Journals of Eleanor Druse, The (Digital Picture Book) (9 page)

“That’s the date on Madeline’s note, Bobby! The same one she wrote in the hospital the night she died. All Souls’ Day. My birthday! How did the fire start, Bobby? How about names? Did you get their names?”

A blank look on his face.

“How would I know how the fire started? Whose names, Mum?”

“The doctor’s name or the little boy’s name? The people who died in the fire.”

“Uh, no, Mum. What do you want with their names? That was sixty some years ago. Mr. Bates said the old doctor was famous for doing some kind of psychological surgery. That, and pain research.”

“The Pain Room,” I said without knowing why I said it or where I’d heard of it. It just popped out of my mouth. “The Pain Room,” like the familiar name of a person whose face I had long ago forgotten, along with the circumstances of how and why I knew the name. It happens a lot in old age. Somebody asks you if you know Bob Miller. You know the name, but that’s all. Maybe fifty or sixty years ago, you knew Bob Miller’s face, the names of his children, his favorite authors and movies. Now nothing’s left but Bob Miller, a familiar-sounding name.

“The Pain Room. Have you heard of it before?”

“No, Mum.”

“The Pain Room.”

I had the familiar sensation of feeling my way along a black wall in a dark corridor, searching for a fingerhold, a peephole, a passageway, an opening, a way in.

“Train Sourball Laboratory,” I said.

Bobby opened his mouth and looked at me as if I had just spoken Mandarin Chinese.

“Mum, what are you doing? What are you saying?”

“I don’t know,” I confessed. “It was just like Pain Room. It just popped out. They’re just words, Bobby, and they made a little salad of themselves. I don’t know why they came out just then.”

“I think you’re on the train to the oddball laboratory, Mum. Are you sure you don’t want to try some of those pills they want you to take?”

Stegman’s visit introduced me to a new sensation: chest pains. The megalomaniacal prana radiating from a single ambient brain surgeon managed to disrupt seventy-five years of coronary calm. I leave it to the cardiologists of tomorrow to design prospective, randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind trials that will establish that malignant force fields given off by the likes of Stegman can indeed scramble the electrical conductivity of a healthy heart and induce deadly arrhythmias. I drew my own privacy curtain—not something anybody would ever expect of me—and hid in my bed to ponder my treatment alternatives. I tried to ignore the grotesque sounds coming from Nancy’s side of the room.

Stegman’s visit seemed to have unsettled her as well. She had been making strange croodling noises, gasping, lunging, rattling the bedrails with her restraints. A particularly violent banging brought me up out of my bed and prompted me to look through the curtain to see if the poor thing needed my help.

Her restraints had more slack than usual, and Nancy had managed somehow to bring her wrist close enough to her mouth so that her teeth were fastened on the tie-line of the restraint. Her eyes still rolled listlessly to one side and stared at the floor, but she growled and chewed on the restraint like a trapped wolverine gnawing its paw off to escape a snare.

“Poor, poor child,” I said.

I stroked her hair and brow and soothed her by humming to her. She slumped back lifelessly onto her pillow, but her jaw remained locked and her teeth embedded in the cords of the restraint.

“Dear child,” I said. “Poor Nancy.”

I turned on her call light, and of course no one came for at least twenty minutes. Understaffed, as usual. Finally Tiffany showed and tried a number of feckless maneuvers to unfasten Nancy’s teeth from the restraint. She wrapped a damp washcloth around Nancy’s nose and mouth, hoping the poor woman would unclench her teeth long enough to gasp for a breath, but Nancy simply seethed and sucked air right through and around the barrier, her eyes wild and her chest heaving with effort, but her teeth firmly embedded in the mesh of the cord. Jennifer came in to help and untied the restraint, replacing it with a new one, and leaving the old one in Nancy’s mouth like a chew toy.

It was two hours before Nancy fell asleep and her jaw unhinged and sagged ajar to its resting state. Tiffany was able to remove the cord, now soaked in saliva, scarred and punctured by teeth marks.

After Tiffany left, I stood at the foot of Nancy’s bed, unable to look away from her. I prayed for her and her family. I felt like the faithful who cut a hole in the roof and lowered the paralytic down to where the Human-born one was preaching.
Lord, here’s our sister, poor Nancy. She’s afflicted and suffering. Please help me find a way to help her.

