Journals of Eleanor Druse, The (Digital Picture Book) (4 page)

In came the doctors wearing badges and ceremonial stethoscopes hanging around their necks like amulets. A big one with wavy hair swaggered out in front and seemed to be in charge. As the formation approached, they reminded me of a band of gorillas: a dominant male, followed by one or two subdominant males, followed by several mature females, followed by callow, fresh-faced youngsters.

The big one spoke first.

“I’m Dr. Stegman,” he said, then indicated the doctor trailing his right elbow. “And this is Dr. Metzger.”

Dr. Metzger was stocky but prissy, with manicured fingernails and a carefully arranged flap of hair combed over his pattern baldness. If I had to guess, his primary qualification for his subdominant role was that he was half a foot shorter than the silverback in charge.

Both doctors smiled.

Where’s my son, Bobby?

“Metzger
is German for butcher,” said Stegman, “but please don’t hold that against him. ”

The acolytes all smiled and shook their heads:
No, he’s not a butcher. He’s Dr. Metzger.

It occurred to me that there had been an afterlife mix-up and I had inadvertently been sent to hell.

“Dr. Metzger is a psychiatrist. The rest of us are neurologists or neurosurgeons, with a few medical surgical people filling in the back rows,” said Stegman. “Dr. Metzger will be in charge of the inorganic and the intangible, and we brain specialists will deal with the organic and the medical.”

A tight smile my way. “Clear?”

Where’s my son? Who made you my doctor?

This Stegman fellow wasn’t talking to me so much as he was performing for the group—and I had no choice but to suck on my tube and be a mute straight man for his preening insolence.

“You had a close call there, young lady,” said Stegman.

He pooched his lips and walked around my bed. His hair had been blown dry into an airbrushed confection that floated regally above his head like a scented halo.

“The next time you fall, madam, I’d do it on a softer floor.”

He winked at me.

I pointed at the tube in my mouth and tried to talk again, which prompted a paternal smile from him and knowing looks from his followers. He marched back around to the foot of my bed, flaunting his own rude good health.

“Don’t try to talk around that tube. That goes between your vocal cords and into your lungs so that the machine can breathe for you. You can’t talk while that’s in there.”

No shit. But I don’t want a machine doing my breathing for me, thank you very much.

Probably just as well I couldn’t talk, as young people are often shocked when the elderly swear freely. Maybe someone could take the goddamn pipe out? Plus, as I learned later, a foul mouth is a common symptom of an acute temporal lobe injury.

One of the mature females in the band started putting films and pictures onto a lighted box on the wall.

“Now let’s have a look,” said Stegman, using a pointer to give the acolytes a tour of brain scans with my name on them.

“Mrs. Drusey here slips on the ice or whatever, giving herself a contra coup injury, resulting in contusion and hemorrhage in her right temporal lobe. The description of Kluver-Bucy-like syndrome? Anybody?” He looked around. “Nobody? I thought so. Any Korsakoff’s psychosis?”

I have to admit, I love it when they take pictures of my brain. I wished I could have been awake for those! Something so exciting about those great omniscient devices seeing deep inside, where no eye has seen and no light has shined.

He moved his pointer again to another scan and indicated a dot.

“And what about this delightful little enigma right here in the left frontal lobe? If it’s malignant, it’s brand new. If it’s not brand new, is it a low-grade tumor? A cyst? Sclerosis from a tiny stroke or previous trauma? Whatever it is, it presents a fascinating teaser: Did it
cause
the fall or is it just an incidental finding after the fact? Did they send us any historical scans on her?”

I made writing motions with my right hand and pointed to the pad and pen on my writing table.

The nurse held the pad for me so I could write:
(1) Where is my son, Bobby? (2) Is this Kingdom Hospital in Lewiston, Maine?

Stegman had gone back to conferring about shadows and hot spots on pretty scans and stringing Latin words together like Legos.

“Your son, Bobby, is here,” said the nurse. “He went to get something to eat. He’s coming right back. My name is Claudia.”

The nurse smiled. She seemed kind and capable, but before she could continue, the pad attracted the attention of Dr. Stegman, who found my second question so ludicrous it moved him to antic good humor, which touched off devotional merriment in his followers.

