Journals of Eleanor Druse, The (Digital Picture Book) (10 page)

“Well…” I said. “If I start taking the stuff, will you let me go home to Lewiston?”

Claudia smiled.

Metzger said, “We’ll just keep you here until we establish proper serum levels of the drug and get your doseages all straightened out. I bet we can send you home to Maine within a week.”

Claudia saw the look on my face and gave me a big kiss.

Bring on the drugs.

The trick to handling doctors is to steer them into ordering tests that will provide useful information, then keep yourself in charge of your own care. Otherwise they have a way of imposing their own push-pull, cause-effect view of the universe on your own precious etheric body. In this case, I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I haven’t always been so medically manageable. In 1972, at the age of forty-four, I sat across the table from Dr. Cherilyn Crabb, a Kingdom Hospital oncologist, in an examination room at the Kingdom clinics and received a death sentence. They had found blood in my urine, and then Dr. Crabb had found renal cell cancer—a three-centimeter mass in my right kidney and quarter-sized metastases to my lungs. Dr. Crabb said that they would go in and take out the kidney, as a strictly palliative measure, but that the metastases in my lungs were untreatable. Her advice was that I should go home after surgery and put my affairs in order, because the median survival rate for patients with Stage IV renal cell cancer was less than one year, and I had an 8 percent chance of living two years.

Dr. Crabb even showed me a chart of two-year survival rates for the various stages and types of renal cell cancer, with a little X penciled in the Stage IV column where the bar graph fell somewhat short of 8 and was actually closer to 7.

I let them take the kidney, but then I went right to work on treating myself. I switched to an entirely macrobiotic diet, meditated daily, and used guided imagery meditation to visualize the cancer in my lungs. I summoned my immune system to destroy it.

One night I was deep in prayer, and yes, very afraid that God would touch me with his finger and take me from this world—a single mother with seven-year-old Bobby to look after. I was deep in prayer asking for nothing less than the usual: “Dear Lord, please annul the laws of medical science on my behalf and allow me to live.”

It was the one and only time (until recently) that I sensed a true presence. If it was God, He appeared to me not as a father or an angel, but as a huge formless presence towering and looming over me, beyond my ken or the powers of my mortal sense to conform Him to a recognizable shape. Instead, some part of Him reached out and touched my chest.

I guess the end ofthat story is pretty obvious. I’ve gotten along fine with one kidney, and the lung metastases went away like a bad cold.

Six months later, the ghostly white quarters were all gone from my X-ray. God had touched me, and I lived.

Madeline Kruger’s note had me stumped, as did all the talk of the little girl. Still lost? Back in the lair of the living? One reason I decided to let them give me pills was fear. I was afraid that I was missing a chunk of memory. A block of brain cells that had recorded whatever I had shared so long ago with Madeline was gone. Senile dementia? Or was it the progressive effects of the seizures they’d been warning me about? According to the doctors, I could have been having them for years. Each one draining the batteries of my brain cells and depleting stores of memories. Including, maybe, whatever Evil had touched Madeline and me, and all about the lost little girl.

Bobby had been bringing me Lewiston
Sun Journals
from home, which were scattered around on my bed and nightstand. A few headlines caught my eye.

“Licensing Board Investigates Medical Fatality.”

It wasn’t on the front page, but it was prominently placed at the top of the local news section, and it described the death of little Theresa Bradley, eight years old, following a routine procedure to repair her pulmonary valve. This was the little girl Bobby had told me about who died the same night Madeline did at the Kingdom. Full moon, Friday the thirteenth. A separate story described how the girl’s mother, Sarah Bradley, was being charged with assault for attacking the pediatric cardiologist with a surgical scalpel.

Alongside were photos of little Theresa and the physician, Dr. Edward Egas, who not only got forty stitches out of the deal but was also under investigation after the procedure had ended in the fatal injury to the child’s heart.

I tore out those stories and tucked them into my notebooks. Then I saw one more. A story that was obviously buried as far back as possible. Not the back page—worse, inside the back page, at the bottom:

“Ringing Hospital Bell Blamed On Malfunctioning Elevator Chimes.”

