One piece of information pretty much hits the nail on the head. I stumble across it around four in the morning, right about when I usually berate myself for still being awake and make myself lie down and stare at the dark ceiling, stubbornly willing sleep to come like I’ve put myself in time out. That’s when I find this thing called ‘aura sight’ at the bottom of the internet.
I know. I agree. I had a good laugh about it too, even at four in the morning. Telling someone who works in healthcare that they have a psychic ability is liable to get you laughed out of the room. We don’t have time for this nonsense. We’re big people doing big people things. There’s a “joke” that goes around the cancer floor. What do you call a cancer patient who uses a “healer” instead of a doctor?
Dead.
Not really a ha ha joke, but you get the point. We barely sniff at homeopathy. You can imagine what we think of this psychic crap. But that doesn’t change the fact that aura sight comes pretty damn close to whatever I have. The good news is I think I’ve ruled out that I’m dying. The bad news is that I’ve ruled in that I may be a kook.
Thankfully I wasn’t scheduled to work the floor on the same day as Doctor Bennet until four days after our little excursion. By then I’d gone through all the phases of over-analysis, and my internal pendulum had settled firmly into a depressed resignation that at best I’m just abnormal. When I next saw him on the floor, it was during another hectic night shift and I’d forgotten completely about Chaco and everything else in favor of trying to remember which meds I’d given to a particularly challenging bone marrow transplant patient and at which hours. In that respect my work can be a blessing. You don’t get time to mope.
“Are you feeling better?” he asks me, speaking softly in the break room. He sat down next to me during my granola bar supper. Or breakfast. Or whatever you call a meal you eat at four a.m. I look up at him and see that he’s still blue. I blink and rub at my eyes. Still blue. A faint, soft halo of blue smoke that seems to puff off of his shoulders and head. It’s his blue. I know that now. It’s genuine and caring and a little sad. I don’t know how I know that, but I do. You’ll just have to trust me.
“I’m fine,” I say, and I’m sure it comes out sounding snippy because I’m exhausted and working when normal people are in deep REM sleep. His smoke twitches a little and darkens a shade. I have an irresistible urge to lighten it up again. Get it back to the color of his eyes.
“I never got a chance to really thank you for what you did,” I say. “For taking me. Making excuses for me to be a nosy little snot. For not freaking out when I was…freaking out. In the car.”
He smiles. It’s like a crack in the clouds. It’s working.
“No worries,” he says. “I know what it’s like to want to see a patient make it. Especially a Navajo. There are some real train wrecks on that reservation. You and I both know that. This Ben guy, he strikes me as a good man. I can see why you like him.” He smiles again, but it’s a little forced this time and his color twitches. Then his phone buzzes, and he lets out a big breath as he pops it from his side and eyes it.
“Work calls. See you around?”
“You know it.”
He taps the table, looks desperately likes he want to say something, taps the table again, and pops up and out of the door.
I don’t see him the rest of the week. I don’t see anyone outside of the nurses who are scheduled to work my side of the unit, my patients, and my pillow. That’s the way night shift is. Weeks when I work nights I’m like a vampire. When I’m not at work, I’m shut in my apartment in a pharmaceutically induced black hole of sleep with the shades drawn against the harsh late-fall sun and my noise machine humming. There’s a little note on the front door of my apartment that says “Do not disturb. Night shift in progress.” The landlord and even my neighbors’ little kids know what it means. I am a zombie if awoken. I slept through a fire alarm once. And one other time I woke up during a fire alarm, and I’m told I actually shuffled out to the main foyer with the rest of the complex, though I don’t remember it. I came to in the shower with my underwear on. I must have thought it was time to get ready for work.
At any rate, the point is that the few people I do know, know better than to try and get ahold of me when I’m on nights, because I’m a groggy mess. That’s why when my buzzing phone wakes me up I know it’s not a good thing, since in my state it would have to have been buzzing a long time. Multiple tries. I paw at it, grab it, and bring it close to my face. I see two screens. Both of them say I’ve missed five calls. It’s from the hospital. This cannot be good. I steady myself and click answer.
