8:58 a.m.

The door of 75th Street Medical in Ocean City swings open. A goateed guy wearing shorts and a T-shirt enters the clinic, then uses his left hand to shut the door behind him. He walks to the receptionist's desk and raises his right hand.

Arcing through the middle finger, in the fleshy tip just above the top joint, is a flounder hook.

"I was on my way to go fishing," Ben Gusciora laments as he is hustled down a short hallway to exam room three. "I wasn't even there yet."

He tried to yank the hook out, he tells a doctor. But it hurt too much. Strange, because it didn't hurt a bit going in. It happened when he dropped his cooler on the floor of the fishing boat. His rod was tangled up in the cooler, and somehow, the weight of the sodas pulled the metal hook clear through his finger.

By now the fishing boat is out in the Atlantic Ocean, filled with people enjoying their vacations. Ben shakes his head. So much for his relaxing day at the beach.

An aide rinses the finger with bubbling brown antiseptic and holds an X-ray up to a light. It shows the hook embedded millimeters away from the bone.

Dr. Victor Gong, the clinic's owner, pokes his head into the room. He has seen worse: Nearly every week, kids who step on fishhooks at the beach are carried in, shrieking and wailing. And just days ago, a guy kept tugging on his line, not realizing he'd snagged his ear. Dr. Gong moves on. The clinic won't close until 4 a.m., and already patients fill the waiting room.

The aide shines a light on Ben's hand, which is resting on a metal tray covered in white gauze. Dr. Sameer Ahmad hunches down and wiggles the hook back and forth, back and forth. The light reflects off his glasses as he works.

"I'm going to have to open it up a bit," the doctor finally says. He grabs a silver scalpel. Ben looks up, then down - anywhere but at his mangled finger. Right about now, he should be leaning against a railing, watching his line bob rhythmically in the water. After a few hours of that, you can achieve a state of relaxation so deep you're practically catatonic.

"Ah, man," he sighs, as the doctor triumphantly holds up the fishhook.

Then comes the really bad news. The finger needs to stay dry for the rest of the week. No splashing in the ocean. No diving into the pool. Even showering will pose a challenge. Ben isn't heading home to Pennsylvania for another three days, but his vacation is basically over.

He leaves the clinic clutching a consolation prize: a plastic bag containing the bloody hook. At least he'll have something to show the guys back home.

12:06 p.m.

At the time, it seemed like a perfectly logical idea. John Welgus was perched atop a Pepsi vending machine last night - and at the time, that seemed a logical thing to be doing - when he decided to get down. Jumping was the fastest option. A second later, John was sprawled across the sidewalk, clutching his right foot.

He didn't think anything was broken, but he might have been anesthetized by the eight beers he'd consumed. Or was it 10? Certainly no more than 12.

He limped home and discovered his friends were throwing an impromptu party in their rented condo. Soon, he wasn't feeling any pain at all. But this morning, as he stumbled by an unfamiliar couple sleeping on his couch, John realized his foot was tender and swollen.

"If you hurt yourself, it's not your fault," John's friend Steve counsels him as they sit in a stark white exam room. Pepsi is to blame, they figure.

As he pops a thermometer in John's mouth, Jason Cantow, the clinic's site manager, says drunken accidents are about as common as sunburns in Ocean City. It's worst in June, when high school seniors overrun the beach. Come 1 or 2 a.m., a cluster of teen-agers often appears on the clinic steps, carrying a limp body. Clinic workers hate those cases, because they need parental permission to treat minors. The students always get hysterical when they hear that. And forget about telling young vacationers they need antibiotics and can't drink alcohol for a week.

John is lucky. His foot isn't fractured, just badly bruised. And, because he is 22, his parents don't need to know about his mishap. He accepts a pair of crutches, hops off the exam table - "You like jumping off things, don't you?" an aide observes - and slaps his Visa card down on the $245 bill.

He hobbles out the door, dreaming about how good a pizza would taste.

3:50 p.m.

When he hears his wife scream, Bryan Mindte races from the waiting room into a private exam room. He sees Wendy's face and in an instant, he knows.

It's been the longest vacation of their lives: A week spent dodging Wendy's parents, who want to know why their daughter looks so run-down. A morning spent shushing Wendy's young nephew, who wants to tell everyone how he caught Bryan and Wendy huddled in the bathroom, staring at a plastic stick.

Then, after they arrived at the clinic, they had to wait 30 endless minutes for the test result. They paced the block, going around and around in circles, while a machine spun a vial of Wendy's blood in circles, too.

"We're pregnant, everyone!" Wendy shouts into the waiting room, and everyone - exhausted parents and children with earaches and bruised teen-agers - looks up and applauds.