The story described how in the wee hours of Friday, December 13 (the night of Madeline’s death and of my episode), during and after a number of disturbances, which included a minor earthquake and several medical emergencies, witnesses at Kingdom Hospital reported hearing the sound of a bell ringing throughout the hospital. A nurse found the ringing bell so peculiar and ubiquitous that she summoned two
Sun Journal
reporters and a Lewiston police officer, who were met by several other baffled hospital employees and led to the hospital elevators, where the sounds of the ringing bell were especially loud and pronounced. “Insistent,” in the words of one witness.

Investigators blamed the disturbances on malfunctioning elevator chimes, even though, when interviewed separately, elevator repairmen on the scene said that all power was cut to the elevators during and after the earthquake, and that the chimes do not function without electricity.

Kingdom Hospital administrator Jesse James, architect of the medical center’s progressive new Operation Morning Air corporate wellness program, attributed the reports of bells ringing to malfunctioning elevator chimes and to stress in the workplace. “The employees of Kingdom Hospital work very hard 24-7 to deliver quality medical care to Lewiston and surrounding communities.”

End of story. I knew the ringing bell meant something. I knew it was connected with everything that had happened that night. Knew it as surely as I knew that I had traveled between life and death the night of Madeline Kruger’s death. I’m ashamed to admit it, but what I did was…nothing.

I settled back against my pillow and drifted off into the hospitable glow of Scyllazine, 100 milligrams, twice daily.

I didn’t have the heart to tell Claudia, but the medications promptly deprived me of my ability to give myself over to the flow of my daily meditations. When I closed my eyes and waited for the familiar tug of the crurent that runs through the entire universe, nothing happened. But there was a consolation prize: I didn’t really care. Just like I didn’t care that the ringing bell meant something and nobody was going to investigate it, because it was easier to blame it on unplugged elevator chimes and workplace stress.

The pills had other effects. When Tiffany or Jennifer or Nancy’s family came to visit, I felt strangely tentative and uncertain, but without the mild anxiety that I expected would attend such a state—like being shy without feeling self-conscious, if such a thing is possible. This was only one paradox in a mental state that seemed constructed of such paradoxes. When the medication reached peak concentration, I felt unwilling or unable to act or speak but also satisfied with my condition—not happy or joyful, by any means, but also not concerned, as if thinking or taking action were not quite worth the trouble, because actions might lead to worry or regret.

My inner mental state seemed to be packaged in Styrofoam peanuts, protected from the buffets and accidents of the outside world. It was quite the opposite of the unitary state of enlightenment that I’d aspired to my whole life, a oneness with nature and the entire universe. Instead, the meds induced a kind of accentuated duality, one in which my insular inner self was protected from the slings and arrows of outraged fortune by neurochemical bubble wrap. The predominant sensation was that I was calm, if not at peace, and that the safest thing to do was always nothing, or at least as little as possible. Less risk, and an increased chance of maintaining the satisfactory status quo.

As an academic, I felt the pills would be ideal for C students. They would remove the vanity, discontent, and restlessness that motivates a C student to try for a B or an A. They would also remove the anxiety of not trying hard enough and incurring a D or F. Thus a C was satisfactory, the aim and end state of the perfect medication.

For several days, I sat in my own drug-induced private Idaho and realized that I had only to take a pill each day and I could remain forever in this limbo state of not exactly happy and not exactly sad. Another troublesome, loopy, time-consuming old biddy of a patient neutralized and rendered as contented as an oyster in her shell, while my insurance company went on making regular payments.

Soon my days were all the same, muddy and indistinct, each one flowing into the next. I was repeatedly warned to stay on my medication and to cooperate with the physicians or my insurance might not cover the entire cost of my care. I decided to take the pills long enough to obtain an honorable discharge from Boston General.

