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Tombstone
Emily Deans
"I
am," he said, "a powerful man."
He picked at the IV line running from his wrist before he looked up at
me. He wore sunglasses at five a.m. "When are you going to let me
go?”
I held in a yawn with the muscles of my jaw. Not that he was boring, but
I was exhausted. Ten minutes ago I tried to lie down for a precious hour
of sleep, one hour out of two days. In those quiet minutes I was curled
up on one side pretending to rest. Pretending because my job overnight
in the cardiac unit was to wait for something bad to happen.
Outside a siren moaned, and the ambulance pulled into the emergency bay.
In the middle of my hope that the ambulance patient was a hot appendix,
or a stroke, or anything except chest pain, I was paged to see Mr.
Hensley. The nurses said he was doing strange things.
Dark blood ran into his veins from a hanging bag. He'd been vomiting
blood all day, but he didn't remember that. "I'm not really
sick," he told me. "You are doing experiments on me. I am a
monkey in a museum."
I wondered if he meant to say zoo. "Mr. Hensley, I know this must
seem very strange to you."
His cardiac monitor started to beep, and he frowned. "I can't rest
here. That noise is disturbing." His fingers traced along the
oxygen tube running across his face, hooked around his ears. He tried to
get up, was pulled back by the IV full of blood. If the IV came out the
nurses would expect me to put it back in with my tremulous, caffeinated
hands.
"Sir, please. You had a heart attack yesterday. You are very ill.
You need to stay in bed." I looked at his chest, saw his EKG in my
mind. There's a particular tracing for a bad heart attack, called 'tombstoning.'
He had them, stark square waves, and they faded when the docs in the ER
thinned his blood to water. Only then he started retching bright red,
and now his lungs were filling with fluid.
I sat in the dark room with him, with the monitor beeping. I looked from
the sliding glass doors of his room to his sunglasses, and then followed
his gaze to the window, and the gray dawn. Did he feel his death nearby?
I could smell his death in the room, the leftover acrid scent of his
blood.
"I am powerful. I can leave when I want." He tried to stand
again, made it almost to his feet before he became too short of breath.
The monitor beeped in annoyance as his pulse climbed into the 120s.
In the daytime I might have rushed to stop him, but now I was too tired
to be anything but calm. "Sir, of course you can leave. That's your
right." Arguing would make it worse, and I had no strength for it
anyway. Death came closer as his pulse raced. I was supposed to keep him
alive. Helplessness sucked at my lungs and the space behind my eyes.
The air was heavy in the room, and warm. He fell back against his
pillows and opened his mouth. "Let me go," he whined. "I
want to go." In his delirious state he knew to hide, to scurry
away.
His heart was beating too fast, and I couldn't slow it without dropping
his blood pressure. He hadn't slept all night, the nurses said. Neither
had I. He kept trying to get up, and when they told him to be calm he
just got worse. The medicines didn't help at all. You have to come talk
to him, they said. We can't do anything with him.
When things are hopeless, call the doctor. She can try to give the dying
man his wish.
"You can go. No one will stop you. We can't keep you here against
your will."
"I can go..." His cracked lips barely moved as he spoke the
words, and he shuddered with his breath. His heart rate slowed, and his
eyes might have closed beneath the sunglasses.
The room brightened, and I sat watching him. Watching his chest wall
rise and fall. I should have listened to his lungs, to keep track of the
fluid in them, but I didn't want to disturb him. I leaned back in the
chair and covered my eyes with my hands. His breathing would tell me
enough, whether it were slow, or labored, or absent altogether.
An animal trick might protect us from the predator. My eyes closed, my
mouth shut, the patient asleep. If we were both quiet and still, death
might just pass over and away.
Copyright
© 2002 Emily Deans
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