Once Bitten

by Reinke, Sara

  “Nosocomial,” John said, because Sandy had already explained such things to him, that and something she’d called MRSA, which she’d said stood for methicillin-resistant Staphylo-something or another.

  “Most infections happen in health care settings, like hospitals,” she’d told him, presenting him with a squeeze-top bottle of clear ooze: hand sanitizer. “Use a lot of it and use it a lot.”

  For once, John found himself agreeing with Wilma, at least on the matter of the staff not knowing anything. The words spinal tap and Lyme disease were still cycling through his head.

  “Are you hungry?” Wilma asked him, after having swatted imaginary pathogens off the sheets and sitting against the bed beside him.

  “Starving,” he replied, sitting up.

  Sandy had told him there was yet more blood work to be done. “They’re going to run a fasting lab on you.”

  “So when can I eat something?” he’d asked.

  Sandy had checked her watch. “Not until tomorrow. ”

  “What? Why do they call it fast when it takes so long before they do it?”

  “Not fast. Fasting. It means you have to fast to take the test. It’s right there, see?” She’d pointed to an orange sticker plastered on his door, with big block letters that read: NPO.

  “NPO?” he’d asked, bewildered.

  “Nothing by mouth,” she’d elaborated.

  “Wouldn’t that be NBM, then?”

  “It’s Latin, I think.”

  “Nothing by mouth?”

  “No. The Latin version. Nil per os, I think it is.”

  “Which means?” John had asked.

  Sandy had given him the Duh! look. “Nothing by mouth.”

  Wilma plopped her big, heavy purse into her lap with a concerted grunt and a jangling of lipstick, keys, compact and heartburn-relief tablets inside, then began to sift through it. “I have some snack crackers in here somewhere.”

  “I love you, Mom,” he said, all but snatching them out of her hand when she found them. He tore open the cellophane wrapped and crammed two of the cracker sandwiches, the Captain’s Wafers cream-cheese-and-chives variety, into his mouth at once.

  She squirted a large blob of his hand sanitizer into her palm and rubbed it vigorously against the soles of her feet, slipping out of her sandals one at a time. “I love you, too.”

  ***

  “How are you doing?” Sandy asked over the phone about an hour after Wilma had left. He had to admit, it had been kind of nice having her there to make a fuss over him. Wilma had fluffed his pillows and dabbed at his face with a cool, damp washrag. She’d tucked his blankets comfortably around him and gave him more of the forbidden crackers. And when the nurse had come to remove his catheter, the timing couldn’t have been more perfect, saving Wilma from wearing out her welcome, not to mention John’s reserve of patience.

  The nurse had been young and pretty. Having her grip his dick lightly in her latex-gloved hand while deflating the indwelling balloon that held the tube in place inside of him had been the closest thing to sex he’d had in awhile.

  “Shouldn’t I buy you a drink or something first?” he’d asked and she’d laughed, a coquettish, chirping sound.

  “You’re silly, Mr. Harker,” she’d said.

  “Call me John,” he’d replied.

  After that, he’d faced the boredom of being alone in the room, watching the muted afternoon light fade through the slim margin of space between the drapes. Even looking at thin stripe of glow for too long had left his eyes stinging. He’d tried the TV but to his disappointment, the hospital didn’t even get paid-cable channels like Showtime, where he might have caught some soft-core porn, never mind the premium subscription channels or pay-per-view adult flicks he preferred as a rule.

  As a result, the phone call from Sandy was heaven. “I’m not pissing through a tube anymore,” he told her brightly.

  “Congratulations.”

  “Yeah, now I’m pissing into a plastic bottle.” He nudged this with his elbow as it hung from a built-in hook on his bedrail. “Gives the whole room this nice, urine-sort of smell once it gets full enough.”

  “There shouldn’t be enough urine for that, since you’re NPO.”

  “Oh.” John scratched the back of his head. Had he been glad for Sandy’s call only seconds earlier? “Yeah.”

  “You haven’t been eating or drinking anything, have you? Because you know that will mess up all your tests tomorrow, your blood glucose levels, your triglycerides, cholesterol readings.”

