The Sixth Sense (Brier Hospital Series Book 3)

by Lawrence Gold

  “Problematic?”

  “You may be in a better position than I to look into his business affairs. I’m afraid that combing through public records trying to get inside information may not get you what you need.”

  “I want this done without his knowledge. Is that possible?”

  “Anything’s possible with enough time, enough cash, and a degree of ethical insensitivity.”

  “I don’t care how you do it. Get me the information,” she said, extracting her checkbook.

  Lilly Shands had spent hours cooking Brian’s favorite dish, roast duck. She set the dining room table for two with her best silverware and crystal. The candles, lit two hours ago in expectation of his arrival, had melted as had her joyous anticipation for the evening.

  She had her head down on the table when Brian entered and threw his coat and briefcase on a chair. She wore the white with roses sundress that he loved. The first time she’d worn that dress, he had the full skirt up and her panties off in moments.

  Lilly looked up as he entered the room.

  “God damn it, I forgot,” he said, shaking his head.

  “I told you this was an important night. It’s our anniversary and I wanted it to be special.”

  “It’s no big deal, Lilly. Can we eat now?”

  “It’s too late,” she cried. “It’s all dried and ruined.”

  Brian frowned and pointed to the gift-wrapped package next to his place setting. “What’s that?”

  Lilly stared at him. “It’s no good Brian. I can’t go on this way. You’re never home, and when you are, you act like a stranger.”

  “I’ve been busy with work, Lilly. I work hard for all of us. Don’t be so spoiled.”

  “Spoiled. I do everything for you. I live for you and the baby. What more do you want from me?”

  “I’m sorry, Lilly. You know me. When I’m into something, I let it take over my life. I’ll do better, trust me.”

  Lilly raised her head focusing her eyes on Brian. “You haven’t touched me in three months, Brian. Three months! At one time, you couldn’t keep your hands off me.”

  “Don’t be such a pain-in-the...I don’t have the energy to deal with this crap...” he paused. “ I’m sorry, I’m just tired.”

  “Let me get you something,” she said as she walked into the kitchen.

  Brian shook his head in disgust, although he had to admit that with her narrow waist and full hips, she sure looked good in that dress.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Since discharge seven weeks ago, my life gradually fell back into a routine. I finished morning office hours early and drove home to join Lois for lunch. When I arrived, a service van with a large blue water drop on its side, the logo for Crystal Pure Water, sat at the curb.

  Finally, I thought. We’ll get to the bottom of our water problem.

  “Lois, I’m home.”

  She came out from the kitchen, gave me a kiss and a hug. “The water man is almost through, and then we’ll have lunch.”

  “Caesar salad with grilled chicken, cloves and mustard…no, make that Dijon mustard. And, if I’m not mistaken, key lime pie for dessert.”

  “Arnie, you’re freaking me out with that nose of yours.”

  “Me too, babe. I don’t know what it is, but my nose is working overtime.”

  I heard a knock on the door from the garage and when I opened it, the Crystal Pure man, Greg Waterford, entered. “Hey Doc. It’s good to see you back in action.”

  “What did you find, Greg?”

  “I’ve been over the equipment, top to bottom, and I can’t find a damn thing. Maybe something got past the system, but it’s okay now. I took the extra step of back-flushing the deionizer and the charcoal.”

  He opened the kitchen tap, let the water run for three minutes. “Give it a taste, Doc.”

  Even before I took a sip, the water emitted the aroma of decaying organic material. The sip was worse. I grimaced as I flashed back to Iraq where my canteen’s disgusting water sat in desert sun for several days. “This is bad, Greg, maybe worse than before, it’s putrid.”

  “Putrid,” said Lois, taking a sip, “it tastes fine to me.”

  Greg took a sip. “I can’t taste anything wrong with this water, Doc.”

  I felt my face redden. “It’s either my imagination or I’m going out of my mind, but that water tastes like shit to me.”

  Lois looked at me strangely. “Arnie, calm down. Nobody thinks you’re crazy. There must be a simple explanation.”

