivera, a musician and activist in the city's Latino community, had spent more than 30 years working as a bilingual counselor at an inner-city high school.

"We're all destroyed. A guy like that, for him to leave us the way that he did — and with what happened to him — everybody's destroyed," said Jesse Bermudez, a friend and fellow musician."

The problem with this case though, is the trio of homeless drug addicts were multi-racial, which means Dr. Enmon and his alleged crime of stealing a Rolex has become something of an urban legend within the drug-addicted community, for he has so much in common with petty criminals.

A Morehouse educated doctor, who was the FORMER CHIEF OF EMERGENCY MEDICINE at a hospital that was routinely blasted for being an embarrassment to the medical profession (but was allowed to stay open due to racial politics) has more in common with homeless drug addicts, then with these M.D.'s.

Stuff Black People Don't Like includes watches left on dying men in the Emergency Room/ ER, for Dr. Enmon seems to have more in common with drug addicts in Philadelphia then in being an upstanding representative of one of the finest medical schools for prospective Black M.D.'s ( or was ):

"While talking with four of his friends in Morehouse College’s Frederick Douglass Learning Resource Center, their conversation quickly turned to the September 2006 issue of Black Enterprise magazine, which included its biannual list of the “Top 50 Colleges for African Americans.” After four consecutive years of being the top ranked school, Morehouse’s placement on the most recent list dropped forty-four spots from number one to number forty-five."

If you are sick in a major city, it might be more conducive trying to find an actor who plays a doctor on TV then going to a hospital run by Morehouse graduates.