Switch Child

by David Howells

a lifetime of experiences. Every other day, Karl would take a Seuss or other child-appropriate book in and, during his break, read to the man/boy/vegetable. Who knew if the kid heard him, but what if he did? Family visitors had long since stopped coming by. Of the scouts? There was one faithful friend who still popped in once a month to bring Felix up on the latest personal and world news. That had impressed Karl greatly. He made sure to meet the man with such a sense of honor and faithfulness to a friend. The faithful friend never made Eagle Scout. Now wasn’t that a bloody shame?

  One intern thought he was original and witty by elbowing Karl and referring to ‘Felix the Cat-atonic’. That intern still avoided Karl, and counted the days to his graduation.

  Shift ended, Karl decided to swing by the new patient’s room. The family money must have been significant. 2E was a pricey floor, and Master Colin Craft had a single room with a nice view. That seemed a little ludicrous as far as the patient went, but the view was there more for the visitors having something to console them while visiting a travesty against fairness. It seemed strange that there was no one in the kid’s room but a lone and lonely figure on a lifetime bed. The way Colin sank into it affirmed that the pad was made of memory foam, which reduced pressure sore production wonderfully well with patients who couldn’t move around on their own. A soft beep came from a device next to the bed that served multiple purposes. Each beep recorded one drop delivered to the IV, which contained essential nutrients and enough water to keep the kid hydrated. The screen at the head of the bed showed the telemetry from the technology attached to the child; blood pressure, heart rate, cardiac patterns (EKG, 3-lead), and even a monitor for brain activity (EEG, 4-lead), just in case God decided to perform a miracle.

  The eyes of the child stared blankly at the ceiling. A wave of Karl’s hand above the face affirmed that there was nothing of interest sufficient to break the child’s focus on nothing. Did his eyes still deliver information to the brain? Did his ears relay sounds? Karl had a mental image of newspapers stacking, one roll higher each day, on the porch of a child-sized playhouse. The playhouse would grow, as would the porch, and the never-to-be-read paper stack.

  There wasn’t much to do in there, officially. He looked around to make sure all was in working order for any visitors...toilet and sink stocked and functioning, all lights in working order, TV and remote coordinated and functioning just in case, windows able to open the limit of six inches should someone want a fresh breeze.

  Karl looked out the door and down the hall. Two nurses, each taking a side of the hallway, had started their rounds of eyes-on checking and patient-repositioning. It was always done with two at the Facility, in case of either an emergency, or an uncooperative resident. That also kept back injuries to a minimum. There was time for one more duty he could perform.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, taking care not to kink the urinary catheter, Karl recited from memory in the gentle paternal tones he had used so many years ago on his own children, “One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish...”

  “Mr. Hoffman...this is really very interesting, but will you be getting to the electrical disturbances soon?”

  “I’m sorry, Ma’am. Geezers like me and rambling are kind of a matched set, and you DID want color, I recall. But yeah, I’m about to get into it, so I’ll dial down to my 12-crayon pack. Thanks for your patience.”

  Two weeks and ten memorized Seuss books later (he’d have to start bringing in others from his collection that he hadn’t memorized, having used up the last in the Horton series the day before), the strangeness began. It was a Wednesday, and it would turn out to be a weird one. Housekeeping sent word for Karl to check out the circuits on 2E. Things were acting ‘funny’. When Karl asked the Supervisor as to what kind of ‘funny’, the man just shrugged his shoulders, saying, “I don’t speak tech or nurse jargon. Just go check it out.”

  When he got there, half expecting pandemonium, there was the usual quiet but purposeful activity in the hallways and nurse’s station. Janice Hallowell, RN, spotted him and waved him over. “Strangest thing, Karl. The monitor in the Craft kid’s room is acting weird.”

  “The monitor? Janice, I’m not a factory rep. Call the company.”

  She hesitated, looked around, and lowered her voice. “We would, but Groucho the Great over there wants you to give a peek first in-house. Budget shortfalls and all that. But the really weird thing is that this flutter or whatever it is, isn’t the monitor. We’ve switched out the machinery twice, and the same thing happens. Those monitors we took out of the kid’s room worked fine with other patients. Maybe there’s, I don’t know, something haywire in the outlets there? Oh, yeah, we tried plugging monitors into the other two outlets in the same room...same story.”