Very early one morning, I heard Tiffany and Jennifer giggling behind the curtain about Dr. Stegman. For just a second (probably a side effect of the accursed medication), I was stumped. I knew that name, Stegman, but I couldn’t remember how or why. Then a visceral nausea erupted in the vicinity of my second chakra (abdomen and lower back), as if the flow there had been suddenly blocked. His name alone was a positive energy sink, a drain on my élan vital, before the rest of me could even remember who he was.

As I pieced together snatches of the nurses’ chatter, I learned that they had arrived earlier than usual with extra toiletries to give Nancy a special bath and to wash and fix her hair, with a nice blue ribbon. I heard them whispering about a yeast infection in the poor woman’s mouth. “Oral thrush,” Jennifer called it. And they made each other take turns swabbing the infection with something called methylene blue. They must have assumed I was senile or deaf or well medicated and couldn’t hear them whispering, “Ew, gross,” or “Yuck,” or “I can’t look at it anymore, you do it.” The chorus continued through the debriding of the woman’s pressure sores and the insertion of a brand new catheter tube and feeding tube and fresh clean cotton wrist restraints.

Toward the end of it all, I heard Stegman’s name again and learned the reason for this early morning overhaul of Nancy Conlan and her appurtenances. Stegman was presenting Nancy to an army of physicians in something called Grand Rounds. She was to be poked and prodded, tested and examined in an effort to determine if she had indeed progressed to a permanent condition the medical experts referred to as a persistent vegetative state, a diagnosis that would allow the family, in consultation with the hospital and its physicians, to discontinue tube feedings and withdraw nutrition.

Mornings were Nancy’s worst time anyway, and this morning she seemed especially restless, banging her bound hands against the bedrails, pitching forward on occasion and making a gagging sound, then throwing her head back and searching the walls behind her head with the whites of her eyes. To me it seemed that as her brain damage progressed, her body operated almost of its own accord, like a headless chicken or a pithed frog.

The nurses said that Stegman had specifically ordered that Nancy be given no medications or sedatives because he wanted her as “alert” as possible for the conference—a notion that made the nurses titter derisively. So Nancy’s random flailing and spastic gasping had gotten steadily worse since last night. No doubt Stegman was planning on bringing in his minions, clapping his hands, and seeing if the poor girl would sit up and bark like a seal. “There, you see?” he would say. “She’s responsive. How can we withdraw nutrition from a responsive patient with her whole life ahead of her?”

I only hoped that the man whose personal demons had run amok and brought misery and ruin to Nancy and her entire family would have this pathetic creature’s image burned into his memory and then carry it foremost in his mind all the way to the grave.

At eight sharp, Dr. Stegman marched in with twenty or so physicians, medical residents, and interns in tow. First they surrounded my bed. I had a terrible headache and my brain floated in the usual suspended animation.

Dr. Stegman asked how I was tolerating the medications.

I felt as if someone else was doing the talking, but a part of my brain had miraculously retained the ability to speak the truth according to the Gospel of St. Matthew.

“The eye is the body’s lamp,” I said. “If your eyes are good, your body will be filled with light; if your eyes are bad, your body will be in darkness. And if your light is darkness, how deep will the darkness be!”

Stegman turned to a pretty medical resident and said, “Religious ideations still prominent. Make a note of it.”

Then he turned back to me and said, “Go on. Please continue. Don’t mind us.”

“The pills cloud my eyes. They dim the light. When my eyes are bad, my body is in darkness.”

Stegman fetched out his digital recorder and paced as he spoke into it. “Room 959, bed two, a Mrs.—”

The pretty med student held up the chart, a candy-red fingernail on the name tag.

“—Drusey. Complains that the Scyllazine 100 milligrams B.I.D. induces a state of semi-voluntary apraxia. Also complaining of vision problems. Refer to Dr. Burt in ophthalmology to rule out macular degeneration and cataracts.”

Stegman smiled a tight one my way, then waved his troops over to the next bed for the main event.

Tiffany tried to pull the privacy curtain shut, but she inadvertently left an opening between the curtain’s border and the wall, which meant I could still see Nancy’s head thrown back on the pillow, grimacing, making those terrible gagging and laughing sounds. She lurched spastically and her head lunged forward at nothing.