Will they be able to keep the secret until dinner tonight, when their parents and aunts and uncles and nephews will gather? Yes, they decide. They can wait just a little longer.

X-ray technician Deborah Hill walks them to the door. She wants to hold onto this moment. "Everybody who comes in here is upset because their vacation is getting ruined," Deborah says. Sometimes, people yell at the staff. Some drunks who come in late at night, their faces cut up from a bar brawl, try to pick another fight.

The next time an irate patient snaps at her, Deborah will remember Wendy. How her face looked when she saw the plus sign on the test, how she wrapped her arms around Deborah.

"Now when you come back next year," Deborah starts to say as Wendy and Bryan leave, clutching the slip of paper with the plus sign. Wendy turns around, beaming, and completes the sentence: "We'll bring the little munchkin in!"

4:22 p.m.

The waiting room's two couches, love seat and three chairs are empty. Dr. Gong is in his office, catching up on paperwork, while clinic workers debate what to order for dinner. This late-afternoon lull is part of the routine. A rush of patients comes soon after the clinic opens at 8 a.m. - mostly worried parents whose children have been up sick up all night. Early afternoon brings a fresh wave of victims: body surfers with dislocated shoulders, sobered-up 20-somethings who've had a chance to assess the damage of the night before, kids bleeding from seashell lacerations. And after happy-hour, the drunks will trickle in.

But for now, the only voice in the tidy waiting room belongs to Oprah. Then Alan Thomas limps in.

He wears blue flip-flops with velcro straps fastened as loosely as possible. They're the only shoes he can fit into.

Alan spent five hours on the beach when he arrived three days ago on a clear, bright afternoon. He rubbed SPF number 30 sunscreen on his pale skin, but somehow, he forgot his feet. They turned crimson the first night, then began to balloon. Now his feet are so red and swollen they look like caricatures. It's excruciating to walk.

"This is my first trip to Ocean City," Alan says. No matter how many times he returns, he vows, his feet will be the first place he coats with sunscreen.

Dr. Gong gives Alan shots of antihistamine and steroids. Clinic workers don't bat an eye as Alan gingerly puts one foot ahead of the other and makes slow progress toward the door. When people fall asleep in the sun and wake up covered in blisters - now that's a sunburn.

"How about a fresh pot of lifeblood?" someone suggests, reaching for the coffee maker. The lull won't last long.

9:46 p.m.

Patients are stacked two deep in exam rooms. In the waiting room, a guy in a nylon running jacket is sprawled across a couch, holding his stomach and moaning. A couple hurries up the clinic's steps, clutching a child.

Behind the door of exam room one, Jacob Hillegass sits on a cushioned table, his right index finger wrapped in a bloody paper napkin. He was working at the Bull on the Beach restaurant, shucking a pile of oysters, when a shell snapped and sliced his knuckle. The cut is so deep it exposes a thin blue-gray vein.

Ruth Pinkney, a physician's assistant, rinses the wound with saline.

"I need to spit," Jacob says, indicating the wad of chewing tobacco tucked in his lower lip. He lifts a plastic cup to his lips.

"Are you going to do that the whole time?" Ruth asks. Her tone supplies the answer.

Jacob removes the tobacco and replaces it with a new habit: His black Adidas sneaker begins a frantic tap, tap, tapping. His blood pressure is high: 148 over 90. Ruth tells him to lie back on the table. She doesn't want him passing out.

She reaches for a curved silver needle and begins stitching the wound together.

"I was so accident-prone as a kid," Jacob says, staring at the white ceiling. "I must've got three, four, five-hundred stitches..."

The needle loops under the skin, emerges on the other side of the wound, then wraps around a pair of scissors, crafting a tight knot. The motion is as fluid as it is economical.

"I busted my head, knee, hand, my chin..."

"One more," Ruth interrupts. She knots the sixth stitch.

The needle stops moving, and so does Jacob's sneaker.

11:52 p.m.

The last crowd of patients has finally cleared out of the waiting room, and it looks like it'll be a quiet night.

Dr. Gong pours a cup of coffee and collapses on the sofa. Someone switches the television channel to a horse race. On the deck outside, Dr. Gong's yellow lab, Abby, snores in her doghouse. Kids usually stop crying when they spot Abby. Besides, if he didn't bring the dog to work, he'd never see her.

The clinic has seen 73 patients today, a low tally for summertime. One day, they treated more than 130.

"People say, 'Oh, you're just at the beach so you can go surfing,'" Dr. Gong says. He hasn't set foot in the ocean in 10 years.

Maybe in September, when the tourists head home and the clinic isn't swamped. Maybe then he'll finally take a day off and go to the beach. Maybe...

11:53 p.m.

The door of 75th Street Medical swings open.

Pub Date: 7/27/98