  Shaken, Greg handed me his clipboard with his water test readings. “The total dissolved solutes was fifty, virtually distilled water, and the rest of the tests, pH, nitrates, etc., are normal.”

  I grabbed a bottle of purified water that I kept in the refrigerator. I took a sip. “This tastes fine to me. It’s the water here…don’t you understand?”

  Greg looked at Lois and shook his head. “I’m sorry, Doc. I’ll have my boss out tomorrow morning. He’s been in the business for twenty years; maybe he can figure this out.”

  After Greg left, Lois sat next to me. “This isn’t like you, Arnie. We have a problem, but one way or another we’ll figure it out. You must have read about or come up against patients with conditions that effect taste.”

  “I’m sorry, Lo. It’s as if somebody demanded that you ignore the evidence of your eyes. Maybe it’s more than my nose that’s sensitive these days.”

  Lois walked to my side and caressed my neck. “Normally it takes a lot to make you this angry, Arnie. What’s up?”

  “Don’t know. I’m constantly on edge.” I hesitated a second then continued, “When I rotated through the Ear, Nose, and Throat service as a medical student, we learned of a condition called dysgeusia, a distorted sense of taste. I’ll look it up, but as I recall it includes things like dental, ENT, or gastrointestinal problems, certain vitamin deficiencies, and the effects of medications. Maybe Jack will have an idea, but Lois, in my heart, I think my nose is heading for bloodhound or beyond.”

  When I returned to my office after lunch, I concluded that this heightened sensitivity had changed my relationship with those chemicals in my environment scientists call odorants. Unless you were on a sensory mission, sniffing for a gas leak or smelling your child’s diaper, our olfactory discoveries were passive, sensing random odors, the fragrant, and the disgusting.

  Suddenly, these encounters were becoming active, and instead of awaiting the collision of drifting molecules with my olfactory epithelium, the smell sensors, in my nose, I found myself going out on the battlefield to greet them. It was crazy by any definition. I found myself sampling everything like a kid with his first microscope.

  I entered each room breathing in, sampling its molecules. I surreptitiously examined each patient’s emitted ambiance (I didn’t think that sniffing at my patients like a bloodhound would go over too well). I approached each olfactory challenge with (pardon the expression) a scent of adventure and discovery.

  An afternoon of this insanity drew me to conclude that while my sense of smell soared, anyone who spent time obsessing about an activity like smelling everything in the environment may not be in the best position to judge the breadth of that curious newfound skill.

  I made one additional observation; I’d begun to smell things foreign to me. Whatever had happened to me, I now carried a diplomatic passport, one with special privileges into an unseen world.

  My next patient was Phyllis Carter who’d been with me from the beginning. She was in her mid fifties, thin, pale, and chronically depressed. Today, she came for a routine checkup. When I first met her eight years ago, she’d been from shrink to shrink for diagnoses ranging from bipolar disorder, to personality disorder, to unipolar depressive illness. She’d been on multiple medications, all of which produced intolerable side effects, forcing her physicians to abandon them well before she completed a reasonable therapeutic trial.

  “This is what I have in mind, Phyllis,” I said into our third recent meeting. �
��I can send you to another psychiatrist or, if you’re willing to work with me, we can try Prozac again.”

  “Prozac didn’t do a damn thing for me, Doc, except make me feel like shit.”

  “All the antidepressants require an initiation period before you feel their antidepressant effects. I don’t think you took any of these long enough or at sufficient dosages to say they didn’t work.”

  After she agreed to try Prozac again, I spent a good part of the next month holding her hand, encouraging and cajoling her to continue.

  As we approached the end of the fourth week, she returned to the office, and whirled into the consultation room in her new outfit. “It’s a miracle, Arnie. Over the last two days, it’s as if someone lifted a heavy weight from my shoulders. I can’t remember when I felt so good.”

