23
Jemma pre-rounded with her usual sense of dread, hand always pausing before knocking on the door, and it took a hefty effort of will to move her wrist. This was the part she hated most about switching services, the introductions. Hello, she must say. I am your new medical student. It’s true: about your illness and your life I am as well informed as a doughnut, and I am as qualified as a doughnut to manage your problems and move you toward the recovery of your health, if such a thing is even possible. Turn yourself to me, trust in my ignorance, let me be your own special moron; I’ll do my weary, confused best not to hurt you.
At least she had escaped Dr. Snood. The Committee had decided that the end of the world was no reason not to torture the medical students; they must continue to rotate within the hospital. Now that Jemma finally felt like she knew her patients and their problems, she would give them up for an entirely different set. On the fifty-second day she went to the heme-onc team with Rob, and Vivian went to the NICU/PICU team.
Dr. Sashay, an oncologist who’d come in the night of the flood to preside over a patient death, ran the service along with the fellow, Cotton Chun. “Yes,” she said, sizing Jemma up during an orientation the night before she came on the service. “You’re a bit of a fatty, aren’t you? Isn’t she, Cotton?”
“I wouldn’t know, ma’am,” he said, not looking up from his computer. Dr. Sashay put out her hand and smiled while she said this, and seemed genuinely friendly. Some people said she had once been a very tactful person, until she had her accident — she was run over by a jet ski while lagging far behind the crowd in a triathlon swim — but that afterward, though her extraordinary genius was not the least bit dimmed, and her generous spirit not soured, she habitually insulted her inferiors. “Somehow you don’t hold it against her,” said Rob, who already knew her from the PICU, where she consulted on three of his patients.
“I’m having a baby,” Jemma said flatly to Dr. Sashay, making Rob choke on one of the fancy danishes — orange and starfruit and papaya arranged as intricately as a mandala in the bun — that Cotton had called out of the replicator for them. Then she laughed — more advice from Dr. Chandra: “Whenever she says something that makes you want to kick her in the face, just laugh. She likes that. I was one of her favorites, and everybody fucking hates me.”
Dr. Sashay laughed back, a crescendo, decrescendo cackle. Strange, Jemma thought, to hear an insult not spoken in malice, but it seemed that was what it was. Dr. Sashay smiled wider, and Jemma wanted to say, You look kind of like a bag lady, don’t you? because she dressed in wrinkled droopy skirts and blouses, and her hair looked like she styled it by rubbing a cat on her head, but Jemma knew she wouldn’t be able to invest her insult with the same sort of friendliness, and left it unspoken.
“But you are going to have a baby, my chunky bunny. You’re going to have five or six of them, sicker than you can imagine, and you are going to learn to poison them like an angel. We’re going to get them better, all of us together — don’t think you’re not as much a part of the team as me or Cotton. We need you, so you need to learn your shit. When you’re not here, you’ll still be here, reading and learning. Sepsis, fever and neutropenia, typhlitis — you’ll be able to do them in your sleep — or should I say my sleep? — long before I’m done with you. We’re going to have adventures! These kids are full of surprises — you never can guess what crazy miserable shit they’re going to pull on you next. All I ask of you is that you do everything I say, read my mind, and give me what I want before I ask for it. I’m kidding! But not really.” She gave everybody a welcoming hug, then, and reminded them all that her name was pronounced with the accent on the first syllable.
Jemma’s first patient was Magnolia Watson, a fifteen-year-old girl with sickle-cell disease admitted for a pain crisis and acute chest syndrome. There was no answer to Jemma’s soft knock on her door. The hair was the first thing Jemma noticed in the darkened room. She stood and stared, not even all the way out of the door, and within a minute she’d developed a relationship with it — she admired it, then fell in love with it, then wanted it for herself. Magnolia lay back asleep on her pillows, her characteristic pose, with her impossibly thick hair piled up above her head. It was such an incredible mass, Jemma was sure she could hide a toaster in it, or perhaps even a toaster oven. It was coarse and herbaceous, and she would discover that whether freshly washed or days into a sweaty bout of pain, it gave forth a wholesome aroma, like bread or cookies. That first morning it was raised into two great hills, parted into a deep valley that ran perfectly straight along the top of her head. On the overheated actresses of the fifties, and on the men pretending to be those women, Jemma had seen the same style look like what it actually was, a big booby-head, but on Magnolia it looked stately.
She’d had a rocky course since her admission — Jemma had read the chart the night before. She came in with both her knees hot and swollen big as softballs, with saturations in the low eighties and a whited-out chest film. The water came in the second week of her hospitalization, by which time she had improved on IV antibiotics and pain medications and an exchange transfusion. But her pain became intractable after the Thing, a phenomenon probably not unrelated to the loss of her family, who had failed to visit her on the day of the storm, like they had on most every other day.
Jemma was looking at the vitals sheet, trying to add up all the PCA hits when Magnolia spoke. “Where’s the bitch?”
“I’m Jemma. I’m your new student doctor.”
“Where’s the bitch?”
“Which bitch?”
“You know. White coat. Mean little eyes. Teeth like a rat. The bitch. Like you, but a bitch.”
“If you mean Maggie, she got transferred. They like to switch us around, because we’re learning.”
“Transferred into a little boat? Set her floating like Captain Bly. Goodbye, bitch. Enjoy your fucking breadfruit. It’s a movie, you know. You can watch it any way you want. The old one or the new one — she remembers all of them. Or one with my brother as Mr. Christian and Uncle Poo as the Captain. Poor Uncle Poo. He was a different kind of bitch, like the ones that get slapped around. He was everybody’s bitch, but she made him so big inside he just yelled and yelled and in the end he had his day and Mr. Christian was stuck on this island without his pants. A girl shouldn’t see her brother’s thingie flapping in the wind, not when he’s all grown up. She’ll change the endings if you want, or even if you don’t.”
“How are you feeling?” Jemma asked, hugging her clipboard and trying to look friendly. She thought that first impressions counted for a lot with teenagers. She beamed the thought at the girl in the bed: I’m not a bitch I’m not a bitch I’m not a bitch.
“Same old deal,” said Magnolia, drawing up her long legs next to her, turning to her side and pushing her blanket off. She raised her slim arm and pointed with one long finger at five joints in succession, rating the pain in each one: left elbow, right elbow, left knee, right knee, right hip. “Seven,” she said, “eight, eight, seven, six.”
“May I touch?”
“Gentle,” she said, so Jemma hardly pressed at all as she felt the joints. Still, Magnolia gasped and moaned, but yawned once in the middle of a moan. Maggie, in truth an anxious and stingy personality, had warned Jemma at length about the wily medication-seeking behaviors of sicklers. She had five separate ways of deciding if pain was real or not, before she gave painkillers. “You got to look at the blood pressure,” she said. “You got to look at the pulse. You got to look at the pupils. You got to kick the bed — if they’re really hurting then they won’t even notice.” Jemma had stared out the window at the dark, empty water while Maggie talked. Every so often someone would think they saw a light in the dark, but tonight Jemma saw nothing but her own face and Maggie’s chinless reflection. “It’s always real,” she had said, not caring to hear the fifth method.