Carolyn Jourdan - Nurse Phoebe 02 - The School for Mysteries (6 page)

Chapter  12

When Phoebe finished writing her message she wiped the dye off her finger and returned to the control area where she donned a kilt, tunic, and neck guard. Then she went into the fluoroscopy suite and positioned the cross hairs of the x-ray machine atop what she’d written and touched the
on
switch and took a single exposure. She didn’t know how to calibrate the machine, so she could only hope that its automated features would set it on something that would work for her purposes.

She went back to the control area to view the image she’d made. After several seconds it began to emerge on the monitor facing the room she’d been in. It was perfectly legible. Good. Now she needed to enter some patient identification information and figure out a way to get it to a place where Charlie, and only Charlie, would see it.

She typed on the keyboard, naming the patient Zinc Phoebe Zinc, using a hybrid of her own name and the naming convention employed by the hospital to identify John Doe emergencies—people who came in without any identification, or who’d had their clothes cut off in the ambulance or helicopter, or who were in too dire a condition to wait for anyone to go through their pockets.

John Does were named in order, starting with Alpha Alpha and progressing to Zinc Zinc, at which point it started all over again with Alpha Alpha.

Phoebe put her own distinctive name in the middle to attract Charlie’s attention. She knew it was possible to send the image and a message to his email, but she didn’t know how to do that. So she returned to the fluoroscopy suite and removed the heavy nine-by-twelve-inch metal-edged cassette from underneath the table and carried it down the hall to Charlie’s office where she left it propped against his door.

“We’re lucky it’s the middle of the night,” she said to Nick, when she’d returned to their hiding place. There’s hardly anyone around. The equipment in this area almost never gets used until the day shift.”

She’d gleaned what supplies she could during her outing and shared them with Nick: pillows, blankets, a sipping cup with a bendable straw, and bottled water. She put a pillow under his head, covered him with a couple of blankets, and made him take a few sips of the water.

She set a small plastic urinal for bed-bound male patients beside Nick. “If you need to pee,” she said, “go in here.”

He mumbled something incomprehensible.

“Are you hurting in your head or neck?”

“Uhn nnn.”

“Can you wiggle your fingers and toes?”

She touched his hands and feet to confirm that they were still in working order.

“Can you move your arms and legs?”

He could. That was good news.

“Go back to sleep,” she said, “It’ll help you get better. I’ll watch over you and won’t leave you again.”

Phoebe sat beside him in the dark and stared at nothing. Her patient’s breathing was deep, slow, and even. She belatedly realized that for a guy with agoraphobia, the snug, dark little hideaway she’d found was darn near perfect.

Now all they could do was wait.

Charlie worked for several hours in the small reading room next to the Emergency Room until he caught up. Then, at about 3:00 in the morning, he decided to take a break. He approached his office with a cup of coffee in one hand and his key in the other. There was an x-ray cassette propped against the door.
Residents
, he thought,
what now
?

He unlocked the door, picked up the heavy cassette, and carried it with him as he went inside. There were no notes explaining what was wanted, but that was typical. He juggled his coffee and the awkward cassette and went to the central control area. He tapped a key to wake up the screen, and logged into the special software system used by radiologists, called PACS, short for Picture Archiving and Communications System.

There was a message waiting for him. He opened it and it said,
please read the image on the cartridge
immediately
.

Yeah, uh huh, sure
, he thought, that image and a zillion more that awaited him.

Since the advent of CT, MRI, PET, and their even more exotic cousins, there was an endless flood of images to be read. It was a never-ending parade of human suffering. And nowadays many of them were true emergencies. Radiology had gone from being one of the most laid back departments in the hospital, to a place where surgeons stood in the doorway holding gloved hands in the air, waiting for him to tell them whether they needed to operate on someone who’d just come in on a helicopter with no pulse and no blood pressure.

Before all the new advances in imaging, radiology wasn’t able to help much in some of the common critical care situations. Now it was crucial in the early decision-making process for all sorts of serious injuries and ailments. It had become an emergency medicine tool.

Charlie tried to keep in mind that although he was looking at static black and white shadows, somewhere there was a real live person who was bleeding, puking, screaming, or dying a few floors away.

He stood the x-ray cartridge on end and jammed it into the reader-scanner and waited. Then he turned to watch the monitor. He often had no idea what the images would be or what he was supposed to be looking for, and this time, yet again, he was forced to play the medical version of
what’s wrong with this picture
?

From many years of experience, without being consciously aware of it, he braced himself. If this image hadn’t been something unusual, it wouldn’t have been delivered this way. It was then that he noticed the patient’s name was given as Zinc Phoebe Zinc.
What the hell
?

The image revealed itself gradually from top to bottom as it was read by the scanner. It was definitely unique. In fact it was like nothing he’d ever seen before—and he’d seen everything.

There were no bones, no internal organs, no human parts whatsoever, just white cursive writing scrawled across a blank black field. He tilted his head to read it. It said,
Charlie Im in the old darkroom come NOW its Phoebe.

