Brain Damage, page 28
part #2 of Prescription: Murder Series
A long silence passes between us. I don’t know what to say. I want to tell him that I’ve been thinking about him too, all the freaking time, but I’m still not sure if that’s the right thing to do. We both have so many of our own issues. The two of us together would be a disaster.
At least, I think it would be. It could be. Or it could be great.
I can see that Jamie is getting more and more anxious the longer that I’m silent. Finally, he blurts out, “Have you thought about me at all?”
God, how could he ask me that? He was my best friend in rehab. He stood up to Clark and maybe saved my life. Does he think I’m some sort of unfeeling bitch?
“Of course I have!” I retort. “I think about you all the time! Every day, I…”
And then I catch myself, blushing. I’ve said too much.
“Charly,” he says, taking my hand in his so that I have to release the cane. I don’t pull away, even though I probably should. “I know you’re thinking this is a stupid idea, but it isn’t. I promise you.”
I just shake my head at him.
“You wanted me to get my life back together again,” he goes on. “Well, I have. The business is doing fine. Great, even. Sam and I are great. My life is back together, as much as it ever was.” He pauses to take another deep breath. “The only thing missing is you.”
He’s very convincing, I have to admit.
“Charly,” he says, scratching his chin nervously. He has adorable stubble on his face, which reminds me of the way he looked in rehab, when they didn’t have time to shave him for a day or two. “Please say something.”
The last time he said that, I told him he needed to leave and never see me again. I guess I had more willpower back then. I can’t make myself tell him to go away this time. I’m pretty sure I’m going to just have to let this thing happen between Jamie and me.
So anyway, I kiss him.
In retrospect, it may have been a little bit stupid to kiss a guy without great balance when mine isn’t so good as well. We could’ve very easily ended up on the ground. I could tell he was struggling to catch himself for the first ten seconds. Luckily, he was standing with his back to the restaurant, so the glass of the window caught us.
And once the fear of falling has been safely dealt with, he gets pretty into it. We both do. Actually, we kiss for like five straight minutes. Or as long as it takes two small kids to use the bathroom.
It’s a lovely kiss. No, “lovely” isn’t the right word. “Lovely” would be a pretty bouquet of flowers. This kiss is everything: soft, passionate, sexy, life-changing. As he pulls me closer to him, lacing his fingers into my hair, all I know is that this can’t be the only kiss.
When we separate for air, Jamie is looking at me in a way that no other man has ever looked at me before in my entire life. And I know this is different. He’s different. He’s the one I’ve been waiting for.
“I really missed you, Helmet Girl,” he whispers.
Except I’m not Helmet Girl. Not anymore.
But maybe it was all worth it if it got me here.
Acknowledgements
When I first told my husband that I was going to write a novel about a woman who was shot in the head and must identify a killer whose identity is locked in the left side of her visual field, he said to me, “You know who the killer should be? It should be her evil Siamese twin who is attached to her on the left side.”
I rolled my eyes. “Great idea,” I said.
“Really!” he said. “In the climax, she can look in the mirror and see that the twin has been there all along.”
“I don’t think that will work.”
“It definitely won’t work if you won’t even try.”
When I finished writing and editing Brain Damage, I asked my husband if he had any interest in reading my book.
“Is that the book where I thought you should have the evil twin be the killer?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Did you end up doing that?”
“No.”
“I don’t think I should read it then,” he said thoughtfully. “I mean, if I read it, I’m just going to spend the whole time thinking how much better it would be if only it had the twist with the Siamese twin. I think that would just ruin it for me, because I’d be thinking—”
“Never mind!”
It’s hard to get people to read your unpublished writing, even family and friends.