  “OK, young lady. Show ol’ Karl what the offending black magic box is doing.” He led the way and Janice was happy to have him do so. She had a streak of nervousness to the unknown in her mental makeup. This qualified for a few goosebumps for her. She made sure to stand on the same side of the bed as Karl did.

  “Now, watch the read out. See there? Those two white lights above the EEG readout? The first one indicates left new-brain activity, the second of right. But there’s no activity coming in on the detail screen. The left indicator comes on, then stays on as the right comes on...takes a few seconds for each...there, see it?”

  “I see it. And that’s not normal, right?”

  “Right. Then it gets stranger. Watch right there next to the EKG read out. There it goes, the red indicator light. Should be a problem warning, but there’s nothing wrong on the EKG read out. Then, to top it off, look right below the red light. There it is. That blue light indicates information received and ‘all is well’. For the finale, all four lights go off at the same time.”

  A few seconds later, they did just that.

  “Then it starts all over again and keeps repeating. It’s been doing that since yesterday evening, not long after you left, I think. Did you fiddle with something in here recently?”

  Puffing out his chest and raising his nose, “Young nurse, I do NOT ‘fiddle’, as you say. I ‘tinker’. There’s a big difference.” The humor worked its usual magic. Janice’s smile accompanied a lowering of her shoulders.

  “Guess I was getting a little worked up over this. I mean, it’s really just a glitch of some kind, right? Anyway, take a look and see what you can find and relay it to Groucho.”

  “I’m sorry, are you referring to the floor supervisor, her benevolent highness Nurse-Supervisor Compton?”

  Janice Hallowell was one of Karl’s favorites. Despite their age, the two could have been a close couple in some former life. “Oh, yes. That’s right. Make sure to genuflect when you give your report. New rule. Did you get the memo?”

  “Nope. Got excommunicated from her church when I didn’t tithe her from my Ring Ding stash.”

  Janice’s eyes went up. “You have Ring Dings? And you didn’t tell ME? I’m hurt. Didn’t Paris mean anything to you?”

  After a few more witty repartees to ease Janice’s willies, she trotted off to the greater comfort zone of monitoring sad stories inching their way to eventual demise. Karl turned back and looked at the fluky monitor. “White light, white light, red light, blue light.” Four lights coming on when they shouldn’t be. EEG and EKG read outs not matching their indicator lights? Didn’t seem like anything he’d heard of before, and he’d been there a long time. Monitors were modular, easily swapped in and out. Three of them displaying the same fluke behavior? Unlikely. Janice then was likely right...it wasn’t the monitors.

  From his belt, which contained enough gadgetry to make old-school Batman fans envious, Karl started off with a device that plugged into the same wall socket as the portable monitoring device. He hit the ‘start scan’ button and waited the requisite fifteen seconds until the ‘beep’ indicated a full snap-shot diagnostic of things electrical was accomplis
hed. Unplugging it, he thumbed the ‘report’ button and looked at the screen on the device’s front. “Hmmm, usual readings on volts, amps, kilowatts, kilowatt/hours. Nothing bizarre.”

  Next step was to plug in again for a twenty-minute evaluation for drops or spikes in service that might fritz something as complicated and delicate as the monitoring devices still in question. That would also give him enough time to check up on jobs listed on other memos he picked up this morning. Before he left, Karl tousled the child’s hair. “You hang in there, Champ. Don’t be like Felix, kid. Don’t give up.”

  The other errands took a bit longer than expected. 3W had a leaky toilet seal, and that was an hour job in itself. 1E was easier with two overhead lights replaced. A child could have done it and nurses might be willing to take care of it, but insurance regs said he was the official bulb changing meister of the house.

  Back on 2E, not much had changed. Life went on as usual, which was reassuring. This little problem was turning out to be a bit of a puzzler. At least it didn’t have the drama of a broken toilet, or the back pain factor in fixing same. Karl went into the Craft room. “Back again, Champ. Let’s see what the Volt Wizard has to tell