HEAD: Atraumatic
CHEST: There are coarse mid-inspiratory crackles heard at the right lung.
FACTOR CONTRIBUTORY TO CONGESTIVE HEART FAILURE: smoking 30 years
At the end of the hour he went back upstairs. The television was on, sound turned up loud, and both Marguerite and Walter were dozing, their cards still spread on the table. Marguerite had gin. Carl stood behind the couch and coughed softly. Marguerite made a kind of low moan and her face sagged terribly in the second before she pulled herself into her usual cheery expression.
She glanced at Walter and then at Carl. “I guess I'd better be off,” she said.
“I'll call your cab.”
“Thank you, dear. You're a …” She looked down and turned the loose gold rings on her fingers, then said, as if to the jewelry, “What's the word I want?”
“Blessing?” Carl said, since this was what she usually called him.
Marguerite beamed. “Just so,” she said.
After he'd called, he took her elbow and they began the slow, careful walk out of the house and down the driveway. She leaned against him and clutched herself closely around the waist. They stood at the end of the driveway, waiting. Marguerite swayed a bit in the wind. “You know, dear,” she said, “he doesn't look too good.”
“Walter?”
“Dear,” she said, “of course Walter.”
“Well, he's sick,” Carl said.
“Has he been making his weekly visits?”
Carl began to tap his foot. “You know I take him, Marguerite.”
“I know you do, dear.” She looked at him, then took a tissue from her white handbag and dabbed a bit at her nose. “It's just … well.” She sighed. “At the home we get excellent round-the-clock care.”
“Walter hates the home,” Carl said flatly. Marguerite took a deep breath, drew herself up to her full height, which wasn't very high, and said, “It isn't anybody's first choice, dear.” The taxi appeared around the corner and crept toward them.
“He's fine,” Carl said.
When the taxi pulled up, he lowered Marguerite's fragile bones onto the ripped upholstery of the backseat. As the car pulled away he felt a flash of guilt and called, ridiculously, “Thanks for coming!” He could see the white blur of her tissue in the window as she waved good-bye.
Patient has been prescribed
Walter was awake and watching Matlock, drinking a cup of coffee that by now must have been quite cold.
“Faking, Uncle Walter?”
“If I pretend to fall asleep, she falls asleep too,” Walter said, and slurped.
“That's not very polite,” Carl said.
“Well, Jesus. You know I think the world of Marguerite. But if I have to hear one more word about her grandchildren in Boca Raton, I'll fall asleep and never wake up.”
“She thinks you should go back into the convalescent home.”
“Convalescent home, my ass,” Walter said. His eyelids were heavy and he held his coffee cup loosely on the arm of his chair. “You keep convalescing and then you're dead. What day is it, son?”
“Thursday.”
“Thursday's bingo night in the home. I won once. Jar of cold cream.”
“They gave you a jar of cold cream?”
“That was the prize.” Walter put the coffee cup down on the table, leaned back, and closed his eyes. “I gave it to Marguerite. That's how the two of us got started.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” Walter said. “Don't worry. I'm fine.”
HISTORY:
That night Walter fell out of bed. What woke Carl up from a restless, dream-drenched sleep (since he never knew the people whose illnesses or accidents were described in the reports, and never saw the doctors who dictated them, his periodic nightmares were filled with faceless strangers undergoing unidentifiable medical procedures while Carl watched, helplessly) must have been the thud of Walter's body hitting the floor. He sat up in bed, not knowing why he was awake, and heard a ragged, whispery gasp from the other side of the hall. When he got to the bedroom, Walter was looking up expectantly from the floor.
“I fell out of bed!” he whispered.
“I can see that,” Carl said.
“I feel okay, though.”
“We should probably go to the hospital.”
“I said I feel all right.”
“I heard what you said,” Carl said. He knelt down and slipped one arm under Walter's back and pulled him to a sitting position. His uncle's back felt meaty and solid through his T-shirt. But he was unsteady on his feet, and in the car he closed his eyes and didn't seem to feel well enough to talk.
At the emergency room they put him under observation, since they couldn't decide exactly what had happened to him. At the foot of the bed, Carl stood facing the digital flickering of the medical instruments. He felt calm. It wasn't the first time they'd been to the ER and in all likelihood wouldn't be the last. He examined the screen and thought of all the tests he'd seen, the signals from inside Walter's body: the CT scans, X rays, EKG. How many people ever saw that deep inside anybody else? He was proud of it somehow.
“Sometimes people just fall out of bed,” the intern told him.
“Is that your actual diagnosis?” Carl said. “I want to see the chart.”
“I can't give you the chart.”
“I want to see the chart,” he said, and grabbed it from the intern's hand.
Walter grinned at the intern from his bed. “He knows everything.”
“You need to rest,” the intern said.
Carl took the chart out to the hall and sat down with it. The jangling noise of the hospital, even at three o'clock in the morning, and the spasmodic blinking of the fluorescent lights and the bad-smelling, recirculated air were making him claustrophobic and irritable. He rubbed his eyes and looked at the chart, the scrawlings of medications and symptoms. Everything about his uncle was here, Walter on paper, his body reconstituted as a record of its processes and ills. This, he thought, is a body of information, and there arose before him a brief image of Walter's naked body, made not of flesh and blood but of a shell of data like tattoos in the air. In this image the body was as fine and translucent as a moth, numbers running down the arms and separating into five fingers, diagrams banded across the chest: statistical, eternal.
“Mr. Mehussen?”
Carl looked up at a woman extending her hand.
“I'm Dr. Newman,” she said. “I'd like to talk to you about your uncle. And I'd like to have his chart back, please.”
Patient appears fragile but in good spirits. Is able to communicate symptoms and receive information.
Dr. Newman had straight, thin, slightly greasy blond hair that swung as she talked. Under her white coat she wore khakis and sensible brown shoes. She was in the middle of saying that falling out of bed, while a traumatic event, might not have meaningful consequences for Walter's condition when he realized who she was. He glanced at her sharply.
“Do you have a question?”
“I just — you're Dr. Newman.”
She ran a hand wearily through her hair and nodded.
“Dr. Amanda Newman.”
“Yes, that's me.”
“I do your tapes,” he said.
“My tapes?”
“Transcription,” he said. He watched her nod again, and smile politely, and then recalibrate her manner to the one she used while dealing with people employed, however tangentially, in the medical profession. She took a deep breath, moved her shoulder closer to his, and became at once friendlier and more professional.
“You have excellent diction,” he told her.