  Wilma had left him with a bag of peanut M&Ms she’d dug out of her purse, then smuggled him a bottle of Pepsi from a vending machine in the lobby. He’d been very surreptitious with his contraband, but glanced guiltily now at the bedside bureau, where he’d hidden both, as if Sandy were standing in front of him, accusatory.

  “So, hey,” he said lamely. “How about you?” He found a piece of candy that had fallen beside him, hidden among the folds in his sheet, and popped it in his mouth. “Catch any vampires yet?”

  “I went down to South Shore, but they told me at the Show Me! that Boyd wasn’t in. He’s on the mainland, over in Miami for some kind of special event.”

  Good, John thought, because at least that meant Sandy would stay away from Wilder long enough to talk some sense into her, distract her from her first-degree murder plans.

  “And I can hear you chewing. What is that, a peanut M&M?”

  He winced. How does she do that?

  “Spit it out,” she ordered, and begrudgingly, he did, leaning over to hit the bedside trash can. “Now are you going to behave, or do I have to come and spend the night with you at the hospital?”

  “There’s only one bed,” he replied. “But I can make room. And now that the catheter is out…”

  “Forget it. I’m glad you’re feeling better. Get some rest. You need it.”

  “Where are you off to?” he asked, somewhat disappointed because he was lonely. Flirting with Sandy might have been futile, but it had its momentary perks.

  “The Orange Oasis Motor Lodge,” she replied. “I’m working that surveillance case I told you about, the cheating husband. That’s where his wife said he likes to hole up with his girlfriend. I’ve got my camera with me. I’m going to see if I can catch them coming or going. You don’t mind, do you? I know you always do the surveilling, like you said, but I figured since you were in the hospital and it was pretty easy stuff that I could…”

  “No, it’s okay. I don’t mind,” he said, even though he did because like he’d told her before, it was his agency, his name on the door and it was supposed to be him doing all the detective work. “Hey, it’s a paycheck, right?”

  She laughed. “Right.”

  “You know, surveillance work can last a long time.”

  “That’s okay. I brought along some Sodoku books. And an audio version of The DaVinci Code. It’s seventeen hours long, or something like that.”

  “Yeah, but you could be there all night,” he said.

  “I’ve got my Venti daily bold with a double shot right here,” she told him cheerfully.

  “You double check your camera batteries?”

  “Yup. And I brought along an adapter plug I can use to charge it up here in the car, if I need to.”

  “You might get hungry.”

  “I packed a mini-cooler, some grapes inside, a couple of apples, a peanut butter, ham and cheese sandwich.”

  “What kind?”

  “Peanut butter, ham and cheese. It’s good. You should try it sometime.”

  “No, thanks. I’ll take your word on it.” He sighed, casting a sorrowful glance around his very boring room. He’d already flirted unsuccessfully with his evening nurse, taken his medicine, watched a lackluster Marlins game on TV, scratched his ass and chewed on enough ice chips—the only legal thing he was allowed to consume until his blood tests in the morning—to numb his gums clear back to his molars.

  “Sounds like you don’t need me at all, t
hen,” he said forlornly.

  “Don’t be silly. What would I do without you?”

  He smiled. “Thanks.”

  Sandy laughed. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Good morning, John,” said a fresh-faced kid as he walked into John’s hospital room the following morning. Dressed in a long white lab coat with a stethoscope around his neck, a nest of pens in his pocket and blue scrubs beneath, he looked like a high school student on Career Day playing at being a doctor.

  “I’m Dr. Wayne Parker,” the kid said, coming to stand at John’s bedside while a pair of pretty, pert young nurses scurried around behind him, getting to work taking John’s vital signs. “I’m a cardiologist.”

  “Nice to meet you,” John mumbled as one of the nurses stuck the plastic end of a digital thermometer into his mouth, poking the underside of his tongue. The other wrapped the cuff of a blood pressure gauge around his forearm, and he stole a peek down the front of her uniform blouse.

  “My area of expertise is the heart and the circulatory system,” Dr. Parker said.

  John spared him a glance. “Hence the title cardiologist.”

