Notorious D.O.C. (Hope Sze medical mystery) (21 page)

Her chin jerked away from me. She took a
quick, angry puff. "They don't tell you anything."

Automatically, I reached for her arm, but
stopped before I made contact. "I'll drop by and see if I can translate
for you."

She sucked on the smoke and shrugged, but
after a minute, she nodded. "Thanks."

So before lunch, instead of hitting the
resident's lounge or the library, I hustled back to the ICU.

Good timing. Stan was clicking through an
online an article from the New England Journal. I dropped in the chair beside
him.

He barely glanced away from the screen.
"Have you picked out your article for journal club? You're presenting
soon."

"Um, no."

"This is a good one on hypertension
in pregnancy. I suggest avoiding the one on horse-versus-rabbit antithymocyte
globulin, unless you want to confuse everybody."

"Good call." I cleared my throat.
"I was just wondering how Reena Schuster was doing."

He clicked on the print icon. "So
what else is new."

Dr. Wharton passed behind Stan's left
shoulder with an old chart tucked under his arm. Dr. Wharton said, "I've
never seen such a dedicated envoy from psychiatry."

I forced a smile. Wendy and her mother
were watching from Reena's bedside. "Just call me an army of one."

"Your timing is fortuitous,"
said Dr. Wharton, sitting down with his chart. His beeper went off.

I looked at Stan. He shrugged and said,
"You're welcome to check her out yourself. Her vitals are almost normal.
She doesn't have a fever anymore, her renal function is down to one-ninety, and
her tone isn't as rigid."

"She has inconsistent tone, it
seems," Dr. Wharton put in as he stabbed a number into the telephone.

I raised my eyebrows.

Stan said, "Check her neuro vitals.
Sometimes the nurses still find her rigid, and sometimes they don't. Basically,
if you sneak up on her and bend her ankle, it's flexible, but then it stiffens
up, and so does the rest of her body."

"O-kay. I assume she's not in a coma
anymore?" I craned my neck, but from where I sat, Reena was just a bundle
under the blankets.

"I suspect her EEG will prove that
her state is psychogenic," said Dr. Wharton, before turning to the phone.
"Joe? Have you seen the patient on 5 South?"

I lowered my voice to Stan. "You
think she's faking NMS?"

"No. She has it, or had it. But we
think she's exaggerating the symptoms. She doesn't want to come out of the
ICU." He rolled his eyes. "So, back to you, buckaroo."

"You're putting her on the ward
anyway?"

"As soon as they free up a bed.
Which better be soon, because there's a GI bleed in emerg."

"But you already got your a psych
consult, right?
 
What did they say?"

"Not a hell of a lot. You can read
the consult."

Officially, Reena wasn't mine anymore.
They keep the residents in the emerg and the medical students on the psych ward
as well as the emerg. The staff psychiatrists do the consults on other services
during the day. But I couldn't let this one pass. "Could you get her old
psych charts?"

"Why would we do that?"

"Humor me. You've got a unit
coordinator to help you, and I bet her mom would sign the consent."

Stan narrowed his eyes. "How far
back do you want me to go?"

"Say, spring 2003?"

"And why would I do that for a
patient who's about fifteen seconds away from leaving my service?"

I paused to think. "I'll bring you a
bagel."

"A real one. Not one of those soft,
puffy ones from the grocery store. We call those Christian bagels."

I laughed. We shook on it. And I went to
see Reena.

Her eyes were closed, but she was
breathing on her own. Her colour was better, in that she was pale, but not
morbidly so. Her IV bag was half-full. No more O2 sat. She was even wearing
socks, red argyle ones. Funny how real clothes or a bedspread from home makes a
difference. She was definitely being suited-up for the ward.

"Hi," I said to Wendy and her
foster mom.

Wendy nodded. Mrs. Schuster said,
"Hello, Doctor."

"Hi, Reena." Did her eyelids
tighten for a moment before deliberately smoothing out? Or was that just Stan
and Dr. Wharton in my head? I decided to talk as if she could hear me.
"You seem to be getting better."

Reena's breath hitched for a second. I
didn't imagine that.

I turned to page through the chart at her
bedside. As described, her vitals and creatinine had improved. Then I asked
Wendy. "Could you tell me again what happened?
 
How did she end up here?"

She looked at her mom. Mrs. Schuster
said, "She took pills, doctor. I don't know why. Everything was going so
well."