“Lewiston, Maine?” he repeated. “Madam, this is Boston General Medical Center. One of the top five medical centers in the United States. And while Maine is not too far away as the crow flies, I assure you that
medically speaking,
Maine is
nowhere near
Boston, Massachusetts. You won’t find the like of these physicians in Lewisport, Maine.”

Boston? How in the world…?

Good humor all around, and nobody was too concerned about whether the little spot on the scan was a malignancy. After all, it wasn’t a picture of their brain, it was a picture of mine. These intelligent primates were members of the science tribe. I was well acquainted with their customs and rituals. Scientists could be useful now and then, but I always took care to deal with them at arm ‘s length, for they are notoriously untrustworthy.

The woman doctor who put the scan images up took them down, and Dr. Stegman put his hand on the bedrail.

“If all goes well, that tube will be out this afternoon and we can talk. Then we’ll take some more pictures and see what’s going on inside that nut of yours. Okay?”

I frowned and motioned for the paper again. The nurse held the pad while I scribbled.

By the time I finished, he was already out the door, under lings in tow, leaving Nurse Claudia to answer the question I’d written:
WHY ARE MY HANDS TIED DOWN?

And something strange: After watching the band of physicians depart, I looked at Claudia for an explanation of the big one’s discourtesy. I caught her staring after them. Her lower lip trembled and a single tear slipped out of the corner of her eye onto her flushed cheek.

That morning, personnel from every branch of the medical industrial complex were lined up outside my room, all waiting for a crack at me. Med techs came from the lab with needles for every artery and vein in my wrinkled body, until I felt like a bloodless beige prune. Respiratory therapists administered elaborate breathing tests to determine what I told them the minute the wretched tube came out of my throat: I don’t need the goddamn breathing machine! My first words! Dietitians, physical therapists, a different nurse every shift attending my every need. It was delightful. All that attention. And with the tube gone, I was able to visit with every one of them. All these smart youngsters were working so hard to find out what happened to my poor noggin.

Dear Bobby! He looked…Well, I was sorry to see that he’d gained weight, and his face was puffy. Probably the stress of having Mum conk out on him. That and eating fast food instead of my soups and salads, and also nobody around to tell him to shut down the computer games and go for a walk in the real world. He brought me lovely flowers from the grocery store, probably because he felt bad about not being there the first time I woke up.

“Don’t worry, Mum,” he said. “You’re going to be just fine.”

I read him like the label of one of his Red Stripes. He wasn’t quite sure if I was going to be just fine, and neither was I.

“Who was that hideous doctor? Stegman? Is he a neurologist?”

“He’s a neurosurgeon, Mum. Cut and cure. You whacked your head good, bruised one of your brain lobes or something, but when they scanned you, they spotted another scar or lesion in there. Could be nothing. They aren’t worried about it yet. They say they just have to watch it and see if it grows. If it is something, he’s the man to take it out.”

“If he touches me I’ll sue him for assault and battery. He’s got the aura and astral body of Mussolini. Which reminds me, where’s my bag? I need my crystals. I don’t like going unprotected in the presence of such a malignant life force.”

“Mum, he’s a brilliant surgeon.”

“We have surgeons in Maine. And if he’s brilliant, find me a dull one. Bobby, what in God’s name am I doing in Boston?”

“Mum, it’s all about the brain scanners. They have the high tech ones here.”

“Brain imaging! On me? How exciting. Tell me all about it. ”

“Well, they got PET scans, some fancy new kind of MRI. There’s another one called a SPECT scan. They can’t decide which one to do on you. We don’t have those at the Kingdom. They’re gonna scan you every which way and do surgery if they have to, then get you back home.”

“PET scans! Pictures of my own brain at work! I want copies.”

I kept looking at my boy. He was the same; I was different. The trip abroad in the borderlands between here and hereafter had turned me into someone else. It’s like the physicists say: We’re just holograms of particles moving through a universe of other holograms. I felt the same way after two years studying the Rig Veda at the University of Delhi in India. (Those were the glory days, before the bondage of marriage and full-time employment.) When I came home in 1954, south central Maine was a foreign country. The Androscoggin Valley was the same, but I was different. I couldn’t throw rice at weddings without wondering: Why do we throw rice at weddings? Why is there no number 13 on our elevators? What happens when we make the sign of the cross? What exactly
is
Halloween all about?