“Hello?”
“Caroline! Thank God. It’s Owen.”
It takes me about ten seconds to put together that Owen is Doctor Bennet. He’s Doctor Owen Bennet. I wonder if I’m dreaming.
“Are you there?”
“Yeah. Yeah, sorry, I…”
“You’re sleeping, I know. And I feel like an ass, but I don’t work with you for a week and I had to try and call you.”
“What? Why?”
He pauses, then says, “It’s about Ben Dejooli. I’ve had some news…”
Chapter 9
Owen Bennet
I’m sitting in my apartment, and I’m cursing my tenacity, cursing Navajo stubbornness, and drinking bourbon.
I’m not sure where I went wrong, but I know I went wrong. I know it because Caroline ended up crying in my car, and since then the one time I saw her she looked at me like she was in a daze, or seeing me for the first time, or something. I don’t know if it was me or Ben Dejooli or what, but it was something, and now everything is ruined.
I take another swig. Who am I kidding. It was me. A doctor who has worked out here for the better part of a decade should know better than to try and push the Navajo into anything. That’s rule number one. There’s white man time, and there’s Indian time. Indians work on Indian time. If you want to work with them, you’d better work on Indian time too. It was a rookie mistake, thinking I could make her feel better out at Chaco.
What on God’s green earth am I thinking here, anyway? What is my end game? What, in my wildest fantasies, do I want to happen? Somehow I sweep Caroline off of her feet? Convince her to stay here with me in my two bedroom apartment in Albuquerque? Maybe we clean out the second room of all of the useless gadgets I jam in there and we have babies and they grow up with Navajo kids and everyone dances the rain dance and we all live happily ever after? Is what I’m looking for basically the first Thanksgiving? I thought I was past all this. I have my practice, more or less, and I have my cause. The problem is now I have a girl. Or a dream of a girl.
I’m suddenly disgusted by the way I live. This happens sometimes. It’s like a bout of nausea or a wave of vertigo. It passes, but when it happens I hate everything I surround myself with. I have no idea how to spend money. Or save money. I stuff it places or put it into stupid projects. I open investment accounts and play the markets like I know what I’m doing. I buy ridiculous gadgets like massage chairs and hydroponic vegetable gardens and memory foam pillows and microwaveable slippers. I use them for a day or a week or a month. I invest in things no sane man would invest in. Small pink slip companies from Australia that are getting into uranium mining. Drug companies that I pick at random from the complimentary pens one of their reps drops off on the floor. I have a jar full. All of these things I do. Some of them make me money. Some of them don’t. I don’t care. I have plenty of money. I’d have plenty of money if everything went tits up. We used to say that you could earn like a prince and live like a king in Boston. It was better than New York that way, where you had to earn like a god just to live like a man. Well, in ABQ you can earn like a man and live like a king. Especially if you have nobody to spend on except yourself.
I take another swig of bourbon. It tastes terrible. Now, you see? This is something I could legitimately upgrade. There is no reason why I should be making a quarter million a year and be swilling plasti
c bottle bourbon at three a.m. in my apartment. I shouldn’t be swilling any bourbon at three a.m., actually, but if I’m gonna swill, it should at least be something decent. In a house.
I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. I’m not a drinker. Not a drinker drinker, anyway. Dad was a drinker drinker. Not abusive or anything, just a booze hound. That is possible, believe it or not. I only allow myself late night drinks when I have the next day off, which, if you knew my colleagues, shows a remarkable level of restraint, comparatively.
I’m going through stacks of charts. I go through a record review for every patient I have. After that I usually go to bed, but this Caroline thing has me a little off. So I go through more bourbon. Sometimes when I can’t sleep I do what’s called a ‘dead review,’ where I whip through past records in our system and pull out everyone who has died and move their files into inactive status. I get the morgue records and cross-reference them with our hospital system. There are generally a lot of overlaps. This is the definition of busywork. I am fully aware that I am doing this so I don’t have to think about Caroline crying in my car because she’s most likely in love with Ben Dejooli.