On that note, I’d like to thank all the people who put in their time and effort to make this book what it is. My mother read three separate drafts of Brain Damage. My father even read the book, and offered the advice that I should publish this one “for real” (instead of publishing it in Imagination Land, like my other books). Special thanks to Jessica Schuster, whose pointed critiques I must read with a shot of whiskey, but my books wouldn’t be half as good without her. I want to also thank the always wonderful Dr. Orthochick, Katie, Jenica Schultz, Dr. Eve Shvidler, and Dane Miller.
But most of all, I want to give a huge shout-out to the patients I work with and the therapists and other staff members who form our team to help them to recover. You guys are all an inspiration to me. And if any of you have evil twins attached to your left side, I will totally let you know about it.
Did you enjoy reading Brain Damage?
If so, please send me an email at fizzziatrist@gmail.com. I would love to hear from you. Or consider leaving a review on Amazon!
Check out my website at:
http://doccartoon.blogspot.com/
In the meantime, please enjoy a short excerpt of my last book, The Devil Wears Scrubs…
Time: 3 a.m.
Hours awake: 21
Chance of quitting: 75%
This patient is the fattest man I’ve ever seen in my life. His name is George Leeman and he’s got fat folds on his belly that are so deep, I think I could stick my whole fist inside. Hell, I think I could stick my whole arm inside. I think I might be able to set up a tent in his belly button with an adjacent fireplace. The nurses had to get him an extra-large bed because the regular hospital beds were too small to fit his massive frame.
Before we got him in the bed, the nurses weighed Mr. Leeman on our bariatric scale. It’s a scale we use for people who are either really obese or are in a wheelchair. The scale has a platform that’s about the size of an elevator and you can wheel or waddle onto it. We got a weight for Mr. Leeman and used it to calculate his body mass index (BMI). The BMI is a calculation based on a patient’s weight and height, and tells us scientifically exactly how fat a patient is.
For example, before I started medical school, my BMI was 24. That put me square in the middle range of “normal.” Now, less than one month into my intern year, my BMI is 26, which puts me just on the edge of “overweight,” kind of like the rest of the country. If I continue to eat primarily junk food, which is likely given how the last few weeks are going, I might get up to 30, which would make me officially “obese.”
Mr. Leeman’s BMI is about five trillion.
Not really. But it’s high. He’s what we’d call “morbidly obese.” That’s a real medical diagnosis, you know. It’s not just something you say to make fun of the fat kid in the playground.
I’ve been sitting here talking to Mr. Leeman for about thirty minutes, scribbling notes on a piece of paper about his heart disease, his medications, his other medical problems. I actually sort of like the guy. He’s got a big toothy smile and he calls me “honey.” I should probably be insulted by the “honey” thing since he’s supposed to call me “doctor” and he’s just being disrespectful and sexist, but at this hour of the morning, any kind words make me feel a little less awful.
My senior resident Alyssa particularly dislikes obese patients. When the emergency room calls her about an obese patient, she sighs extra loudly. I’m not as bothered, and it’s not just because I automatically like anything that makes Alyssa unhappy. But I figure nobody gets to 600 pounds just by eating a bunch of bacon double cheeseburgers. People who are that big must have a disease, just like the patients with pancreatic cancer or multiple sclerosis. And I’m not going to throw stones. After all, I like my bacon double cheeseburgers too.
“Do you have any more questions, sweetheart?” Mr. Leeman asks me. I’ve now graduated to sweetheart. He’s making me feel all of twelve years old.
I look down at my page of chicken scratch. I can make out exactly five words on the page. I’ve been a doctor less than a month and I already got the handwriting down pat.
“No, I think that’ll be all,” I say. Then I add, “For now.”
As a lowly medical intern, I must discuss every patient I see with my senior resident—and odds are twenty to one that Alyssa will send me back in here to ask something else I forgot. No matter how thorough a history I think I got, she always comes up with something. What’s the patient’s shoe size? What did he eat for dinner last night? What was the middle name of his best friend in third grade? Alyssa demands a very thorough history.
