Walk on the Wild Side - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,119
under way by lunchtime the following day. Meredith bought a stale ham sandwich from a machine, munched on it, phoned his wife. She wasn’t home. He fumbled around his desk and found some Maalox. By the time he’d had sessions with a few patients, it was growing dark and Cousin Bob had made it through surgery. Meredith spoke to him in the recovery room. He phoned his wife. She wasn’t home. Meredith went back to his house. He microwaved a low-cal dinner, ate part of it.
Bob seemed to have come through it all very well. Maureen was at his bedside. Meredith persuaded Janice to visit with her when Janice could spare the time.
“I had a dream, Kirby,” Bob told him two days post-op. “I’m not sure it was a dream.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“I’d climbed out of my bed, pulled out the IVs. I was fumbling my way along all these corridors. Lost. Just trying to get out. Go home.”
“I was somewhere in the basement—I don’t know how. I pushed open a door, thinking it led out. Only I was in the hospital morgue. Two doctors were doing an autopsy on a man. I think the man was me. I must have fainted, but I remember someone taking me back to my room. I’m afraid, Kirby.”
Dr Meredith considered. He decided to be reassuring. “Near-fatal illness. Major surgery. Anesthesia. Pain medication. Not an uncommon sort of nightmare Just rest and let your body heal. Just ask the nurse to call me if you have anymore bad dreams.”
He examined the charts, just in case, and found nothing out of the ordinary.
All of this was at the end of June. July brought in a new crop of interns, freshly graduated from med school and eager to excel. Dr Meredith lost a few of his residents, gained a few more, none of whom seemed promising, but that was his task—to bring them around. When he closeted himself in his office, he studied travel brochures.
Cousin Bob was now five days post-op and starting to take semisolid foods.
He choked on the cherry Jell-O. Maureen pounded his back and shouted for help. By the time the nurse arrived, Bob’s breathing passage was clear, but the spasms had opened some sutures, and this was causing pain and some bleeding. The nurse called for an intern.
The intern had only just arrived at the medical center, knew nothing about his patient, saw the post-op abdominal incisions and fresh bleeding, obvious severe pain—and ordered a liberal injection of morphine to quell pain and agitation. He hadn’t thought to check the charts for liver function, but he had been told that the patient in 221 was a hopeless drunk. Whatever. Who cares.
Cousin Bob died before Dr Meredith could rush over from the psychiatric wing. Janice came to be with Maureen. Meredith followed the body to the basement morgue. There would be an autopsy, although it was obvious to most idiots in white coats that a patient with minimal liver function had been massively overdosed.
“Shit! He’s back again!” The chief pathologist was breaking in another pale and trembling med student. Meredith suspected he enjoyed this sort of thing or he’d leave this to residents.
“What do you mean?”
“Patient stumbled in here a few nights back. Guess he just couldn’t wait.”
“Nothing in his chart about that.”
“One of your patients? Well, orderlies don’t like to report a fuss when there’s no harm done.”
“No harm done.”
“Looks bad for the hospital.”
No one ever gets well in a hospital.
Dr Meredith wandered from the basement morgue, seeking his office.
The oppressive walls soaked with pain and rage pressed down on him. He thought of a thousand Cousin Bobs—slowly, painfully killed by the best efforts of modern unfeeling medicine. No one ever gets well in a hospital.
Tomorrow he would clear out his office.
Tomorrow couldn’t come soon enough.
Brushed Away
As a teenager in the 1950s, Maurice Tarwater was considered by his peers to be hopelessly square, strictly from hunger, and probably queer. Perhaps it was because he wore his older brothers out-of-fashion hand-me-downs. Perhaps it was his acne. Perhaps it was his funny name.
He couldn’t dance. He listened to classical music instead of this new rock and roll. He couldn’t drive a car. His father insisted that a boy must be at least eighteen to begin driving lessons. He was hapless in sports. He didn’t smoke cigarettes at lunch break, and he didn’t touch a drop of smuggled beer at the few parties he attended. He was seldom invited. He was hopeless