  Dr. Parker laughed, a wan chuckle that was as condescending as his explanation of his job title. “That’s right, John,” he said, as if praising a particularly prodigious preschooler. “I’m here to talk about that arm of yours.”

  “Which one?” John asked as the nurse popped the thermometer out of his mouth. “I’ve got two. One on each side.”

  Dr. Parker chuckled again and John decided he didn’t much care for him. “The blue one,” the doctor said, pointing to John’s left arm. “It’s what we call cyanotic. Which means there’s a deficiency in your blood supply to it somewhere along the line. And we need to find out where that is.”

  John glanced down at his hand. The skin clear up to his shoulder was a mottled mess of blue, purple and a waxy sort of grey, almost like potter’s clay.

  “I thought I had gangrene,” he said. “Or Lyme disease.”

  “And you may,” Dr. Parker conceded. “We’re still waiting on test results to find out for sure. But neither one of those would cause the kind of peripheral cyanosis we’re seeing in your arm. I’ve been able to rule out diabetes as a possible cause, which means I’m going to need to run some more tests to see if there’s any sort of arterial blockage, idiopathic primary Reynard’s disease or—”

  “Did you just call me an idiot?” John asked with a frown.

  Which only made Dr. Parker smile at him again in that Glinda-the-Good-Witch kind of way. “Idiopathic,” he said, sounding it out slowly, as if John was deaf and lip-reading, in addition to being stupid. “In particular, I want to rule out carotid artery stenosis or similar vascular aneurysm, embolisation, maybe even Buerger’s disease. The latter could account for the gangrenous infection, but it’s a condition generally confined to tobacco users, affecting the lower extremities not the arms. And according to your chart…”

  This he carried tucked in the crook of his arm, and he glanced at it now. “You don’t smoke, never have.”

  “That’s right,” John said.

  “Which would make Buerger’s an anomaly at best. But it’s still worth ruling out, as is arteriovenous malformation that may be only now manifesting itself despite congenital origins.”

  John found himself missing Sandy and her inane familiarity with medical terminology, because Dr. Parker could have lapsed into fluent Turkish for all he’d understood of him.

  “I’m going to order an ultrasound scan of your upper chest and arm to check for possible occlusions,” Dr. Parker continued. “I’m also going to call for an peripheral digital substraction angiopathy. Depending on what we find, I may have to perform percutaneous transluminal or carotid angioplasties to stent the affected blood vessels and restore blood flow.” He seemed to at last take notice of the bewildered look on John’s face and smiled. “I’ve lost you, haven’t I?”

  “Right around the ‘ruling out diabetes’ part.”

  Another snicker, which John fully expected to be followed by Parker asking, a la Glinda again, “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?”

  “That means I’m going to take an X-ray picture of the inside of your arm, in particular, your brachial artery, which runs from your shoulder to your wrist,” Dr. Parker said instead. “First, I’ll X-ray your arm just like it is. Then I’ll take a series of images that will allow me to observe the blood flow through your arm. To do this, I’m going to inject something called a contrast agent into your bloodstream.”

  “Inject?” John asked.

  Dr. Parker nodded. “I’ll insert a thin tube called a catheter into your arm, just above your elbow. I’ll feed the tubing into your brachial artery up toward your shoulder.”

  John glanced at his arm, mentally calculating the distance between his shoulder and elbow and considering, to his horror, the amount of “feed the tubing” this would require.

  “Then I’m going to inject periodic doses of iodine dye solution into your artery through the tube,” Dr. Parker said. “And as I do, I’m going to take pictures with an computerized X-ray. The dye will make your blood vessel stand out clearly in the images and will show me if there are any blockages.”

  “I don’t…” John’s voice came out hoarse and he cleared his throat, his mouth tacky and dry all of a sudden. “You know, Doc, I don’t really care too much for needles.”

  “We could always go with a computed tomography angiogram,” Dr. Parker said. “It’s less invasive, but involves radiation exposure.”

  “Radiation?” John repeated, and Dr. Parker nodded.

  “These things, these tests,” John said. “They’ll fix my arm?”