I find Alyssa sitting in the resident lounge, which is her working area of choice when we’re on call. She’s wearing blue scrubs that make her eyes look bluer. Alyssa isn’t beautiful, although sometimes I wish she were because it would give me another reason to hate her. She’s on the cusp of beautiful, but she’s a little too skinny, a little too tall, her forehead a little too long. My mother always says that the forehead is what makes the face. I’m not sure I agree with that one, but Alyssa’s forehead definitely isn’t doing her any favors.
Alyssa must be as sleep deprived as I am, but she doesn’t look it. Her straight brown hair is swept back into… I think it’s a chignon, although I truthfully don’t know what the hell a chignon is. Not one little hair is out of place. Her eyes aren’t bloodshot and don’t have little purple circles under them, like I know mine do without even looking in a mirror. And she smells good. Nothing in this hospital smells good, except somehow Alyssa does.
“Hi,” I say timidly.
Alyssa is flipping through her index cards. She carries around a pack of index cards on which she catalogues information about all our patients, and possibly one about me too. My biggest fantasy is stealing her index cards and watching her flounder. Then I get disgusted with myself that stealing index cards has now become my biggest fantasy. In any case, she doesn’t look up from her cards when she speaks to me.
“Are you ready?” she asks me.
She’s not really asking me if I’m ready. She’s really saying to me, “You better be ready and not be wasting my time, girlie.” I wring my fists together and in the process, I crumple my notes slightly. Even though it’s three in the morning, I’ve got a little surge of adrenaline going.
“I’m ready,” I say, with all the finality of someone pledging her marriage vows.
Alyssa gestures at the couch across from her. I’m not allowed to actually sit next to her while we talk. I’m lucky she lets me sit at all. I can imagine her forcing me to stand at the doorway, maybe on one foot.
Before I can open my mouth, Alyssa says, “What took you so long?”
“Huh?” I say. I have no clue what she’s talking about.
Alyssa finally raises her eyes from her index cards. “What took you so long?” she says again, louder this time.
My hands are sweaty. I wipe them on the couch and leave behind two little sweat stains. I’d be embarrassed if I wasn’t so tired and also this couch is very possibly the dirtiest couch in the history of the world. Probably 20 years’ worth of cafeteria food stains this couch. If anything, my sweat made it cleaner.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I finally admit.
“Connie got her last patient after you did, yet she presented him to me ten minutes ago,” Alyssa says. She puts down her index cards and folds her arms across her chest. “Why are you so slow, Jane?”
Connie, like me, is a lowly intern in her first year of post medical school training. I secretly suspect that Connie and Alyssa are twins separated at birth. They even have that secret twin language where they look at each other and I can tell they’re exchanging sentiments of how incompetent I am. Connie has conveniently provided Alyssa with a model of how to correctly do all the things I’m doing wrong.
“What are you doing that’s slowing you down so much?” Alyssa says. It’s three in the morning, yet she won’t let this go.
I wrack my brain to think of an answer I can give that will end her line of questioning. I can’t think of anything. I honestly didn’t think I was that slow. Mr. Leeman is a complicated patient, more complicated than Connie’s guy with chest-pain-that-was-clearly-indigestion. But I know that isn’t going to be an acceptable answer for Alyssa.
“You need to work on being faster,” Alyssa finally says. She clucks her tongue. “Well, go ahead.”
I clear my throat. Around midnight, my throat always starts feeling scratchy and dry. I suppose it’s just my naïve body telling me I need sleep. “Mr. Leeman is a 56-year-old man with a history of heart failure and diabetes who has been having increased shortness of breath for the last week…”
Alyssa takes notes as I talk about how the emergency room discovered that Mr. Leeman was having an exacerbation of his heart failure and his lungs were basically floating around in a swimming pool. He got a strong diuretic that turned the swimming pool into a small Jacuzzi, and he is now doing okay, but still needs some oxygen. We’ll probably need a few more days to clear out the pool. Then we’ll send him home.
