“Now what’s wrong?” asked Gibby. “Patient bite you?”
“A medicine bit me,” said the intern, looking at her strangely. His white jacket was mussed and soiled from two days use; the curved ends of a weary stethoscope drooped from a slightly torn side pocket. “It just makes me tired, that’s all. Here we have three hundred thousand men in medicine trying to find just one piddling answer that adds up the same way twice — any answer — and they can’t even count on their tools to be the same from one hour to the next.” He sipped coffee and hunched his long shoulders over the table. “Now take pain-relieving drugs, for instance. You use Demerol, or Dilaudid, or Pantapon, or Levo-Dromeran, or codeine, and you don’t expect too much. You’re sending a boy to do a man’s work, and if the job only gets half done, you can’t complain. But when you’ve got real pain to deal with, you send a man and not a boy. And there are very few kinds of pain that a dose of the poppy won’t take care of.” He sat back. “At least, I thought so until now.”
The evening nurse was suddenly watching her coffee very carefully, and not looking at the intern at all. They were alone in the dimly lit basement dining room of the hospital, the tiny pink-cheeked nurse and the tall, loose-jointed intern, and they knew each other far too well by now for embarrassing silences. But for a moment the silence was embarrassing. Then Gibby said, “What are you trying to say?”
“I’m trying to say that old Mr. Canlee on Fourth only got a half an hour’s relief from his morphine shot tonight,” said Dr. Ned Thompson. “A sixth of a grain always lasted him four or five hours — until now. Tonight it didn’t hold him for an hour.” He set his cup down with finality. “I don’t know how you figure it, but to me it adds up to something very fishy.”
Gibby nodded. “I know,” she said.
“Others, too?”
“Yes.”
“A week, more or less.” The girl shook her head unhappily. “I couldn’t be sure until the last couple of nights, but there can’t be much doubt any more.”
The intern stared at her. “Do you know who it is?”
“It’s Davis, obviously. She has the medications on Fourth floor, three o’clock to eleven. There’s no one else it could be.”
“Well, don’t we have any cops in this town? My God, girl, what are you waiting for?”
“Proof,” said Gibby. “It isn’t enough to know it, not with this. You’ve got to prove it. But just try to prove it, and see how far you get.”
For a moment the intern just blinked at her, shaking his head. But he knew she was perfectly right.
It was a vicious thing to have to prove.
It was a horrible, frightening thing. It happened so rarely as to be unimaginable — yet every hospital had seen it at one time or another. St. Christopher’s Hospital was not the first, nor the last.
And when it happened, it was unbelievable, and sickening.
How and when it would start nobody knew. Nurses are close to sickness and death; pain is the enemy, healing the goat. The drugs and medications for relief of pain are part of the nurse’s daily work, and she knows them well. But who could tell what pain the nurses suffered, too? To some of them, nursing is merely a job to be endured; to others it is a way of life, a glorification. But to a few it is a day’s work to be dreaded, an emptiness and a loneliness with nothing for fulfillment. A healthy mind would find a healthy answer — adjust to the way of life and find contentment, or leave the profession. But on rare occasions an unhealthy mind would find a different kind of fulfillment...
She would come to the hospital as an experienced medications nurse. She would probably not be, but she would be efficient, would know her job. A confident voice, an aura of solid reliability — not like the giddy senior students about to graduate. References? Perhaps — but the hospitals she names so firmly are good hospitals, and with nurses so badly needed these days—
She might not start as a medications nurse, but she would soon end up there, or her interest in the job would quickly fade and she would be gone — to another hospital. A week after she was hired, you would find her, quietly and efficiently dispensing medications on the surgical floor, or perhaps on a medical floor caring for patients with heart disease or cancer or gall bladder trouble. She would be working the shift from three in the afternoon until eleven at night — so obliging of her to fill in on the shift the younger girls find so unpopular, not to mention that this is the shift when the morning’s new surgical patients are recovering from their analgesics and hypnotics, and feeling the first bite of postsurgical pain — the shift when much narcotic is used, often freely used. And her narcotics-check with the evening supervisor before she went off duty each night would always be scrupulously accurate...
But presently, insidiously, the complaints would begin. Mr. Thornton’s leg must be bothering him again — he needed two hypos between six and nine this evening before he got relief. And Mrs. Findley, complaining that her hypos aren’t relieving her the least bit (although one has been tempted to think that nothing short of a tap with a sledge hammer would effectively silence Mrs. Findley for more than half an hour at a stretch). But Mrs. Conway, always so quiet, now hesitantly and almost apologetically asking for just a tiny hypo before she goes to sleep tonight — her back has been acting up something terrible this afternoon, for some reason—
Once or twice it could be ignored. All patients had different needs, different pain thresholds. A cry-baby with an appendectomy might demand more narcotic than a stolid old trooper with massive cancer resection. But gradually the trend would appear, and the evening supervisor (who has been through this mill before, painfully and wearily, somewhere, sometime) knows without any possibility of doubt that a nurse drug addict is at work in the hospital.
“Davis!” said Dr. Ned Thompson. “You mean Jane Davis? The little brown-haired girl that started on Fourth last month?”
“That’s the one.”
“I’d never have thought it.”
Gibby grimaced. “Nobody ever does. She seems so — well, colorless. She’s never been particularly friendly with any of the girls, no gossiping about the doctors or the patients. She just keeps to herself most of the time, as quiet as can be. And now this.”
“Have you talked to Benedict down in the office about it?”
“Yes.”
“Why doesn’t he fire her”
“Because I talked him out of it,” Gibby snapped, suddenly angry. “I begged him not to fire her. That won’t solve the problem. She’ll just go on to another hospital, get the same job there, do the same thing there. And then what about us? How do we know we aren’t hiring another one to take her place?” She shook her blonde head emphatically. “Fire her, and you just turn her loose. This kind of person is horrible and cruel and you have to catch her to stop her, don’t you see? You have to actually catch her in the act of stealing the stuff, catch her giving it to herself, in order to stop her. Then you can do something — you can charge her and prosecute her and put her away somewhere.”
The girl took a deep breath and stamped out her cigarette. “But if you get excited and accuse her without proof — oh, brother! That’s what she’s waiting for. It’s the worst possible charge. A hundred thousand dollar suit against the hospital for slander and defamation of character, her choice of the slickest lawyers in town to help her win it — she’d love that! She’d win it, too. And a hundred thousand dollars would buy her an awful lot of morphine.”