Chapter  13

“I’ve heard of
disappearing
ink,” Charlie said from the doorway, “but you’ve invented an
appearing
ink, at least for radiological purposes.” He flipped a switch Phoebe hadn’t known was there and the room was illuminated with soft red lights that were darkroom safe. He saw the man in the floor and knelt beside Nick.

“What exactly are we looking for?” Charlie said with his typical calm. This wasn’t the first time Phoebe had involved him in one of her quirky cases.

“He fell out of a helicopter,” she said.

Charlie looked up at her in surprise.

“Well, to be honest,” she admitted, “he was
thrown
out.”

“Why?”

“I’m not really sure, but I’ve noticed he has a way of getting on your nerves.”

“Go ahead,” Nick murmured, “talk like I can’t hear you.”

“How did he survive the fall?”

“Lucky bounce,” Phoebe said.

“Why is he on the floor of my darkroom instead of in a bed in the Emergency Room?”

“Some scary people are after him. They followed us here, to finish the job I presume.”

“How did you get him in here?”

“It wasn’t easy.”

“You somehow sneaked him in here, concocted a way to get a message to me, and then hid with him until I found you?”

Phoebe nodded. “And there’s another factor. He’s agoraphobic.”

“That, I can fix. It’s common for us to have to medicate people for MRIs. The meds for claustrophobia ought to work just as well for the reverse problem.”

“Oh good.”

“What are his symptoms?”

“He’s sore, he can barely stand on his own, but nothing else that I know of for sure. He’s been intermittently groggy and fainty, but his mind seems fine.”

“It would be normal for him to be addled and in shock for a few hours after a bad fall. And the syncope could be related to his anxiety issues. But, if he’s not badly injured, his condition should improve rapidly.”

Nick groaned.

“Help me get him up,” Charlie said.

Charlie was six-one and built like a pro football player. He held Nick without too much trouble, but Phoebe had to turn the door very slowly and tuck stray hands and feet inside as it spun away from her.

She waited her turn, then followed them out into the hallway. Mercifully, it was still empty, although she could hear sounds of people in the area.

“This was a good place to hide him,” Charlie said. “It’s brilliant, actually.”

Phoebe retrieved the wheelchair and he lowered Nick into it. “Let’s go for the full body scan,” Charlie said. “It’ll be quicker and I won’t need to involve any of the x-ray techs.”

Charlie rolled the chair to the GE LightSpeed Scanner and handed Nick a couple of pills he’d taken out of a nearby cabinet. He held a plastic cup of water and steadied Nick’s head so he could take them. Then Phoebe helped him transfer their patient to the sled that would carry him in and out of the scanner.

Charlie went to a control area and flipped a bunch of switches. This was the part of radiology he called
knobology
. The radiologists and their technicians had to know how to operate all sorts of extremely complicated devices. “How many images will you take?” Phoebe asked.

“More than either of us can stand,” he said, frowning. “But even with all the images in the world there are still significant limits to what we can see with this, you know.”

Charlie studied the screens while Nick rode the slow-moving sled deeper into the maw of the scanner. “We can see broken bones or internal bleeding, but there could be multiple fatal soft tissue injuries that will never show up on a radiograph.”

“Like what?” Phoebe asked.

“Like tears in vital organs. A hard jolt can tear our guts loose from the surrounding tissue. And that can rip a hole in an organ or tear a blood vessel. Then you die.”

Phoebe nodded as she watched the images appear and morph on the computer monitors that were rotated 90º so as to stand on end. Charlie adjusted his viewing angles. He’d taught her the names of the slices in each of the three dimensions—
coronal,
sagittal
, and
transverse
.

Watching him cursor up and down the body was like riding in a glass elevator through Nick’s guts. Every time she watched Charlie do this she thought about the saying that beauty was only skin deep. She’d learned from hanging out in Radiology that it was just the opposite—the most extraordinary beauty began just beneath the skin.

There was nothing on earth more holy or more beautiful than the human body. A Charlie-eyed view of anatomy gave a deeply moving window onto the assurance that each of us was made in the image and likeness of God. Phoebe didn’t know exactly what that meant, but seeing the images playing across the computer monitors, she believed it was true.

“He looks like he’s in pretty good shape, especially considering what happened.”

Charlie turned half a dozen switches off, and went to tell Nick what he’d found. He suggested that Nick and Phoebe change into scrubs to make them less noticeable and then he showed Phoebe one of the changing rooms where dozens of sets of blue and green scrubs were in neat stacks organized by size and color.

Charlie changed Nick while Phoebe changed herself. When they were both in clean, nondescript clothes, Charlie and Phoebe rolled their patient back to the darkroom and tucked him in again.

“You realize of course that you don’t know anything about this guy except that he’s trouble,” Charlie said.

“I know that he’s
in
trouble,” Phoebe corrected him.

“And he’s gotten
you
in involved in whatever that is,” Charlie said. “Just so you know, I’ve taken measures to minimize his ability to create any further difficulties for the next few hours.”

Phoebe looked over at their patient. Whatever Charlie had given Nick was already taking effect. He was snoring with his mouth wide open.