  The effect lasted several years, and then gradually her depression returned. I tried several other antidepressants, with some effect, but none as good as her initial response to Prozac. Finally, I sent her to see Ross Cohen, an experienced psychiatrist, with the thought that she might need another category of drugs called monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAO), problematic drugs, best prescribed by someone with more experience than I had.

  She had an excellent response to the MAO called Nardil, and continued under Ross’s care.

  When I entered the examining room, Phyllis sat on the table in a gown. I immediately smelled Shalimar perfume, body powder, and hairspray. When I examined her throat, I caught a whiff of a musty-metallic and acrid aroma. I checked her teeth and gums for any sign of decay or inflammation, but everything looked normal. I questioned her about food, vitamins, herbal supplements, etc., but Nardil was her only medication. I’d have to research the association between this aroma and Nardil.

  Afterward, we met in my office. “I’m setting you up for routine blood tests, a urinalysis, and a chest film. Make sure you keep up with your gynecologist for Pap smears and mammograms. I’ll see you again in six months or sooner if you need me.”

  My last patient of the day was Janine Joseph, new to the practice.

  “Arnie, you’re going to love, Janine,” said Beverly Ramirez, my office nurse. “She’s so sweet and charming.”

  “Why is she here?”

  “She recently moved to Berkeley with her two little girls and got your name through friends. She’s asking to join our practice.”

  When she entered my consultation room, her charisma stunned me. Besides being physically attractive in her floral pink flowered sundress, her smile, and attentive wide blue eyes said, that for this moment, I was the most important person in her life. Who could resist the seduction?

  “Thank you for agreeing to see me, Dr. Roth. I’ve heard wonderful things about you.”

  She wore an appealing floral perfume that I didn’t recognize. “What’s that fragrance you’re wearing, Ms. Joseph?”

  She smiled seductively as she stared into my eyes. “Please call me, Janine. Givenchy calls it Very Irresistible. Do you like it?”

  “It’s lovely,” I said. “I think I’ll get some for my wife.”

  “She’ll love it.”

  Beneath the obvious floral bouquet was something else, a delicate, but acrid ammonia-like aroma, that I couldn’t identify. Something about it made me uneasy.

  I took a complete history, unrevealing except for many years of migraine headaches.

  “What have you tried for your migraines?”

  “I’ve tried everything. Nothing worked.”

  “What do you do for your attacks?”

  “The doctors gave me Vicodin. That’s the only thing that helps me.”

  The ammonia-like aroma recurred and my mind grappled with a particularly apt cliché: this doesn’t smell right to me.

  “What about the ergot drugs?”

  “They make my fingers go into spasm.”

  “What about preventive measures, like beta blockers?”

  “They make me depressed.”

  “What about Imitrex?”

  “It doesn’t work and it makes me nauseous.”

  The ammonia-like smell of her fabrications increased ever further. “If you’ll excuse me for a moment, I must check on a patient in the hospital. It’ll be only a moment.”

  I walked to the front desk. “Where’s Janine’s information sheet, Beverly?”

  “Here it is, Arnie. What’s wrong?”

  “Did she bring any old records?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll be in my office calling her last physician.”

  “Dr. Ostrow’s office, can I help you?”

  “This is Dr. Roth calling from Berkeley. Is Dr. Ostrow in?”

  “Why yes, doctor. Can I pull a chart for him?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’d like to talk with him about Janine Joseph.”

  “My, my,” she said with a chuckle. “Doctor will be right with you.”

  A moment later, the phone clicked and I heard, “Ben Ostrow here, can I help you?”

  “I’m calling about Janine Joseph.”

  “That didn’t take long, did it?”

  “You know Janine?”

  “Do I know her? She a piece of work. She’s the best con artist I’ve ever seen. How much Vicodin have you given her?”

  “None. I only met her today.”

  “You’re a smarter man than I. It took me nine months to catch on. Dozens of doctors have come before us and many more will follow.”

  When I hung up the phone, Beverly said, “Well?”

  “She’s an addict, Beverly.”

  “My God,” said Beverly, “what a waste. How did you know?”

