Tombstone
By 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