By Steven Long
I sat at the horseshoe shaped bar of Galveston’s late lamented Café Torrefie, a hotbed of what passed for the island’s hot spot for literati from the late ‘70s until the early ‘90s. It wasn’t exactly on the level with Paris’ Left Bank in the 1920s, but it passed for it if the Bud was cold enough and you drank enough of it.
I had more than enough of it night after night playing basketball with bar napkins and swilling beer as I lamented another failed marriage. Thankfully an indulgent bartender put up with me for meager tips at the end of an evening. Surely a Sinatra saloon song echoed through is brain as he watched me toss paper aimlessly.
The Café sat on Galveston’s most fashionable five block stretch. The Strand is a nineteenth century historical district of national significance. Nineteen blocks away sat one of the busiest operating rooms in the nation serving the University of Texas Medical Branch’s John Sealy Hospital. Attached to the hospital the Lone Star State cared for prisoners in a huge new hospital giving them the very best a teaching hospital could offer, including the free service of young doctors eager to tote hours as they went through a grueling residency.
Sometimes that best of everything approach was too much for Texas taxpayers. Such was the case when an operating room nurse walked into the Café, sat down next to me, and began to pour out complaints, one of which was that she didn’t believe taxpayers should be paying for felon’s facelifts.
I put down my beer in disbelief.
As she continued I learned of the extent Texas medical residents were being used by the oldest medical school west of the Mississippi to practice on pimps, burglars, drug kingpins, rapists and murderers.
The Johns Sealy O.R. operated then on a 24/7 basis. One moment the most pius Baptist church lady would lay on an operating table, and the minute her surgery was completed, the room would be prepped and the next patient moved in as a tattooed criminal took the place of honor as surgeons scrubbed up.
My journalistic instincts are hard wired for a story and always turned on. I knew instantly this was a big one if I could just pierce the circle the wagons secrecy of the university that had thwarted so many great stories before. Nowhere in the almost 40 years I have done journalism was there a more impenetrable bureaucracy than UTMB.
“Does the operating room keep logs?” I asked the nurse.
“Yes,” she said.
“Are they filed away there or are the thrown away at the end of the day?” I pressed.
“How would I know? I’m a nurse,” she said as I sat on the barstool frustrated, yet exhilarated.
At the time I was making the 50 mile commute each way from Galveston to the Houston Chronicle downtown in the Bayou City. I had plenty of time to think about the story and I knew that if I could get my hands on those logs the lid would be blown off a major scandal with statwide implications. A week went by, then another. Each night, I returned to the Café Torrefie and waited, vainly hoping the nurse would return, logs in hand. Finally it happened.
A few nights later, I sat on a bar stool next to a pioneering heart surgeon who was a regular and on faculty at the medical school. I pulled the logs out of my brief case and put them in front of him. He almost dropped his Cutty.
“That’s our O.R. log,” he exclaimed. “How did you get that?”
That was enough confirmation for me, I knew I had the real thing and for the next two hours we went over the logs and marked every inmate who had surgery that day. As I recall, four of them were on the table for plastic surgary. One, a female inmate had a breast reduction. Another, a tummy tuck. Yet another, a 55-year-old Dallas pimp doing 35 years was under the knife at taxpayer expense for a brow lift to remove the menace of his hooded criminal eyes.
I quickly requested a prison interview with the man and assigned a photographer to accompany me for a photo to record the skill of his medical resident surgeon. The two of us traveled to the prison in Huntsville, Texas to see firsthand what my tax money had paid for.
Two days later, we were escorted through the gates of the state’s Wynn Unit to see an astonished pimp who was curious why a reporter from the state’s largest newspaper wanted to see him.
“You must be one sorry pimp,” I said as he came into the interview cell. “You must have really pissed somebody off to get 35 years for running whores,” I said.
We hit it off instantly.
I looked at the man. I had seen the scowling prison photo of his “old” face. Before me was a handsome man in his mid-50s.
A week later, another handsome man stood before me, curious why I had asked to see him. The head doc of UTMB’s otolaryngology service wondered why a reporter requested an interview with him. He was surely expecting a puff piece on his beautiful work in plastic surgery.
“Why is the state doing cosmetic surgery on prison inmates,” I asked, getting straight to the point.
“We aren’t,” he answered incredulously, angrily.
I opened my briefcase and pulled out the now well thumbed logs of the John Sealy Hospital operating suite as his face went ashen.
The doctor recovered sufficiently to stammer that his residents were performing a public service by giving the felons they operated on renewed self esteem. I replied that they were giving them face lifts, tummy tucks, breast reductions and brow lifts. The interview was brief.
I then called the chairman of the board of Texas Department of Corrections with the same question. He also denied the state was doing cosmetic surgery until I said I had the logs.
