5
They shut the door to the narrow room that had a black-board upon which doctors customarily drew diagrams for parents confused about the treatment their child would receive. Both physicians studied David as if they wished they weren’t alone with him.
“Now we realize you’re under stress,” the first physician said. “You’re worried about your son. All perfectly natural. But what exactly do you think is-?”
“Going to happen?” David’s legs felt weak. He gripped a chair. “Septic shock.”
The second physician narrowed his eyes. “Where’d you hear that term? Something you read? You’ve been doing, let’s call it, well-intended but uninformed research, and it makes you nervous?”
“Never mind how I know. I’m absolutely certain-”
“Now listen carefully,” the first physician said. “Whatever books you’ve been reading, whatever outdated texts have made you afraid, yes, it’s true there’s always a danger of septic shock. We’ve already warned you. When a patient’s blood counts are low, there’s a risk of infection. That’s why we take extreme precautions to prevent-”
“No, you listen carefully.” Though the room stayed perfectly still, David’s mind revolved. “Your precautions are fine. There’s nothing wrong with the treatment you’re giving him. But Matthew will get septic shock. I can’t explain why, but tomorrow afternoon, he’ll become infected. His blood pressure will drop and…”
“What makes you so sure?”
“You wouldn’t believe me! Just give him antibiotics now!”
The first physician edged toward the phone.
The second physician raised his hands in a placating gesture. “‘Antibiotics’ is a general description of a wide variety of treatment.”
“I understand that. Different antibiotics have applications to different infections.”
The first physician picked up the phone.
David’s chest felt squeezed. “Stop. Give me a chance.”
The first physician touched numbers on the phone.
“Please!”
The first physician hesitated.
“You need to know the specific infection so you can choose the specific antibiotic to use to attack it. So now I’m telling you.”
As David spoke the words that to anyone but a doctor would have been gibberish… as he recalled the words he’d memorized from the microbiology report in his dream… words that in his present timestream would have been impossible for him to know, let alone pronounce… he realized that he wasn’t crazy. His dying vision was fact. He had indeed come back.
For what he told the physicians, the words like gravel in his mouth, was…
“What’ll give Matthew septic shock? Streptococcus mitis. Staphylococcus epidermidis.”
David couldn’t believe he’d spewed those chunks out.
The physicians couldn’t believe it either.
“Where the hell did you…?” The first physician almost dropped the phone.
The second physician drew his head back. “But naturally adapted strep and staph are almost never…”
“Fatal?” David shuddered. “This time they will be.”
His legs buckled. The room spun along with his brain. He lost his grip on the chair.
“My God, he’s…”
Falling.
“Having a…”
Drifting.
Toppling.
“Heart attack.”
6
When David struck the floor, he couldn’t move; he felt disoriented, helpless. His fall, which seemed to have lasted forever, contrasted sickeningly with the sense he had of floating above his aged dying body. He seemed to drop and rise simultaneously-conflicting sensations that produced such vertigo he could barely muster the strength to blink.
Making these reactions more intense was the added element of fear, as if to move, to try to stand, would kill him.
Through a haze, he saw the first physician lunge from the room. The second physician knelt beside David, checking his pulse. After an interval-ten seconds? a minute?-the first physician rushed back, accompanied by Donna and a nurse.
“His pulse is strong.” The first physician’s voice was an echo. “No fibrillation. Ninety.”
“Acceptable,” the second physician said.
“No… normal for me is…” David’s chest heaved.
“Don’t try to talk.”
The nurse wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around David’s arm. Donna knelt beside him, touching his cheek, as the nurse inflated the cuff. David saw the fear in Donna’s eyes.
The nurse deflated the cuff, watching a dial as she listened to a stethoscope pressed to David’s arm. “A hundred and forty over ninety.”
“Tolerable. A little high, but not unusual. Not critical,” the second physician said.
“No. Listen. Normal for me is…”
“Don’t try to talk. Relax.”
Sure, easy for you to say, David thought, the room and his mind aswirl.
“What I told you a minute ago might not be true. Try not to worry. Our initial examination isn’t conclusive, but you might not be having a heart attack.”
“Then what…?”
“We don’t know. We’ve alerted Emergency. We’re sending you down there. If it is a heart attack, we’re not equipped to deal with-”
“Stop the spinning. Stop the damned room from spinning.”
“David, I’m here. I’ll be with you,” Donna said. “I’ll stay right beside you.”
“No, stay with Matthew.” The effort to emphasize his words was excruciating.
David felt his body being lifted. He suddenly found himself in a wheelchair. He closed his eyes. But the tingling-and worse, the swirling-persisted.
Feeling the wheelchair being pushed, he groaned from increasing dizziness. Pressure accumulated behind his ears. He dared to open his eyes and discovered…
He was in an elevator. The doors hissed shut. The elevator dropped.
“No!”
At last he moved of his own accord, shoving his hands to his ears to stifle the pressure.
“No!”
The elevator jerked to a stop. The top of his head seemed about to explode. If someone hadn’t been holding him, he’d have toppled from the wheelchair.
Blinding lights. A swirling corridor.
But not the soothing gleam of the corridor in his nightmare. This was the hospital’s first floor. Rear section. The part that patients and visitors almost never saw and prayed they would never have to see. Through a spinning maze of twists and turns, he was rushed in his wheelchair toward the Emergency Ward. Outside, a wailing ambulance arrived. David concentrated to focus on glass doors that led to a curve in a driveway where attendants unloaded a patient onto a gurney. Through a blur, he saw a nurses’ station directly across from where the glass doors now slid open, the attendants hurrying the patient through.
David’s wheelchair stopped abruptly in front of the nurses’ station. His head tilted forward, making him groan.
A woman peered over a computer screen toward him. “Name?” She poised her fingers above a keyboard.
David managed to tell her.
“Two ‘r’s, two ‘I’s?”
David gasped for breath and nodded.
The woman tapped the keyboard. “Address?”
“It’s all”-David sweated, even though his skin felt cold-“on file. I hurt my shoulder… in March.” He breathed faster. “I came here then for treatment. I’m in… the computer file.”
“Just a minute.” The woman tapped the keyboard again. She read an address from the screen. “That’s where you live?”
David nodded.
The woman read the name of an insurance company.
“Yes,” David breathed.
“Okay, you can take him in.”
The wheelchair hurried forward. David’s dizziness increased. He closed his eyes once more, felt the wheelchair turn sharply left, and the next time he looked, he was speeding toward an examination room-a bed, a sink, a metal cabinet, its shelves stacked with medical supplies.
The nurse who had wheeled him down from the Bone Marrow Ward stopped and tapped his shoulder. “They’ll take care of you now, Mr. Morrell. Good luck. I’ve got to get back on duty upstairs.”