Ward 402
Page 17
It was as if Prader had been struck.
“And right now,” McMillan kept after him, “I’m treating a very sick little girl. But she isn’t dead. Not yet. I don’t push a terminal case. But this girl isn’t terminal. You can’t tell me that tomorrow she won’t be breathing again, or the next day. There’s no reason not to use everything we have. That’s why we’re here. If we pull her through this she’ll have a chance to lead some kind of life, not so different than a hell of a lot of kids in your own clinic. How many of them are going out of remission? How many are sick but still on protocols? How many are even past that, and still being given blood transfusions and antibiotics?”
For a moment there was silence, and the insistent mechanical hissing of the respirator took over the room.
When Prader spoke again he sounded strangely subdued. “It’s not quite that simple,” he said, almost as if he were talking to himself.
“When she’s dead, she’s dead,” McMillan said. “That’s simple enough. Then there is no chance, no hope, nothing. That’s the real failure. I’m not going to kill her. If you want her dead you’ll have to kill her yourself.”
Prader stiffened. “We don’t kill patients,” he said.
“No? Then turn off the respirator.”
While they were arguing, I saw blood beginning to ooze out of the corner of Mary’s mouth. Fascinated, appalled, in the midst of all that was going on, all the paraphernalia, the tubes, the catheters, I watched the drop of blood gathering, growing, getting redder and redder, until like a tear it fell onto the endotracheal tube and began sliding slowly down the smooth gray-green plastic. And now another drop began to form, until like the first it left the corner of her mouth and began running down the tube.
I no longer heard what McMillan and Prader were saying. It was as if my own blood was oozing out of me, dropping onto that tube, and my chest felt heavy, as if the respirator was breathing for me. I wanted Mary to live, too, but not just for another day, another month, or even another year, not to have to crawl to watch other children playing as she had once been able to play herself, to have to struggle to think of a word, or just to keep milk in her mouth. I wanted her to be all that she could have been, all that was possible for her to be.
I watched the respirator driving her chest, mindlessly pushing it in and out, and the sound of its hissing grew ever louder and louder, filling my head, filling all the room, drowning out what McMillan and Prader were saying. They stood facing each other across the bed, suddenly unreal, with expressions I couldn’t read any more, words I couldn’t understand.
I looked at Mary; her mouth taped, the tubes in her nose and mouth.
Enough, I thought. Enough. No more suffering. No more. No more.
I don’t know if I said goodbye or thought it, nor to this day do I know if it was I who left Mary or she who left me. But I looked at her once again and for the last time, and I walked over to the wall and pulled the respirator plug.
The next thing I knew I was in the corridor walking towards the nurses’ station. I saw Mrs. Gowan approaching me from the conference room. She stopped short.
“What’s wrong?” she said. “You look so—”
“Nothing’s wrong,” I managed to say.
“Well—Mr. Berquam’s here, and he’s drunk and—”
“I’ll see him.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t,” she said. “He’s pretty angry. It might be better if someone else talked to him.”
“Talk, talk. That’s part of the trouble, isn’t it? Don’t worry,” I said. “Maybe this time I’ll just listen.”
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1973 by Ronald J. Glasser
cover design by Mauricio Diaz
978-1-4804-0922-4
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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