And I could almost smell the pile as he dropped a load when I reminded him that the state legislature had prohibited the practice of cosmetic surgery on prison inmates in state teaching hospitals two years before
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I sat at the horseshoe shaped bar of Galveston’s late lamented Café Torrefie, a hotbed of what passed for the island’s hot spot for literati from the late ‘70s until the early ‘90s. It wasn’t exactly on the level with Paris’ Left Bank in the 1920s, but it passed for it if the Bud was cold enough and you drank enough of it.
I had more than enough of it night after night playing basketball with bar napkins and swilling beer as I lamented another failed marriage. Thankfully an indulgent bartender put up with me for meager tips at the end of an evening. Surely a Sinatra saloon song echoed through is brain as he watched me toss paper aimlessly.
The Café sat on Galveston’s most fashionable five block stretch. The Strand is a nineteenth century historical district of national significance. Nineteen blocks away sat one of the busiest operating rooms in the nation serving the University of Texas Medical Branch’s John Sealy Hospital. Attached to the hospital the Lone Star State cared for prisoners in a huge new hospital giving them the very best a teaching hospital could offer, including the free service of young doctors eager to tote hours as they went through a grueling residency.
Sometimes that best of everything approach was too much for Texas taxpayers. Such was the case when an operating room nurse walked into the Café, sat down next to me, and began to pour out complaints, one of which was that she didn’t believe taxpayers should be paying for felon’s facelifts.
I put down my beer in disbelief.
As she continued I learned of the extent Texas medical residents were being used by the oldest medical school west of the Mississippi to practice on pimps, burglars, drug kingpins, rapists and murderers.
The Johns Sealy O.R. operated then on a 24/7 basis. One moment the most pius Baptist church lady would lay on an operating table, and the minute her surgery was completed, the room would be prepped and the next patient moved in as a tattooed criminal took the place of honor as surgeons scrubbed up.
My journalistic instincts are hard wired for a story and always turned on. I knew instantly this was a big one if I could just pierce the circle the wagons secrecy of the university that had thwarted so many great stories before. Nowhere in the almost 40 years I have done journalism was there a more impenetrable bureaucracy than UTMB.
“Does the operating room keep logs?” I asked the nurse.
“Yes,” she said.
“Are they filed away there or are the thrown away at the end of the day?” I pressed.
“How would I know? I’m a nurse,” she said as I sat on the barstool frustrated, yet exhilarated.
At the time I was making the 50 mile commute each way from Galveston to the Houston Chronicle downtown in the Bayou City. I had plenty of time to think about the story and I knew that if I could get my hands on those logs the lid would be blown off a major scandal with statwide implications. A week went by, then another. Each night, I returned to the Café Torrefie and waited, vainly hoping the nurse would return, logs in hand. Finally it happened.
A few nights later, I sat on a bar stool next to a pioneering heart surgeon who was a regular and on faculty at the medical school. I pulled the logs out of my brief case and put them in front of him. He almost dropped his Cutty.
“That’s our O.R. log,” he exclaimed. “How did you get that?”
That was enough confirmation for me, I knew I had the real thing and for the next two hours we went over the logs and marked every inmate who had surgery that day. As I recall, four of them were on the table for plastic surgary. One, a female inmate had a breast reduction. Another, a tummy tuck. Yet another, a 55-year-old Dallas pimp doing 35 years was under the knife at taxpayer expense for a brow lift to remove the menace of his hooded criminal eyes.
I quickly requested a prison interview with the man and assigned a photographer to accompany me for a photo to record the skill of his medical resident surgeon. The two of us traveled to the prison in Huntsville, Texas to see firsthand what my tax money had paid for.
Two days later, we were escorted through the gates of the state’s Wynn Unit to see an astonished pimp who was curious why a reporter from the state’s largest newspaper wanted to see him.
“You must be one sorry pimp,” I said as he came into the interview cell. “You must have really pissed somebody off to get 35 years for running whores,” I said.
We hit it off instantly.
I looked at the man. I had seen the scowling prison photo of his “old” face. Before me was a handsome man in his mid-50s.
A week later, another handsome man stood before me, curious why I had asked to see him. The head doc of UTMB’s otolaryngology service wondered why a reporter requested an interview with him. He was surely expecting a puff piece on his beautiful work in plastic surgery.
“Why is the state doing cosmetic surgery on prison inmates,” I asked, getting straight to the point.
“We aren’t,” he answered incredulously, angrily.
I opened my briefcase and pulled out the now well thumbed logs of the John Sealy Hospital operating suite as his face went ashen.
The doctor recovered sufficiently to stammer that his residents were performing a public service by giving the felons they operated on renewed self esteem. I replied that they were giving them face lifts, tummy tucks, breast reductions and brow lifts. The interview was brief.
I then called the chairman of the board of Texas Department of Corrections with the same question. He also denied the state was doing cosmetic surgery until I said I had the logs.
And I could almost smell the pile as he dropped a load when I reminded him that the state legislature had prohibited the practice of cosmetic surgery on prison inmates in state teaching hospitals two years before
