Journals of Eleanor Druse, The (Digital Picture Book) (11 page)

Stegman presided over the ceremonies like a showman displaying a circus freak. He rattled off diseases, syndromes, and sequelae; lab values, diagnostic scan findings, and test results. He moved to the head of the bed, where he shined a penlight in each of Nancy’s eyes and said, “Oculogyric crisis.” He indicated her dead-bird claw hands and said, “Contractures.”

The other doctors took careful notes and murmured “Interesting” or “Very interesting” upon hearing about her uremia or her white cell count or her elevated pH.

At this point, Stegman motioned for Tiffany to unfasten Nancy’s restraints so that he could move her arms. He demonstrated the range of motion of her shriveled limbs, tugging her this way and that while describing her interesting defects in Latin, using words like
dyskinesia
or
torticollis,
posing now and again to receive the admiration of the female residents.

Then Stegman put a latex glove on his right hand, and Tiffany gave him a tongue depressor, which he used to probe Nancy’s mouth.

One by one the eager young medical scientists were treated to a view of Nancy’s very interesting clinical example of oral thrush, a kind of white fur growing inside her mouth which, from the looks on their faces, must have been enough to make Job question his faith.

I believe God or Satan provided me with a sudden premonition of what was about to happen. I suppose the other possibility is that I actually caused it to happen, by some as yet unexplained psychokinetic stimulation of the motor areas of what was left of Nancy Conlan’s brain. Precognition, or just good old-fashioned instinct shining through the medicinal fog, I don’t know which, but I knew it was coming and I can’t say I didn’t relish the prospect.

Stegman used the tongue depressor to move aside the flap of Nancy’s cheek, so that yet another shameless professional voyeur of her pathology could feast his or her eyes on the manifold pleasures of the grotesque. Nancy suddenly lurched forward, opened her mouth in a hideous grimace, then clamped her teeth onto the gloved hand of Dr. Stegman. As I watched in horrified delight, I could see that the purchase her teeth had obtained on the meat of his right palm was at least as tenacious and forceful as the one she’d had on the cotton wrist restraint some days previous.

Stegman howled in agony and gingerly attempted to withdraw his hand—“Ow, OW, OW, OWWWW!”—without leaving a piece of it behind in Nancy’s incisors, but he succeeded only in tugging her head up off the pillow. Her wide-open eyes swelled and flushed red in their sockets and her facial muscles bulged and flexed as her jaws locked and exerted increasing force on her teeth, which sank deeper, through the membrane of the glove, through the skin, and into the flesh of Stegman’s hand.

Dark blood filled the semitransparent latex glove and then streamed in rivulets from the holes made by her teeth and dribbled around her lips and chin.

Stegman howled louder and pulled again at his trapped hand, but it only brought Nancy up off the pillow and closer to his screaming face. She lurched again and her claw hands fastened onto his lab coat, those bony talons grasping the lapels with the blind fury of raw motor automatism. Now she had ahold of him, tooth and claw, and his panic was pure. He tried to step back, which had the effect of dragging her into a half-sitting position on the frame of the bedrails, from which she tipped forward and clung to him.

Stegman tripped on his heels and fell back, dragging Nancy down on top of him, her teeth still firmly embedded in the flesh of his hand. She was growling and gnawing and clinging to him with the relentless vigor of unguided reflex-driven musculature. She was like a human drone missile who had found its target.

The other physicians tried to help, but what could they do? Any attempt to pull Nancy off their leader caused him to shriek, “Don’t pull on her, damn it! She’ll take half my hand with her!”

Jennifer and Tiffany hurried over and helped me out of bed.

“Mrs. Druse,” said Tiffany, “this is an emergency situation. We are going to move you out into the hall so that the emergency team can bring in the crash cart and give Nancy some special medicine so she’ll let go of Dr. Stegman’s hand.”

I can’t say for sure, but I may have seen laughter in their eyes.

By late afternoon, things had calmed down, and I was able to return to my bed. I’d missed my morning medication and felt my head clearing, so I took the occasion to review my recent notes, most of which I couldn’t remember from day to day.

I found one dated two days back that read: “Dr. Stegman visited this morning and seemed pleasant and agreeable. He still doesn’t remember my name, but it’s probably because he’s so busy trying to help all of his patients. He works too hard, but I believe he is well-intentioned. Remember to ask Claudia if he is really a bad man or just a victim of circumstances.”

