“You’ll let me know?”
“Of course, thanks.”
I turned back to the admissions data. The data field was mostly blank. But the first line read, “Doe, Merritt.”
Out loud, I said, “Her name is Merritt.”
Three
Adrienne had a peds patient she wanted to check on before she left the hospital. I said good-bye to her at the elevator, told her I’d be available all day, and headed home. Before I leashed Emily up for a walk I put a fresh battery in my pager. I had a patient in my outpatient practice who had a newfound love for single-edge razor blades and another patient who had been paging me to pay phone numbers on weekends just to check on me and reassure himself that I was a responsive and caring human being. Although he never said a word when I returned the calls, I could tell from our sessions that he knew I knew who he was.
And now I also had Merritt Doe lying unconscious at Community Hospital awaiting whatever magic I could provide that would help her view the world as a place in which she might wish to continue to maintain residence.
All in all, more than enough reasons for a fresh battery in my pager.
Emily and I were only ten minutes from the house when the call came in to my beeper. I had Lauren’s cell phone with me. I punched in the number from my pager screen and the call was answered by the distinctive lilting voice of the ward clerk from the ICU. As instructed, he was alerting me that although Merritt wasn’t awake, her parents had been located. They were with their other child, another daughter, who was hospitalized in Denver at The Children’s Hospital. One of them would come to Boulder immediately.
I thanked him.
The ward clerk wasn’t done. In a breathless rush, he said, “You know who I bet this is, don’t you? I think it’s that little Chaney Trent, that little girl from the news. That’s who Merritt’s sister is. I bet that’s why she tried to kill herself. She must be soooo distraught about her little sister.”
I looked at my watch, silently added an hour for Merritt’s mother or father to get to Boulder from Denver, and told the ward clerk when to expect me at the ICU. “Make sure whichever parent shows up waits for me, okay? No matter what, I need to speak with one of them.”
“Absolutely,” he said, still energized by his suspicion that he was on the very periphery of notoriety.
Since the shootings that Lauren and I had been involved in the previous October, I had stopped watching the local news. Too many people I knew and cared about were on too often those days, almost always presented in ways that made me sad or angry. Usually angry. Sometimes I would watch Headline News or wait and tune in to the local network affiliates at twenty minutes after the hour just in time to catch the weather and sports, but mostly I relied on out-of-town newspapers to fulfill my anemic craving for current events. With the newspaper, it was easy to skip articles I didn’t want to read, and the editors of the Denver dailies and USA Today didn’t seem to give a crap what happened in Boulder, Colorado.
I hadn’t exactly missed the whole to-do that had been going on about the little girl, Chaney, and her illness, but I hadn’t focused on the names. To me, it was just another public tragedy. Lately they seemed to be falling like raindrops, and I had my fill in my own life and my friends’ lives and my patients’ lives and all I wanted was an umbrella to shelter me until the storm passed. I wanted, first, to pull Lauren in out of the rain with me.
What I knew, all I knew, from glancing over a few stories in the local paper was that there was a TV reporter mommy from the Boulder area who had a sick little girl who was being denied treatment with some experimental protocol that had a low double-digit chance to save her life. The denial was coming from her cost-conscious insurance company. The mom/reporter’s name hadn’t stuck in my head, nor had the little girl’s last name. The child’s first name had stuck, though, like a yellow sticky note.
Chaney.
I figured she had been named Chaney in order that she be memorable, and now she was. For all the ink the father received, I would have guessed that the sick child was a member of a single-parent family.
I didn’t recall Merritt’s name ever being mentioned in anything I had read about the sick little girl. But then again, I admit that I hadn’t paid a whole lot of attention.
It would have been better if I had.
I had some time before I needed to return to the hospital to meet up with Merritt’s mom or dad. I preferred to be armed with information rather than saddled with ignorance, so I called Diane Estevez, who does gossip as effectively as CNN does news.
“Diane, hi, it’s Alan. Can you fill me in some more on this sick little girl in Denver, the one who’s been in the news all the time lately? It looks like I may be getting peripherally involved.”
“Wow, no kidding. Hold on, let me get comfortable. God, you’re so out of touch sometimes. You really don’t know the story? Really?”
“Really. But I want to know more about the situation you alluded to at lunch. John Trent’s kid.”
“Of course. But first, dear, you have to dish. How are you involved?”
I considered how much I could share with Diane. “Adrienne called me from the ER at Community this morning to see a patient. The two cases, the ER and the sick little girl, may be related; that’s all I can tell you.”
“What do you mean, ‘may be’? You don’t know who your patient is?”
“My patient is unconscious. Let’s just leave it that there’s reason to believe that the case may be linked to the kid on the news. Come on-”
“Do you know your patient’s name? Is it Trent?”
“Please. Let’s not play twenty questions.”
She made an unpleasant noise before she said, “This is John’s first marriage. I’m pretty sure of that. I can check with someone if you need me to. But maybe his wife brought a kid along with her. Remember, she’s that reporter for Channel 7, Brenda, a, um, Strait. Yeah, Brenda Strait, that’s her name. She calls her news reports The Strait Edge.” Diane mounted her best on-air voice imitation and said, “This is Brenda Strait at Woeful Recycling in Arapahoe County, and this is The Strait Edge.”
Strait. “Tell me about the sick kid, Diane.”
“She’s a cutie, Alan. Breaks your heart to see her. Like I told you at lunch, she has some rare cardiac condition. I think it’s called, don’t quote me on this, viral myocarditis. It’s an awful thing. I mean, she has a runny nose and, poof, a month later she has a terrible heart disease that may kill her. The news reports say there’s a program in Vancouver that’s doing some experimental things with some drugs from Japan to try and arrest the virus, but the chances of success are still pretty low. The kid’s docs believe the only real hope for her is a team in Seattle that has been using the same drugs as the Vancouver people, but for kids with problems as critical as Chaney’s, they follow the drugs with a heart transplant. But the kid’s insurance company won’t approve the funds for it.”
“This is all from the news?”
“You expect me to rely on single sources for my information? I’m insulted, Alan. This is from Dani Wu. Confirmed by the news. But my sources are reliable.”
“You said it’s an insurance company? Which one?”
“Excuse my vernacular-it’s actually a managed care company. I think it’s-”
“MedExcel.”
“Right. How did you know?”
“Lucky guess. Usual suspects. Is MedExcel on solid ground in refusing to pay for the procedure?”
“Sounds like it. Everybody agrees it’s an experimental approach the Washington hospital is doing. The drugs they use to kill the virus aren’t approved by the FDA for anything but investigative use.”
“How critical is Chaney’s condition right now?”
“The news reports make it sound grim. Dani-she works with John Trent a lot, she should know-says it’s bad, the baby’s heart muscle is mush, that John’s in Denver whenever he’s not working, day and night. Mom is carrying the ball publicly, trying to raise sympathy to keep pressure on MedExcel, without further alienating them. Tough act, huh? I think the parents are still hoping for a last minute change of heart, so to speak. Me, I think the strategy is naive.”