I launch into my physical exam findings. He has a heart murmur and lungs that sounds… well, wet. There’s a sound that fluid-filled lungs make that now makes me think of the ocean. The ocean. I wonder if I’ll ever have time to go to the beach again. Maybe Ryan and I can take the subway out to Brooklyn and… no, best not to think about it.
“What about his bottom?” Alyssa interrupts me.
“Huh?” I say. This seems to be my response to 90% of her questions.
“How did his buttocks look?” she says. “Any skin breakdown?”
“Uh,” I say. “I didn’t really…” I lower my eyes so that all I can see is my hands. “I didn’t look.”
“You’re presenting a patient to me and you didn’t even look at his buttocks?” Alyssa’s usual monotone raises in intensity a few decibels. I can’t imagine her being any angrier if I had suffocated the patient with his own pillow.
“I guess…” I bite my lip. “The thing is, he’s really obese.”
“All the more reason to look at his buttocks!”
“Yeah, but he can’t roll over,” I explain.
Alyssa gives this really loud sigh. Even Mr. Leeman one flight up can probably hear her sigh. “Well, I don’t know, Jane. How would you look at the backside of a patient who can’t roll over on his own?”
“Huh?” I say.
Alyssa sighs again. She puts her pen down on the couch next to her and sits up a notch straighter. The girl always looks like she has a rod up her spine. When she speaks again, it’s very slow, like the way she’d talk to a small child, if a small child had the misfortune of somehow getting into a conversation with her. “How. Would. You. Look. At. His. Backside. If. He. Can’t. Roll. Over.”
It’s like one of those riddles where you’ve got two boats and five people and each boat can only fit two people and they have to get across a river in three steps or less. I was always terrible at those. “Um, how?”
“You ask a nurse to help turn him,” she says, shaking her head at me.
A nurse. Great. Because they don’t already hate me enough without my forcing them to turn a 600-pound man with about a trillion tubes and wires coming out of him.
“Okay,” I say.
Alyssa has gone back to sifting through her index cards and I get a bad feeling. “You mean now?” I ask.
“When do you think, Jane? Next week?”
I can’t believe Alyssa isn’t going to let me finish presenting my patient to her. I can’t believe I’m going to have to figure out a way to turn 600 pounds of flesh and bones (and lung fluid). This bites. All I can think of is my bed back home. My cozy bed with my down comforter and fluffy pillow.
I heave myself off the couch, resigning myself to the fact that not only am I not going to see my bed at home, I likely won’t even get to see the creaky cot in the call room tonight. “Okay,” I say. “I’ll be back.”
Alyssa doesn’t even lift her eyes to acknowledge me.
When I get back upstairs to the floor where Mr. Leeman is staying, I head over to the nurse’s station to recruit help. I see Rachel, a youngish nurse who doesn’t seem to actively dislike me. Unlike Alyssa, Rachel really is beautiful, all dark and exotic. She has long black hair that she probably should wear in a ponytail, but it would be a crime not to leave it lush and flowing around her face.
“Hi, um, Rachel…” I begin.
Rachel smiles radiantly at me. “What can I do for you, ‘Doctor’?”
Yeah, all the nurses call me “doctor” and I always, always hear the scare quotes. I don’t blame them. I’ve been a doctor less than a month and I think it’s kind of ridiculous they have to call me that while I call them by their first names.
“I need to turn Mr. Leeman to look at his backside,” I say. I lower my eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
Rachel whips her head around as she turns to the rest of the nurses, and her long black hair nearly smacks me in the face.
“We need to turn Mr. Leeman!” she calls out. “I’m going to need some help. Angie, Maxine, Anthony, Katie, Julio, Jenny…”
I swear to God, she called out about ten names before she was done. A few minutes later, a parade of us are marching into Mr. Leeman’s room. I’m still not entirely sure if we have enough manpower.
“Hello, Mr. Leeman,” I say as we come into the room.