My last dose had been yesterday afternoon, so the soma fog (as I had come to call the effects of the Scyllazine) had lifted, and I read with horror those words I couldn’t remember writing. I heard Nancy gag in the next bed.

If Metzger kept his promise, I had only three days left before Bobby would drive me back to Lewiston. I had things to do first, and they weren’t going to get done if I was sitting around barmy on pharmaceuticals and writing love notes to the likes of Stegman.

I cheeked my next two doses and flushed them down the toilet after lights out. Next day I did the same.

It was easy to pretend that I was still medicated. All I had to do was nothing, and no matter what happened or what anyone said to me, all I had to say was “That’s fine” or “I don’t care.”

Claudia came in to advise that Stegman’s hand had been mutilated and infected with a deadly bacteria called Clostridium, famous for causing gas gangrene. Human bites are apparently far worse than the bite of any other animal except poisonous snakes and rabid dogs. Claudia said that culturcs taken of wounds caused by human bites are polymicrobial, yielding an average of five microorganisms cultured per wound. She said that streaks of red had appeared on Stegman’s arm within hours of the bite and had traveled rapidly up above his elbow. He’d spiked a temperature and shown the classical symptoms of cellulitis.

“How awful,” I said.

“Then came the smell,” said Claudia.

“The smell?” I asked.

“Progressive myonecrosis,” she said. “The bacteria produces a gas that gets trapped inside the skin. Hence the name: gas gangrene. But its most distinguishing feature is its odor. It smells like a dead guy eating a mustard gas sandwich in a World War I trench.”

“Is there a cure?” I asked. Claudia was already gloating and didn’t need any help from me. If Stegman was about to lose an arm to gas gangrene, I was almost ready to feel sorry for him.

“They had to open the flesh of his arm along the fascial planes of the muscles and clean out the bacterial infection. Then they put him on IV antibiotics. It doesn’t look like he’ll lose an arm. Unfortunately. He may even live to operate on someone else.”

“The poor man,” I said. And blessed myself, mainly because I didn’t know what else to do.

“Yes,” said Claudia. “Poor man. Actually I was hoping for a diagnosis of necrotizing fasciitis. The one the tabloids call the flesh-eating bacterium. Could have killed him by now, and Boston General would be a safe hospital again.”

I patted her hand.

“There now, Claudia,” I said. “Forgiveness is the best revenge.”

Nancy’s parents, Renn and Margie, came in that weekend to see what had happened to their little girl. The doctors had given Nancy IV muscle relaxants and sedatives, because it had been the only way to free Stegman’s hand from her snappingturtle jaws.

She was asleep on the pillow, eyes closed, more peaceful than I had ever seen her.

I held a Selene crystal in front of me on a silk string, and used it as a pendulum to determine how I might help Claudia and Nancy and her family out of the disaster that their lives had become. At Renn’s request, I took out the channeling crystal and agreed to ask it for guidance on his behalf.

“Can you ask it if my little girl will ever wake up again? Be her old self?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll try to ask it.”

“Wait,” he said, and touched my hand to stop me. He swallowed hard and got red around the eyes. “Wait a sec. Maybe I don’t want to know.”

“Go ahead on and ask it,” said Margie. Her jaw was set, ready for whatever the crystal might say.

I looked at Renn again and he nodded.

The pendulum slowed very gradually and began oscillating slightly sideways. I saw it blur through my own tears and my hand shook.

“She will not,” I said. “She will never walk or talk again. She will never be the same old Nancy. She’s gone.”

I wept freely. Renn and Margie joined me. I was afraid he would be angry with me, but instead he seemed relieved.

He touched my free hand. “Thank you.”

“Wait,” I said, studying the quartz moving at the end of my string. “That’s not all.”

“What?” he asked, trembling, leaning closer. “What is it?”

“This terrible thing that happened to your daughter,” I said, studying the crystal’s movement. “It was not meant to be.”

Renn frowned and wiped his eyes. He balled up his red fists. “What does that mean? Not meant to be? I wasn’t meant to be washing pots and pans at Rudy’s Fish House, but I am. What do I do with ‘not meant to be’?”

