The recent record snowstorm in New England got me all in a deep wintery nostalgia. I contacted my friends back in Boston who have been living there for well over 40 years to get their perspectives, and it brought back memories of living on the East Coast and surviving the seemingly interminable long winters there before I moved to California in the late 1980s. Most prominently in my memory is being a medical intern at the Faulkner Hospital in Jamaica Plain, Boston, while on call on Monday, January 10, 1983, as it began snowing and didn’t stop all night. I recall looking out a patient’s window at about midnight and seeing the glistening street light reflecting the falling snow going sideways in the howling wind pushing the bare tree branches to their limit. That night on call was not memorable for anything in particular as far as medical disasters are concerned. I was on the general medical floor and took care of patients that needed attention, and I probably admitted a few patients from the ER. Typical medical admissions back then included worsening congestive heart failure, pneumonia, GI bleeds, strokes, and other non-ICU stuff. I even got a few hours of sleep. However, in the morning I heard over coffee and breakfast in the cafeteria with the other interns and residents there would be no “morning report.” This was the daily ritual with the chief of medicine, Andrew Huvos, MD, each sleep-deprived young doctor giving a brief summary and discussion of the new admissions from the night before. Dr. Huvos and all the rest of the teaching staff were snowed in and couldn’t make it to the hospital. It turned out that the nearly two feet of snow that fell the night before paralyzed the area. None of the streets in Boston were plowed, and no one was going anywhere while it still snowed lightly on the collections of huge snowdrifts.

I recalled wonderful snowstorms as a kid in New Jersey, where after we heard our school closures proceeded to spend the entire day outside sledding with our friends! This was different as we all hunkered down surrounded by a hospital full of sick people. We reviewed the admissions and the sicker patients with the senior resident, then went about doing rounds on all the patients. It became apparent sometime in the late afternoon after our first night in the hospital that our relief physicians were not going to make it to the hospital, and we couldn’t drive home anyway, so the reality of spending another night on call sank in. This was also true of the hospital staff: The nurses, technicians, and kitchen and support staff who had come in the previous evening were all stuck in the hospital as well. It was an odd and unanticipated situation, but there was no choice but to accept fate. In retrospect, a hospital is not a bad place to be stranded. There is electricity, heat (hospitals have backup generators in case of blackouts), food (and even kitchen staff to prepare and clean up meals), and a place to sleep (the on-call rooms). We made up an arrangement for support staff to share all the available beds, and we hunkered down for another winter night in the hospital.

Actually, it was an easy night that had a certain bonding, coziness, and satisfaction that has lingered since. Because of hazardous driving conditions, the ER was essentially silent without ambulances or patients able to come in. By then, all the hospital patients were well known to us, and only abrupt changes in condition needed to be closely attended to, making our work almost routine. We chatted and gathered in the evening, and most of us got more sleep than usual for a night on call. The next morning life went back to usual; we had a brief morning report with Dr. Huvos thanking us vigorously for our valorous duties. We rearranged the call schedule to even out the nights, and I got to go home in the mid-afternoon, handing off my patients to the next intern for the night. One final strange thing, however: Being still sleep-deprived and disoriented in the parking lot of the hospital, I wandered around searching for my car for a good half hour before locating it. The roads were still quite snowy but drivable, especially with my old VW Beetle, which proved itself on many occasions to be able to get through any snowy battles in Boston! It was not the only winter night that snow forced an additional night in the hospital for our interns and residents over the three years of my residency. Fortunately, I only had to endure one of them.

I checked the hospital’s response in Boston during the recent blizzard, and it seems a similar situation recapitulated itself in the modern hospital world. Weather can force life into adaptive survival mode for anyone anytime. Those times were intense and filled with adventures and learning, but I’m enjoying the pleasant California these days!

George F. Smith is an internal medicine physician and author of Tales from the Trenches: A life in Primary Care.