Beneath a boxy pair of gold-rimmed shades, she's laughing about how, just 24 hours earlier, she was almost paralyzed in bed thanks to her occasionally crippled back. The pain kicked in, this time, after 12 hours in the ER on Wednesday (7 a.m. to 11 a.m., followed by 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., with a full slate of meetings in between), followed by an appointment-filled Thursday. To cope with the pain, she uses a Middle Eastern therapy called Feldenchrist, which essentially involves the relearning of the body's most basic movements. The way she holds her head talking on the telephone or leans over a patient, for instance, can have an effect that is subtly crippling.
This, of course, isn't the first time she's worn herself down. Her days in Boston, juggling the emergency work with the groundbreaking ectopic pregnancy research, took their toll as well. But she's quick to point out that "it was good work," valuable fodder, as it turned out, for a bunch of medical niche publications, including emergency room pamphlets. Which was nice. But this domestic violence project might just land her in the über- prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association.
Paul Trapani
Paul Trapani
Kaplan has to juggle groundbreaking research with day-to-day ER work.
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And that thought gets her grinning.
"The ectopic pregnancy stuff was, umm, kind of, uh ..."
"Wonkish?"
"Yeah," she laughs. "This work should appeal to a more general audience."
But that audience will have to wait a bit longer: Even though the data from her follow-up interviews is all gathered, she says it'll take her a month or two longer to write up the findings. And, having finished the reporting, Kaplan suggests the piece will, in the end, include as much human interest as hard science. "We meant for this to be a scientific study, but we kind of got involved," she says.
No one in San Francisco General Hospital's emergency room -- at least, no one who worked on Tony Zachary's wife -- will ever forget what he did to her that March night in 1999. After stripping off her clothes, shoving a sock in her mouth, and tying her to her bed with electrical chords, he repeatedly burned her with a curling iron. "He took his time," a police investigator told a San Francisco Chroniclereporter at the time, noting that the victim would be scarred for life. "This is an evil, evil act."
Pictures of the victim -- which Kaplan kept -- say as much. More, actually. They show a nude, mutilated body, nearly tiled with more than 30 separate, severe burns. A close-up of one burn, on the stomach, shows an off-purple welt the size and shape of the iron itself. Others show similar marks on her chest and arms. And legs. Then there are the panned-out shots, where you see each individual burn in relation to the others, and you wonder how these two people stayed married for six years. The photos are almost impossible to look at without cringing. Although, having looked at them for two years, Beth Kaplan can.
Today, Kaplan is sitting in her car, which is parked in S.F. General's 23rd Street garage; she's ready to head home. There are pale rings around her eyes, rings pronounced enough to be visible even through the dirty-blond hair that lightens as it falls in front of her face, while she looks down at the photos.
The shift she's just completed was intense, but relatively typical, complete with a standard flow of half-conscious junkies; the homeless "regular" the whole staff thought was dead who showed up for treatment; and the woman who had been run down from behind, on the sidewalk, by a sport-utility vehicle, leaving her with a broken back and leg, a crushed pelvis, and tire marks across her abdomen. She is, very likely, paralyzed for life. (Kaplan, of course, had the privilege of sharing this diagnosis with the victim's husband and child.)
Kaplan's is a hard job, and not one that lends spare time and energy for research on the side. I ask her why she continues to pursue domestic violence as a medical issue; she gestures toward the Polaroids of the former Mrs. Zachary.
"I keep these," she says, pulling the car out onto Potrero Avenue, "so I remember."