  “I just knew.”

  “Are you a mind reader?”

  “If I were, I’d never admit it.”

  When I returned to the consultation room, Janine smiled brightly. “Is everything okay, doctor?”

  “I just talked with Ben Ostrow.”

  Janine’s smile disappeared. “What did he say?” she said with coolness.

  “Exactly what you knew he’d say.”

  She rose and began walking for the door. “Well, thank you for your time, Dr. Roth. You seem like a nice man.”

  “Thank you, Janine. Why don’t you let me help you?”

  She smiled the smile that would send any man’s heart a flutter. “You’re sweet, but I’ve been through it a hundred times; inpatient, outpatient; voluntary and court-ordered; as well as every form of standard and alternative treatments. I’m an addict. I’ll always be an addict.”

  “I’m not going to try and convince you otherwise, but you need to store one fact somewhere in your memory. People who persist in their struggle to overcome an addiction, will, in spite of failing repeatedly, eventually succeed. That time may come for you, and if you are so inspired, you know where to reach me. Good luck.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Saturday morning. I slept soundly and for the moment, all was well with the world. I left Lois in bed and moved to the lounge chair near the open window. The morning sun shone through the blinds and the air carried an aroma of freshly cut grass. I inhaled deeply, raised my legs, and looked around at what Lois and I had accomplished, our lives, and our kids. I flushed with satisfaction. The lyric, you don’t know what you have until you lose it, was too near reality and as close as I ever wanted to get.

  Amy folded herself into her favorite beanbag chair listening to the music box we gave her for her birthday. It played a charming version of Disney’s “It’s a small world,” but after the umpteenth play, its charm grated on my nerves. I had the irresistible urge to take a sledgehammer and silence the damn thing.

  When Lois entered the room, I gestured discretely, a pantomime of pointing to my ears in pain and closing the music box.

  “Why don’t you go to your room for a while, sweetheart. Maybe I can get Daddy to take us out for lunch.”

  After Amy left, I said, “If I hear that song one more time, I’m going to check my blood sugar and put myself on insulin.”


  “What about lunch?”

  “We’ll see.”

  “You promised to take us,” Becky whined as the clock approached noon.

  Lois looked at the girls then at me. “Daddy’s not in the mood for fast food, sweetie.”

  “But you promised,” Becky cried, soon joined by Amy’s tearful, “You promised, Daddy.”

  Lois rubbed my back. “Come on, Arnie. You like Burger World.”

  “Tolerate is a better word.”

  We loaded the kids and the dog into Lois’s minivan and drove downtown. It was a bright, but hazy day and, judging from the traffic, everyone had the same idea.

  I pulled into the drive-through line about twelve cars deep, listening to the family’s meal preferences.

  Becky leaned over my seat back. “Don’t forget to get a burger for Archie.”

  Archie, our Golden Retriever, had his nose fused to the vent. His tail wagged in anticipation.

  Suddenly, a foul, pungently sweet stench hit me. My mind flashed back to Fort Carson, Colorado, where I served as a battalion surgeon…

  Two soldiers carried a PFC into the dispensary. The young soldier writhed in pain. Beaded sweat soaked his OD shirt and covered his face. When I approached the examining table, he pointed. “It’s on my butt, Doc. It’s killing me.”

  When he turned face down, I saw a large shiny abscess, a red three-inch circular swelling with white-gray spot in the middle. The abscess was bulging and getting ready to rupture. When I touched it, he screamed in agony.

  “I’ll fix this in a minute,” I said as I froze the surface of the boil with ethylene chloride spray, then lanced it with a scalpel and watched as the infected material erupted from the wound with the foul stench of infection. I gagged.

  He screamed. “It’s gone Doc…it’s gone…thank God, it’s a miracle.”…

  I jerked the wheel to the right breaking away from the drive-through line and left the parking lot.

  “What are you doing, Daddy?” Becky shouted, suddenly shocked.

  Lois looked at me strangely. “Arnie, what’s wrong?”