It’s interesting when you flip through the Chaco Health Center files. I find myself lingering on pictures of the Navajo. One of the first things they teach residents that are going to CHC is that your bedside manner with the Navajo needs to be different. Clear and direct doesn’t always go over so well. You have to be much more reactive; let them take the lead. Especially with the old guard. And the old guard is mostly what shows up at the Center. I’m struck by how flat their expressions are. Flat like a lake. Calm. Expansive.
There’s one man in particular who gives me pause. His name is Oka Chalk. He looks haunted. He has the kind of lined, tanned face that you would instantly associate with an elder Navajo, but his eyes look like the eyes of a young man. Of a young warrior. I remember seeing him off and on at CHC for blood pressure issues related to drinking. His chart says he asphyxiated on his own vomit. The report notes drug paraphernalia on his person at the time of death, but the toxicology came back inconclusive. Positive on alcohol in the system. Well above the legal limit, but nothing that would kill a seasoned drinker. Curious. But with no living relatives and nobody to follow up, his case was open and shut. Like far too many of the Chaco cases.
I pull him from the active files and mark him deceased. On to the next. I do this for an hour until I grow weary and slightly depressed. The bourbon is swimming in my head. The night has whispered by me, and the sky is opening up to the sun. In the distance, a flock of crows stirs as the first rays hit the bare tree where they rest. They shuffle and stretch their wings like a single organism, twitchy and black. One of them caws loudly. A sharp, brief sound, like the scratching of a record. I should really be in bed. This is bad, even for a day off. I know I’ll never be able to sleep long enough through the day to make up for this the rest of the week. But something in the call of the crow sobers me and draws me back to my computer.
I flip to the active files and pull up Ben Dejooli for the tenth time. I reload his chart. The scan fulfillment status goes from N/A to processed. I take the last swig of my bourbon and cough a little. I pull out my phone and call the hospital.
“Radiology, how can I help you?”
“This is Doctor Owen Bennet. I was hoping to get the results of a scan that went through.”
“One moment.”
The hold music sounds particularly ridiculous to me. The bourbon still burns my throat. I find I’m tapping the hem of my jeans rapidly and standing in front of the window, staring at the crows.
“This is Diagnostics. What’s your patient number, Doctor Bennet?”
I recite Ben’s number from memory, forcing myself to slow down. I’m not quite sure why I’m acting like a student waiting for his board results. I’ve done this countless times before. But in all those other times there was no Caroline involved.
“Doctor Bennet?”
“Yes.”
“I’m loading the file now. You should have access momentarily.”
“Thank you.”
I hang up and squeeze my phone. I make myself wait for an entire minute, then I refresh my log-in on the system. Ben’s file is there. And it’s bad.
I see two separate causes for outright concern. The first is in the front left lobe. Three inches in diameter. The second is in the rear left lobe, one and a half inches in diameter.
I am speechless.
Multiple instances almost always indicate metastatic activity. This is not benign. The tissue surrounding the sites are in necrosis. These look like late-stage glioblastoma multiforme tumors. We’d need to radiate the sites to reduce their size before we even thought about operating.
Caroline was right. Ben Dejooli is dying.
A sound tears me away from the scan. It is the crows. They’ve all taken flight at once in a massive black cloak and are sweeping towards me. Right towards the window, all of them shrieking at once. They look as though they will collide with the window, and I find myself backing away, into the kitchen. I even throw up my hands before they swoop up and over the building, their calls dropping away as they gain altitude. I sit down again, my heart racing. I take out the phone once more, and this time I dial the contact number for Ben Dejooli. It’s barely five in the morning, but he picks up.
“Hello?” he asks.
This is always the worst part. The part before you bring a man’s entire world down around him.
“Ben?”
“Who is this?” he asks, wary.
“Ben, this is Doctor Owen Bennet, with ABQ General. I have the results of your scan.”
He pauses.
“It’s bad, isn’t it,” he says, very clearly. No one has ever said this to me before. It throws me for a loop.