Travel had turned me into a foreigner in my native land. But my son was still very much at home and always would be, so I had to be careful.

“Bobby, did you see Madeline Kruger’s body that night?”

Bobby frowned, and I could see a memory worrying its way through the dim recesses of his docile brain, something he’d heard and promptly discounted, because he’s about as inquisitive as a hibernating bear.

“No, Mum. I didn’t see her. It was one crisis after another that night. They lost a little girl in the ICU right about the time you went down. Terrible thing. Earlier in the day, the pediatric cardiologist, Dr. Egas, had done a routine procedure to dilate the girl’s pulmonary valve—supposed to be a low complication rate—but later that night they found out he had punctured the little girl’s heart with the balloon catheter while he was in there. They took her back to the cath lab and tried to save her, but she died on the table. Eight years old. They brought the mom back there to be with the body. She was hysterical. She grabbed a scalpel and sliced up Egas real good with it. Took four of us to pull her off him. Now the chief medical officer is looking into whether Egas had been packing his nose that day.”

He sniffed his thumb for me and was about to explain.

“I know what it means, Bobby. I wasn’t too old to enjoy the sixties. What kind of a compound Idiot monster takes narcotics before operating on a child?”

“After the little girl died, then you hit your head, and in the middle of all that, we had an earthquake. Ruptured pipes, cracks in the basement flooring.”

Bobby shuddered, and I could see him think better of mentioning something else.

“What?”

“Nothing, Mum,” he said too quickly.

“How’s it go?” I said, straining my old brain to shake loose what little Shakespeare I had left. “ ‘The quality of nothing hath not such need to hide itself.’ Something about the poor girl?”

He looked sideways, meaning yes.

“She…” He caught his breath and rubbed his jowls with the meat of his palms. “They put her body in the morgue, of course, because you know there’s
got
to be an autopsy on that one. And the cracks down there in the floors and walls. That’s the old hospital down there, Mum. The one that burned down in your day. They built right over it. And you know how the earthquakes make the vermin go mad. Well, the rats got at the bodies—”

“Oh, no, Bobby—”

“Don’t go asking around about the Mrs. Kruger business. It’s been hushed up. The family is Catholic, and the suicide stuff is taboo.”

“Of course it was one crisis after another that night, Bobby. It was a full moon and Friday, December thirteenth, what the Algonquin tribes called the full cold moon. Did you see that crazy old man in the gown come up to the nurses’ station? Mr. Hyde, as I live and breathe. Walk into any emergency room in America and see what happens on a full moon Friday the thirteenth. I’m surprised you didn’t get a plague of locusts with the Androscoggin River running red and backwards. What about Mrs. Kruger’s suicide note? Did you read it?”

Bobby shook his head and scowled. “I didn’t see it, Mum, and the full moon, that’s just lunacy.” He took a breath to change the subject, but I wasn’t about to let him.

“Bobby, I need to see that note. I have to know what Madeline wrote about me. You’ve got to find a way to get a copy. ”

“Mum, I can’t do that.”

“You always found a way into the cookie jar.”

“Please, I can’t go rummaging around in a patient chart looking for a suicide note.”

“Was there an autopsy?”

“I don’t know.” Another sideways look.

“You don’t know?”

He winced and started sweating; he has a glandular disorder that makes him perspire profusely when he’s the least bit nervous.

“Mrs. Kruger’s body was down in the morgue, too. The rats—there must be armies of them in those old walls. They had LuvKraft Pest Control in the next day, but the bodies, they—”

“What about the orderly, the fellow sitting outside her room, dozing when he was supposed to be watching her. Chairman? Charmin?”

“Angelo Charron, Mum. He was gonna get fired for coming in drunk one too many times, anyway. Then he’s got a patient on suicide precautions, and she somehow gets her hands on an ice pick. He’s long gone, Mum.”

“Then what about the nurse? Lauren? Laura? What did she say?”