“Something I learned to do in the army,” he said to Cat.
Within just a few minutes they had transported Garner onto a wheeled hospital bed in the patient room closest to Dr. Ransom’s private office.
“Thanks, Randy.”
“Any time. Call me if you need my muscle again. You get better, Remke.”
Randy left, and Cat removed Garner’s shoes. She ran her fingers over his hands and feet. Both were freezing to the touch. “Could be food poisoning,” Cat said for Garner’s benefit.
“The elk sandwich, you think?”
“Too long ago. Might have been my salmon.”
“Not a chance.”
“Have you eaten anything that tasted a little off ?”
He barely shook his head, then frowned from the pain the movement caused.
“Have you thrown up?”
“No.”
The vomiting would start soon enough. Cat turned down the lights. It was easier to appear calmly authoritative, and therefore trustworthy and comforting, in a dim room. And Garner would be more relaxed. More suggestible.
The age of the patient, the isolation of the town, the privacy of this office—all the factors in place today would surely make this easier than the time she’d employed similar methods with little Amelia Reinhart for the sake of winning her father’s adoration. Already, everything had gone so much more easily.
Cat gave Garner instructions to try to sleep while she fetched a few items she needed.
Ergot brought down its victims simply enough with symptoms that could be blamed on any number of causes: nausea, vomiting, stomach cramping, headaches, numbness, fever. Such symptoms were consolable, eased by time, patience, love, and the understanding of a gentle doctor. In small amounts, the effects were reversed easily enough: all one had to do was stop eating the ergot-tainted food and let the monster run its course.
Depending on how Garner responded to Cat’s TLC, she could keep nurturing him with those rye rolls he loved so much, or put him on an ergot-free diet. She’d take one day at a time.
Though Garner’s liver cancer was an unknown variable, short-term exposure to ergot was easy to handle. If she decided to, she’d keep him down long enough to restore his adoration of her but not long enough to need to admit him to a hospital. If exposure to the ergot went on too long the toxicity would mount. Some patients would experience convulsions, hysteria, hallucinations, dementia. Skin infections would flare, accompanied by such unbearable pain that the condition had been known for centuries as St. Anthony’s Fire. In others, especially in animals, blood flow to the extremities was reduced to the point that gangrene set in.
As Cat gathered various analgesics from her supply closet, she found herself particularly curious about how Nova’s exposure to the fungus would turn out. Ergot had been used by midwives since the dawn of time to contract the uterus after the birth of a child; modern-day obstetricians used a derivative of ergot to jumpstart an expectant mother’s contractions. In the distant past, some women used ergot to abort their babies—though they tended to be successful only insofar as one considered the death of both child and mother a “success.”
Cat could only guess how far her generous dose might go in the fetus of a woman as slightly built as Nova. It would be an unscientific experiment.
She returned to Garner’s room carrying a box of medications that she might or might not administer: a vasodilator and an anticoagulant, in the event Garner's extremities began to turn black, though that would take days, maybe even weeks; activated charcoal, if any of the symptoms worsened; saline and a stomach tube, mainly for appearances. Gastric lavage was only sometimes recommended for this type of poisoning. The box contained several other sterile items, still in their sealed plastic and brown bottles, also for appearances.
But she would go through whatever motions were required to make people love her.
A shout came from the entrance. “Dr. Ransom! Where’s Garner?”
Cat left Garner’s side and leaned out into the hallway. Dotti had already crossed the waiting room in those bright orange sneakers and was coming straight at her.
“Randy told me Garner came in half dead.” The woman’s eyes and hair were both frenzied, as if she’d run here all the way from Salida. She was even slightly breathless.
“Shh, shh. He’s in good hands, Dotti.”
“A person can be in good hands and still be half dead. What’s wrong with him?”
“I’m thinking it’s a little food poisoning, nothing worse than that. It’ll pass.”
“Food poisoning! The man’s got liver cancer. He might as well have Alzheimer’s of the liver. It won’t have any