“She’s almost exactly my age.”

The voice made me jump and clutch my chest. I turned and saw nurse Claudia standing just behind me. She dabbed at a stray tear with a Kleenex, her eyes reddening again with that same changeable sadness.

“Claudia. You threw a fright into me!”

“There’s the fright,” she said, nodding toward Nancy Conlan, or what was once a person so named. “She has three children, almost the same ages as mine. Her husband, almost the same age. Same, same, same.” Claudia wept quietly, then finally broke down entirely and buried her face in her hands.

I prayed I had the power to allay whatever sorrow’ was afflicting Claudia. She had a good heart and a gentle disposition.

I reached out and touched her. “There, there, dear. We can’t bear such tragedy alone, we have to turn it over to the Divinity who absorbs all. Trust God. You believe, don’t you?”

She nodded and went on. “All I had to do was warn her. The same as I tried to warn you. But I didn’t. I was afraid that she and her family—She was a checkout clerk at grocery store in South Boston. Her husband is a laborer for a drywall contractor. Simple, good people. I was afraid they were so
simple
that they might let slip that a nurse had warned them away from—”

“From what, dear?”

“What I wanted to tell you the day before yesterday, before Dr. Metzger interrupted us, Sally, was that if you end up needing surgery, you must not let Dr. Stegman perform the operation.”

I looked again at the mute, flesh-fallen frame and the hollow face of a mother whose children were growing up without her.

“Stegman did this?” I gasped, clutching at my crystal necklace. The grave would be a better place for her. Better death than to live on as a bedridden zombie, a constant reminder of what once was.

“Is he incompetent?” I asked. “Is he a butcher?”

She shook her head. “On the contrary, he’s brilliant. Probably the most skilled neurosurgeon on staff, and that’s his problem. He never says no. His patient load grows every year—always has. He runs clinic and surgery on the same day. Sometimes both at once. Scrubbing in and out as needed. He leaves his fellows at work on one case while he runs out and starts another or zips over to the clinic for a quick consult. Then half an hour later, he scrubs back into the same procedure.”

“That can’t be.”

“It’s illegal, Mrs. Druse. Against hospital rules. He’s infected with the MORE virus: more patients, more procedures, more research, more prestige, more money. More. More. More. And patients like poor Nancy are the casualties of his runaway ambition. They suffer because there’s no more time in his day to do a careful job of anthing anymore. He just does the best he can under the circumstances, which are always frantic, chaotic, overwhelming. ”

“What did he do to her?”

“He operated on the wrong side of her brain, and then tried to claim it was because he’d seen a second lesion on the scans before beginning surgery. The film’s conveniently missing, but he swears on it. Now she’s in what’s called a persistent vegetative state—eyes open, permanent unconsciousness. According to the EEGs, she sleeps and wakes up, but she’s totally unaware of herself and her environment. Her brain stem functions, but the PET scans show almost no cortical activity. She can’t chew or swallow, because you need intact cerebral hemispheres for that. She’s been like this for months.”

“And he’s still doing surgery?” I had trouble fathoming how this could be so.

“I told you: He is a brilliant surgeon. Still is, but he’s unraveling now under the pressure of the self-inflicted overload. He generates millions in revenue doing arguably unnecessary procedures, which he defends by saying that he aggressively protects the health of his patients. Yes, it’s true that for the last few months, maybe even for the last year, he’s been the star of the mortality and morbidity conferences. Meaning the lawsuits will soon follow. But until he costs them more than he generates in revenue, tragedies like this will continue happening.”

“It can’t continue. He must be stopped.”

“That won’t happen anytime soon. It’ll continue until the lawsuits mount or the medical licensing board investigates.”

“Who else knows what this man has been doing?”

“I know a lot because he likes using our unit for his patients. We’ve seen several like this, and several complaints followed.”

Silence. She looked at the floor and sniffled.

“The complaints did nothing?” I asked. “He’s still practicing?”

“Yes, and the nurses who complained were fired. That’s why I can’t — So now, instead of complaining afterwards, I warn people I trust
before. ”

“Does her family know?”

Claudia shook her head. “They know and they don’t know. They know something went wrong, but they are too trusting. They don’t know enough medicine, let alone neurology, to ask the right questions. They are barely able to grasp what’s happened.”