“Yes. I’m afraid it is. We’re going to want to get you on a treatment plan immediately.”
“Like radiation?”
“Yes. And chemotherapy. In preparation for surgery. But first let’s schedule a consult. I’ll be there to explain everything.”
He is quiet. I can only wait.
“I can’t do that,” he says.
“Ben, I don’t think you understand…”
“I understand. I’m a dead man.”
“No. Not if you choose to fight.”
“And if I don’t?”
“If you don’t, it’s my opinion you have at most a couple of months. Maybe weeks.”
“Shit.”
“Yes. Shit. But there are options.”
“Chemotherapy? Like, the chemical kind?”
“Yes. We would radiate the tumors initially, here, at the hospital, then put you on an aggressive chemotherapy regimen with the aim of shrinking the tumors before surgery.”
“Tumors? Like, more than one?”
“Yes, I believe there is clear evidence of two, and maybe one more potential site.”
“Shit.”
I’m standing at the kitchen counter and I hang my head. I feel like whatever buzz the bourbon gave me left with the crows and now my head weighs a hundred pounds. “I wish…I really, really wish I had better news, Ben.”
“I can’t go back to that hospital. I don’t do well in that hospital.”
“Well, you’re gonna have to, if you want to give yourself a chance.”
“No, you don’t understand. I can’t. And not just because of…it’s also because cancer here, at Chaco, it doesn’t go over well. I…it just…for the Navajo it’s a mark of death.”
“Not if I can help it, it’s not.”
“Can anything be done here? At home? At my home? In private?”
Now this is an interesting question. I rub at my face and try to get my brain working the way I know it should. We do have off-site programs for chemotherapy. And the hospital likes to appear to bend over backward for the Navajo community. I bet I could get a request for offsite delivery pushed through, given Ben’s position as a policeman. I am aware of more about the
stigma of cancer among the Navajo than Ben would think.
“I could probably get the chemotherapy off-site. But the initial radiation has to be done in a lab. Can you give me that? If I can get you the treatment at home?”
He pauses. “Yes. I can do that. I suppose. It’s either that or die in a couple weeks.”
He says this with such a cavalier tone that it chills me. It occurs to me that he has exhibited none of the usual traumatic overtones. His voice is calm and clear. No tears. No wavering. He is responsive, and not in shock. It’s not unlike the discussions I have with other doctors about swapping shifts. Straightforward. Practical. I jump at the opening.
“I’ll call you back within the hour, okay? Stay by your phone.”
“All right.”
I move to hang up, but he speaks again.
“Hey, doc?”
“Yes?”
“Who would give me the chemotherapy? At home?”
“One of our oncology nurses.”
“Can I request one?”
I already know where this is going. I can’t help but laugh. It’s a strange, desperate laugh. Thankfully I cover the mouthpiece first.
“Caroline Adams?” I ask.
“Y…yeah.”
I shake my head, but I say, “Yes. I think I can make that happen.”
“Thanks.”
“Ben, we can beat this. I’ve seen people with stage four diagnoses beat it before.”
He pauses again, and I think that maybe I’ve finally gotten through to him. I picture him holding his head, or covering the receiver while he gathers himself, steels himself for the battle. But after a minute he speaks again, and his voice is as even as glass.
“Yeah. I guess we’ll see.”
I get this uncanny feeling he’s trying to let me down easy.
As soon as I hang up, I call the hospital on the off chance I can catch Caroline, but they tell me she was released early and went home from night shift two hours ago. I nearly curse out loud at the poor charge nurse, but I catch myself, thank her, and hang up. Then I stare at my phone for another ten full minutes as the sunbeams creep into my living room. Dust motes swirl about my table and my head. This is insanity. I had plenty of chances to disassociate myself from this. Let Ben be Ben and Caroline be Caroline. I know they want each other. It’s like they reach towards each other when they are together. Even an analytical robot like myself can see that. Where along the line did I think it would help my chances with Caroline to throw her into close quarters with Ben? A terrible thought creeps into my brain, and the more I try to shut it out the stronger it becomes.
Follow the Crow Page 10
