Thursday, July 4, 9:05 a.m.
The next thing Mitt became aware of was the sound of knocking on his on-call room door. It was soft knocking, which was why it took a relatively long time to rouse him from his coma-like sleep. “Just a second,” he managed, finding his voice and then having to clear his throat. He uncrossed his legs, which apparently had been crossed for the nearly four hours he’d been comatose, and threw them over the side of the bed to help him sit up. Immediately he could tell his right leg remained “asleep” from having its circulation compromised. As he massaged the involved calf, he called out: “Hang on! I’m coming.”
“No problem,” came back through the door.
Mitt instantly recognized Andrea’s voice and assumed she was responsibly checking in with him to start her on-call status. When Mitt felt his leg was capable of bearing weight and would be reasonably responsive to commands, he stood up. He then had to weather a short-lived spate of dizziness. When that passed, he staggered a few steps on a leg that still felt wooden and opened the door.
“Oh my gosh, you look like you’ve been through the wringer,” Andrea said, but her tone was cheerful. She then followed up with a teasing verbal once-over as she stood in the doorway, pointing out his bloodshot eyes, his rumpled white coat, and his hair, which stuck out at odd angles the way terrified cartoon characters were drawn.
“Thanks for all the compliments,” Mitt said. In sharp contrast to his own appearance, as per usual she looked rather chic, as if she were heading out on a date rather than starting what might turn out to be a grueling twenty-four-hour on-call stint as a first-year surgical resident. He couldn’t help but notice she was back to wearing her trendy, bright red dress under a clean and starched white coat. On top of that, her dark, bobbed hair had been scrupulously attended to, and she was even wearing a small amount of makeup. Despite feeling decidedly outclassed, he added: “Do you want to come in for a few minutes and chat?”
“I’d like to hear about your night,” Andrea said. “But only if it won’t bother you. You do look exhausted. Maybe you should just go back to sleep, and we can talk later?”
“No, it’s okay! I want to get up,” Mitt said. “I prefer to get out of here, go back to my apartment, and get some real sleep.”
“Fair enough,” Andrea said as she stepped into the room.
Mitt let the door go, and it closed on its own accord. While Andrea sat in the lone reading chair, he went back to the bed and sat down.
“I’m sorry to have awakened you,” Andrea said. “The way you look, it seems cruel in retrospect. In my defense, I did debate with myself for a few minutes. Ultimately I thought it behooved me to find out if there was anything particular that I should know as part of a responsible handoff.”
“It’s okay,” Mitt said. He ran both hands through his hair, trying to tame it to a degree. “Seriously! I’m glad you woke me. As I said, I’ll appreciate getting home. As for the current inpatients, ‘All’s Quiet on the Western Front,’ at least at the moment.”
“That’s good to hear, which reminds me: I haven’t had anything to eat yet. Want to grab a bit of breakfast together?”
“Thanks for the invite, but to be honest, I’m not hungry in the slightest.”
“Fair enough,” Andrea said. “Sounds like you didn’t get much sleep. Otherwise, how was your night?”
“Pretty terrible,” Mitt said, nodding as he spoke.
“Bummer,” Andrea said. “What made it bad? Did you have emergency surgery in the middle of the night?”
“No surgery. I wouldn’t have minded that. Instead, all three of my remaining patients died.”
“What?” Andrea loudly blurted. She was plainly shocked. “Oh, come on! I hope you are trying to make what would be the world’s most tasteless joke.”
“I wish I were,” Mitt said. “Elena Aguilar had a cardiac arrest in the ICU, which I suppose wasn’t so startling as she had been doing poorly since her surgery. But just before that happened, Latonya Walker, my breast biopsy, also had an arrest, which was a huge surprise for everyone because she’d been doing perfectly fine and had no cardiac history whatsoever.”
“Unbelievable! What about the last one? Was that the thyroidectomy you were so hyped about?”
“Exactly,” Mitt said. “In some respects, the third one was the most disconcerting of all. His name was Diego Ortiz. He’d been doing fine, too, but then out of the blue he suffered an off-the-charts thyroid storm.”
“Whoa! I’m not sure I’ve even heard of a thyroid storm, but I guess it’s self-explanatory.”
“It is self-explanatory. The body’s metabolism just goes berserk, and the patient kind of burns himself up from the inside.”
“Good God! I’m blown away! This means that every single one of the patients you’d been assigned so far has died.”
“I’m afraid so.”
For a few beats, the two friends just stared at each other. Mitt longed to bring up the extraordinary idea that he was being targeted by the ghosts of Bellevue because of the sins of his forebearers, but he couldn’t get himself to do it. Once again, if the situation were the other way around, and Andrea was trying to tell him that malevolent spirits were targeting her patients because of her ancestors’ behavior, he’d think she’d gone off the deep end. At the same time, he was desperate to talk with her and feel a connection with a friend and colleague to help him deal with a difficult emotional situation. If nothing else, he wanted reassurance that his plan to return to the psychiatric hospital to borrow the records behind Lashonda Scott’s back wasn’t taking advantage of her good graces and personal generosity.
“How are you handling this amazing coincidence?” Andrea asked with obvious concern. “I hope you are not taking it personally?”
“It’s difficult not to,” Mitt said as his shoulders visibly sank. “Seven out of seven is just pushing the limits of probability.”
“But you are only a first-year resident,” Andrea exclaimed. “We talked about this. You haven’t made any of the decisions nor done the surgeries. It can’t be your fault. There’s no way.”
Mitt shrugged his shoulders. Once again, he wanted to talk about the apparitions he’d been seeing, especially now that he’d visited the psychiatric hospital where they all apparently resided, but he dared not. “Something else very disturbing happened last night,” he said, thinking about where he could take the conversation and remain on reasonably safe subjects.
“As bad as three of your patients dying?”
“I suppose not, but pretty bad just the same.”
“Okay, lay it on me.”
“I got specific confirmation from two actual cases that Dr. Harington was correct about my Bellevue ancestors being on the wrong side of history.”
“I’m not sure what you mean?”
“Exactly what I said. My ancestor Homer Fuller amputated a leg in mid-thigh in 1854 and chose not to use anesthesia, which was obviously available at the time. And Clarence Fuller, the psychiatrist, attempted to do a lobotomy in 1949 on an eight-year-old girl with what was probably a behavioral disorder, which she probably would have outgrown, and killed her in the process supposedly because of an aberrant cerebral artery.”
“Holy crap! That is pretty bad. And how is it you got confirmation of all this in the middle of the night?”
“It’s a moderately long story. Do you really want to hear?”
“Yes, of course, but if it is a moderately long story, I’d like to revisit the breakfast idea. Are you sure you’re not game?”
“You know, now that I’ve been upright and conscious for a few minutes, I do feel a bit hungry. Let’s do it.”
After Mitt had splashed some cold water on his face and tamed his hair a tad with a brush, he and Andrea left the on-call room. Out in the lounge, he also took the time to exchange his soiled and seriously wrinkled white coat for a clean, starched one. This effort improved his appearance enough for Andrea to joke that she now wasn’t all that embarrassed to be seen with him.