When the first dose wore off, he’d managed to phone Janet and explain what had happened, trying to minimize his symptoms. “Don’t worry, you know these things are usually over in twenty-four hours. I’m just sorry I can’t have Thanksgiving dinner with you and Brendan.”
“Dammit, Earl, be straight with me.”
“I am, I swear-”
“You wouldn’t let anyone drag you into a hospital bed unless you were half-dead. Now tell me what’s going on – really.”
“Everything’s fine, Janet, just fine…” As he’d talked, it became all he could do to keep his voice from giving away the sheer agony in his stomach. He didn’t want her jumping on a plane, bringing Brendan, and having them both fretting at his bedside. He finally convinced her to stay put.
“But if you’re not telling me something, Earl Garnet, I’ll doctor you myself, starting with the biggest colonoscopy tube I can find-”
“Of course I’m telling you everything.”
“You lie like a pirate.”
“Me?”
“When it comes to whether you’re sick or in trouble, you do.”
To Brendan he’d said, “Just a sick tummy, like you get sometimes.”
“Drink Seven-Up,” his son had advised.
He’d also tried to reach Mark, got his answering machine, and left the number.
Then he’d requested a nurse to contact Melanie. “Ask her to please change the order to Demerol or codeine – something that won’t put me so out.”
A matronly red-cheeked woman wearing granny glasses had cheerfully spiked another needleful of morphine into his IV line. “No such luck. Dr. Collins says you need your rest.” She relaunched him to the other side of the universe.
The soft squeak of crepe soles approaching his bed snapped him into the present, and a white shape glided toward him in the darkness.
“Who’s there?” he yelled, jackknifing upright.
“It’s Tanya Wozcek, Dr. Garnet. Quiet down. I shouldn’t even be here.”
“Tanya?”
She snapped on his bedside lamp. The light caught the bristles of her short hair and turned it into a silvery brown aura. “I heard you were admitted. All the women on my floor are talking about what a weird coincidence it is, you getting sick after asking all those questions about Bessie. I had to make sure you were all right, so I slipped away.”
“I’m okay,” he said through gritted teeth.
“Chaz Braden hasn’t been near you, has he? I mean, is there any way he could have made you ill?”
Whatever he suspected Braden of doing, the last thing he needed right now was an outlandish rumor casting himself as the man’s latest victim. Should he or Mark ever find enough evidence to lay charges against Chaz, he could just imagine what a defense lawyer would say. “So Chaz Braden, in addition to murdering Dr. Kelly McShane, making Dr. Bessie McDonald slip into a coma, and firing a shot at Dr. Mark Roper, also managed somehow to poison Dr. Earl Garnet, even though no one can tell us when or how. Is there an MD in Manhattan he hasn’t attacked?”
“No, I haven’t even seen him since last Saturday. And though I appreciate your concern, I insist you don’t go spreading-”
“That doesn’t mean he won’t take advantage of your being here.”
“Tanya, don’t get carried away-”
“Dr. Garnet, for God’s sake, he got to Bessie. He could get to you the same way, or have someone sabotage you for him.”
That gave him pause. Still, such talk had to stop. “No way,” he said, even as he began to wonder about whom Braden might have hired to poison him. “There hasn’t been anyone near me, and if we go around making unsubstantiated allegations, no one will ever believe us once we do get evidence-”
“Dr. Collins has got you on morphine, for Christ’s sake. A squad of Marines could march in here, and there’d be times you wouldn’t know.” As she leaned in to speak with him, the illumination from the lamp caught her face from the side, exaggerating the shadows around her mouth and eyes. “So tell me, how do you feel?”
“Crappy.” He grinned at his choice of word.
Her worried expression continued to hover over him like an overwrought half-moon. “But are your symptoms what they should be, or has he done something else to you?”
Let’s see, he thought. Excruciating pain, nausea, a bellyful of writhing snakes, and soon to come, promising more delights. Maybe vomiting, most certainly the runs. Yeah, Tanya, that seemed exactly right. What a relief. I’ve only got one thing wrong with me, with or without any help from Chaz Braden. Clenching his jaw even tighter against a new volley of cramps, he muttered, “Of course they are.” Now go away, so I can twist and squirm in peace.
“What’s in here?” She turned to read the label of his IV bag.
“Normal saline, with extra potassium, exactly as it should be.”
“And who prepared it?”
“Dr. Collins herself. She did it to save the nurses – Oh, God.” All at once he felt scalded inside, as if something were shredding the walls of his intestines.
“What is it?”
“Just please leave. I’ve got to call the nurse.”
“For more morphine?”
“Whatever.”
“Why not Demerol-”
At the moment he didn’t care. “I’ll ask for it. Now, please get out of here.”
“Who gives you your shots? Always the same person?”
“Yes! She looks like Santa Claus in drag. Now dammit, Tanya, I’m ringing my buzzer.” He flayed at it with one hand, cradling his stomach with the other.
“Okay,” she said, pressing it for him, then heading to the door, “but I’m keeping an eye on you.”
He let out a long moan, and twisted himself into a pretzel.
Two hours later he fell and cut his head making a rush for the toilet as the remainder of his symptoms, long expected, kicked in.
That put an end to the morphine.
It also earned him a tube down his stomach.
His life became sandwiched between basins at one end, bedpans at the other, and the unremitting agony of a gut on fire in between.
They started giving him Demerol, but it barely muted the pain. A second dose didn’t work much better, other than to make him sleepy. He knew not to request a third. It’d have the same effect as morphine as far as suppressing his gag reflex, and he’d be choking on vomit.
“How about we ask Dr. Collins about a tube in your trachea to protect your airway? Then we could knock you right out,” the nurse with red cheeks suggested.
He declined. Then he thought, “Wait a minute. Weren’t you on the day shift?” he asked, fearing he’d let himself get disoriented.
“Dr. Collins asked that I switch to nights, just so you got the best of care.”
Oh, great!
By dawn he felt like an empty husk. “I’m dehydrating,” he told Santa, trying to prop himself up on one elbow. He flopped back, unable to bear the weight. “The IVs aren’t keeping up with the fluid I’ve lost. And better check my potassium. My muscles are so weak I can hardly move.”
“This isn’t a service station, Dr. Garnet.” Her icy tone sounded as cold as the North Pole and just as hostile, making it clear he wouldn’t be breaching the divide between patient and staff on her watch. But she sped up the IV.
By the end of her shift he could barely hold an emesis basin.
“And how are we today?” Melanie asked, disgustingly chipper as she swept in at 7:00 A.M. on the wings of a crisp lab coat, obviously giving him the honor of being her first case for morning rounds. A semicircle of sleepy residents sporting more wrinkled wear shuffled in after her and formed a small white amphitheater at the foot of his bed.
“As you recall,” she began, addressing her entourage without giving him a chance to answer, “Dr. Garnet came into ER over twenty-four hours ago with symptoms of bacterial enteritis characterized by inordinate pain, yet a relatively delayed onset of diarrhea. With this subtle discrepancy, I suspected this might be E. coli 0157:H7, rather than the more typical organisms we might expect. Of course I withheld antibiotics pending cultures. As I passed through bacteriology this morning, I picked up the preliminary results. All sorts of normal E. coli are being grown as would be the norm, but no salmonella, no shigella, and no Campylobacter. That means, I think it’s reasonable to assume that hidden amongst these noninfectious E. coli, we’ll find the infectious strain, or a serotype close to it, that I initially suspected. Of course we’ll have to wait a full forty-eight hours…”