  “Oh, no.” Dr. Parker rocked back on his heels with a little laugh. “They’ll just show me what’s going on in there. I’ll need to go in with stents—those are tubes made out of wire mesh—and prop open any places where your artery might be blocked. They’re compressed and inserted through a catheter into your blood vessel in the same procedure as the angiograph. Then I use a small balloon catheter to open the stents once in place. They’re like scaffolding on a building. They help hold the artery open.”

  “And that will fix it?”

  For the first time since entering the room, Dr. Parker’s unflappable smile abruptly withered. His brows lifted and he affected a sympathizing look. “If that doesn’t, then we’ll have to discuss other options, John.”

  John didn’t like the way he’d said this. “Other?” he repeated, trying to lend the same ominous emphasis to the otherwise innocuous word.

  Dr. Parker nodded. “Bypass surgery,” he said gravely. “Possible amputation.”

  At this, John’s eyes widened. “What? You mean my arm? Oh, no. Hell, no.” He sat up and swung his legs around the side of the bed, flapping his hands to untangle a mess of IV lines. “You’re not cutting anything off me.”

  “John, it’s just a possibility,” Dr. Parker said, hedging back as John stumbled to his feet. “And a very remote one at that. We have plenty of alternatives we can explore, tests we can run.”

  “Forget it.” John began yanking out his IVs and needles, wincing as they tore loose of his skin.

  “What are you doing?” Dr. Parker asked, the condescending good cheer gone from his voice now, replaced with a shrill sort of alarm.

  “I’m getting out of here,” John growled, shoving past him and tromping toward the closet.

  “But John,” Dr. Parker hiccupped, exchanging bewildered, nearly frantic glances with the pair of nurses, who had likewise shied back toward the doorway.

  “Call me Mr. Harker,” John said as he stepped into his jeans. His shirt from the day before was gone, too bloodstained to keep, so he settled for shoving the long hem of his hospital gown down beneath his waistband.

  “You can’t do this,” Dr. Parker sputtered in protest.

  “Oh, yeah?” His sunglasses rested on a shelf in the closet and John snatched
them in hand, glancing at Dr. Parker as he slipped them on. “Watch me.”

  ***

  John could have gone back to the Quagmire, but had no real desire to be alone, or to see what was left of Lucy Weston’s brains spattered against the inside of his cabin. He could have returned to Little Pink but had a nagging suspicion that if he did, Sandy would promptly trundle him, kicking and screaming, back to the hospital.

  So in the end, he’d flagged a cab outside of the hospital and gone to Wilma’s.

  “Hey, Mom,” he said with a feeble smile as she opened the door. “Can I come in?”

  “John,” she exclaimed, wide-eyed and concerned, reaching for him. “Of course. My goodness, you look like you’re about to fall over.”

  She ushered him inside, fussing and fluttering about him and in general making him feel wanted, doted upon and loved, fixing his favorite childhood rainy-day lunch: grilled cheese sandwiches with Velveeta slices and Wonder Bread.

  “I know it’s not much,” she fretted as he gobbled down two of the sandwiches in less than a minute, tossing each wolfish mouthful back with whole milk. Wilma didn’t fool with the two-percent or skim stuff, and the milk tasted as rich and sweet as cream to him. “I could take that pork roast out of the freezer, put it in the oven.”

  “No, Mom, this is terrific,” he replied, stuffing the last wedge of sandwich number three into his mouth, then licking his fingers. By the time he’d reached her neighborhood, he’d begun to wonder if he hadn’t just made a monumentally piss-poor decision in abandoning the hospital, because his shoulder was aching him, his arm was even more leaden and numb than before, and worst of all, an incessant chill had gripped him from head to toe. Even though Wilma had bundled him in layers of blankets, he still shivered beneath them even now.

  “I told you the people at that hospital didn’t know their head from a hole in the wall,” Wilma said, going back into the kitchen where a fourth sandwich was currently sizzling away in the electric skillet. She’d muted the TV upon his arrival, and John watched Vanna White steal silently across the screen, tapping screens the game board to reveal hidden letters.