“I mean to say that according to the crystal pendulum, there was a serious medical error made during your daughter’s surgery. That’s why she is the way she is. Someone made a terrible mistake.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do about that?” asked Renn, gripping my bedrails, trying to fathom this new view of the medical solar system he’d just glimpsed by way of the crystal. “What do I do about the mistake now? It’s done.”

“You need to—Wait, let me concentrate.”

I watched the pendulum change directions. Now it was swinging vigorously in an arc that drew Renn and me together in a kind of temporary dyad.

“Yes, it’s just as I thought,” I said. “It’s really very simple.”

“What?” he asked. “Tell me, Mrs. Druse, what?”

“You need to go see a very good medical malpractice lawyer.”

“I do?” asked Renn.

“Yes,” I said. “According to the crystal, a good plaintiffs’ lawyer will tell you exactly what to do.”

IT WAS UNDILUTED PLEASURE
to go back home to Maine. Seizure or no seizures, near death or far from it, out of body or marooned inside this old bag of bones—be it ever so humble, there’s no place like being back behind the windows of my old house and the eyes of my mended body.

Health is a golden crown we all wear, but we can’t see it until we get sick. Getting well again bestows a renewed appreciation for the tiniest delights, the most uncontrived comforts. I went into my own kitchen and made myself a pot of tea. The wooden handle of my favorite cane felt like an old friend’s warm handshake. I purged the lingering odors of Bobby’s pipe smoke, beer, and pizza using bindles of sage and a potpourri. I sat in my favorite chair by the window and let our mixed-breed pound dog, Skipper, mostly lab with a little spaniel and who knows what all, put his snout in my lap and nuzzle me a warm hello.

“Good boy, Skip.”

What is life but a struggle to find a safe warm corner of the world where one can turn around three times, settle down for a moment’s rest, and think:
Well, I’m happy and healthy, at least for now.
But in all honesty, my home of thirty-some years no longer felt like the most intimate surroundings on the planet. The last ten days made the most familiar objects of my old life—my books and reading glasses, my ottoman and end table, the antique lamp my mother left me—seem as changeable and insubstantial as spirits. I expected them to melt or grow lips and whisper to me at any moment.

I was seized by a vague fear, as if instead of being back, I was actually far away in a foreign land where I didn’t speak the language or know the customs. I felt like an expatriate in Saudi Arabia, who creates an illusory, artificial, little Americanized apartment inside a secure compound, where she can pretend to be safe at home in familiar surroundings, even though she knows that just outside the walls are rag-headed mobs ready to stone her to death for sleeping with the wrong man.

The date of departure from my comfortable past to the uncertain, alien present? December thirteenth, the night Madeline Kruger died.

I grabbed an old Lewiston-Auburn phone book and my reading glasses and looked up Werling. Laurel Werling. The nurse who had led me into Madeline’s room that terrible night. I’d written down her name the minute Bobby had reminded me of it in Boston. And the orderly’s name was Angelo Charron.

I found Werling, L., out on Lyngby Road. I copied her name, address, and phone onto a yellow sticky. I dialed the number, and my heart jumped in my throat when I recognized Laurel’s chipper voice on the recorded greeting: “Hi, it’s me, leave a message and I’ll call you back.”

“Ms. Werling,” I said, “this is Eleanor Druse, Sally Druse, we met almost two weeks ago on the Kingdom Hospital psychiatric ward where you…were working. I had an episode of some kind that night. I guess you must know that. I’m sure you do. Anyway, I have some questions I’d like to ask you about what happened, if you wouldn’t mind calling me back.”

I left my phone number for her and went back to the phone book, where I found no listing for Charron or any alternate spelling thereof. Next I found Kruger, M., still at the address where she’d lived for decades: 519 Woodlawn. Walking distance but for the snow outside. I rested my hand on the phone and stared at the number. I’m always at my best in person, so I considered bundling up in my wool sweater and coat and driving over there in my old Volvo. It was a one-and-a-half story Pennsylvania Dutch bungalow, as I recalled. If Hilda Kruger was still in town handling Madeline Kruger’s estate, I could go see her in person. But if I showed up unannounced, it might put her on the defensive, especially if I started asking questions about her mother’s death or trying to get my hands on that suicide note.