“Monstrous!” I cried, looking at the poor woman who was now a prisoner in her own slowly deteriorating body.

“Not only is he responsible for her condition, the bastard is keeping her alive on top of it. He’s against withdrawing the tube feedings. ”

“What does the family say?”

“Depends which family you talk to and whether they’ve just spoken to Stegman. Nancy’s husband, Dave, and his mother, Virginia, want the tube out. They want to let Nancy go. They know she’ll never recover.”

“What do her parents say?”

“Whatever Stegman tells them to say. He’s got the hospital’s neurologists in his pocket, and gets at least two of them to say that Nancy’s CAT scans and MRI scans are ambiguous and that the metabolic rate of glucose uptake in the cerebral hemispheres, although diminished, does not conclusively indicate a total loss of cerebral cortical function. Blah, blah, blah.”

“Who cares about tests?” I argued. “Just look. She’s no longer alive in any meaningful sense of the word. She’s not there. Her body is, but her soul is gone.”

“He’s got a video clip somebody took with a digital camera that shows Nancy lifting her head, supposedly in response to the presence of others in the room.”

“It’s not right to put her family through this,” I said.

“Sally,” Claudia said, and her eyes reddened again with guilty tears, “please. You mustn’t let on that I told you anything. Or—”

“I know, I know,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

The next day Dr. Metzger arranged to meet with me in the early morning on the neurology ward. Tiffany showed me into a conference room, where I was surprised to find that the butcher psychiatrist had enlisted the services of a secret ally.

“Hello, Sally,” said Claudia. She looked a little sheepish, as if she’d wanted to warn me ahead of time about this meeting but had been instructed otherwise.

Metzger had changed back into his clinical white lab coat, complete with pocket protectors and badges. He looked pleased with himself and quickly apologized for his superior’s abysmal behavior of the day previous.

“Dr. Stegman means well,” he said, “but like many surgeons, he’s not a people person.” Big smile.

If he’s a person at all,
I thought. So far I thought of Stegman as exhibit A in the case against materialism: No mere collection of cells, molecules, and atoms could be so hateful. The man’s physical body was but a conveyance for his infinitely malevolent spirit.

“Dr. Stegman is often overly direct,” Metzger continued. “He is concerned about you, as am I. And I enlisted Claudia’s help, because I know she’s worried about you, too.”

Claudia nodded. “Sally, Dr. Metzger asked me to help him convince you that it is in your best interest to do something about the seizure activity that you may be having according to your EEGs.”

“I don’t like medications,” I said. “If there’s something wrong with my brain, I’d rather do some of my own woo-woo on it and make it go away. If there’s healing to be done, I’ll do it myself.”

“Drug therapy completely eliminates seizures in a third of patients,” said Metzger, “and greatly reduces the frequency of seizures in another third. As for woo-woo, I’m not aware of any studies—”

“If your seizures go untreated,” said Claudia, “you could have another bad fall, or the seizures could get progressively worse until they start causing mental deterioration. And with a wonderful mind like yours, Sally, we don’t want that.”

“Sometimes patients like their seizures,” said Metzger. “Conversely they don’t like the drugs, because the drugs make them overly sedated, spacey, or dizzy. For instance, some say that certain seizure medications make them feel slightly drunk. We have a new drug protocol I’d like you to enroll in. The exciting thing is that it may not just suppress any seizure activity, but may also enhance your mystical experiences.”

“Enhanced mystical experiences?” I asked. “Is it cut with psilocybin, ayahuasca, LSD?”

“Bad girl,” he said. “I’ve found literature that suggests patients have an enhanced state of well-being, and”—he smiled at me—“how did you put it? A sensitivity to wonder and to the unity of all beings and things?”

“Patients are allowed to make bad decisions,” said Claudia. “We can’t force you to take any medicine. We can only give you the facts.”

Claudia was melting me with daughterly concern, and I was wondering if perhaps I shouldn’t give their medicines a try and see what might come of it.

“We want to try you on Scyllazine,” said Metzger. “It’s an antiepileptic. Sometimes there are side effects, in which case we administer Charybdisol to counteract those. But the good thing about Scyllazine is that there are far fewer side effects of the sort that usually trouble an active and spirited person like yourself, Mrs. Druse.”