So well that she came to the emergency
room twice before fleeing me? I eyeballed Wendy, who avoided my gaze. I asked,
"Who called 911?"

"My daughter." Mrs. Schuster
wrapped her arm around Wendy's waist. "Thank God. I don't know what I would
have done otherwise. Losing one of my girls..."

"You're not going to lose us,
Ma," Wendy muttered, her mouth now safely tucked into her mom's shoulder.

"Maybe not now. But you never know.
She's not out of the woods yet." Mrs. Schuster released her and yanked
some tissues out of her purse, carefully dabbing her eyes. She'd taken the time
to apply mascara and eyeliner today.

"How did you find her?" I asked
Wendy.

Another pause. I glanced at Reena. She
appeared motionless, but Wendy drew back from her mother, followed my gaze and
wrapped her arms around her own waist without answering.

Mrs. Schuster said, "Thank goodness
they were both home. I think Wendy heard her hit the floor. Isn't that right,
love? I wish I'd been the one to find her. I'd rather walk through hell than
put one of my girls through it. I've already been through hell so many times,
what's one more?"

I smiled sympathetically and tried to
steer the conversation back. "Yes, I can see how that—"

"You have no idea. I can see it from
your face. You're young. Maybe even as young as Wendy, here, I don't know. It's
hard to tell." She scanned my face. I braced myself for the "with you
Orientals" part, but she managed to bite that back. "I hope you never
have to go through what I've gone through. Reena, here, in and out of hospitals
since she was thirteen. My husband died of a heart attack in my arms. Not one,
but both my girls telling me they're gay! What are the chances! Is it
contagious?"

"
Ma
."
Wendy's fists bunched up.

Mrs. Schuster barely paused, but she
turned her head and waved at her daughter's bed. "And now Reena here, on
the brink of death. I tell you, sometimes I wonder how much I need to be
tested."

"I think we all feel like that
sometimes." I was thinking of Mrs. Lee. Two different mothers, two
different women grieving.

Mrs. Schuster looked right at me.
"Can you help my daughter?"

"I'd like to. She, ah, didn't feel
comfortable seeing me." To my surprise, I saw Wendy's neck flush as she
averted her eyes from me yet again. What did she have to be embarrassed about?

Maybe she knew why Reena hated me. That
put me off my game for a second, but I steeled myself. Mrs. Schuster was asking
me for help, even if her two daughters were not. "I'm only rotating
through psychiatry. I wonder, though, if we could do some family counseling in
one of my outpatient clinics." Even as I spoke, my brain was shrieking,
what are you doing? Your plate is so full, it's already toppled to the floor!
Reena hates you! Her foster sister hates you! Why would you counsel them?

Wendy's eyes widened, but Mrs. Schuster
was already saying, "Thank you, doctor. I like you a lot better than that
other head-shrinker. Give me your card."

Chapter
21

I traded some favours and dug up Mike's criminal record. Stealing
cars, theft under a thousand, big fucking deal.

But I like to keep my hands clean.

I called Mike up and met him in a parking lot behind a Couche-Tard
downtown, where no one could hear us. "I want you to get me a car."

"Yeah?" He shook a cigarette out of his pack and lit it.

"A big one. Something easy to drive. An automatic."

He sucked on his stick for a while. "Why?"

"Does it matter?"

He shrugged and looked me in the eye. "I don't do that shit
anymore."

I laughed in his face. "Yeah, right."

He shrugged again and got up to go. "Anyways..."

Before the word was out of his mouth, I sighed. "It's too bad
about Wendy."

He carefully straightened his spine. "What about her?"

"You guys breaking up and all. She told me what you did to
her. Kind of sick, dude. Especially with her being only thirteen."

He stopped breathing for a second.

"She was thinking of talking to someone about it."

"I never—"

"She made a video with her little camcorder. She showed me
the tape. Not smart, Mike."

He stood there with his cigarette burning in his hand, too stunned
to flick the ash off. I waited for a minute. I was enjoying this. Not only did
his face go a weird, pale grey, but he even smelled funny. Can someone smell
like fear?

I relented. "But I talked to her. I told her to hang on.
Don't back that up. Don't upload it anywhere. I told her you were a good guy.
You were even doing a favour for me." I paused. "She gave me the
tape."

I watched his Adam's apple bob up and down. He glanced up and down
the lot, but we were alone except for an old Geo and a GMC truck in the corner.
He muttered out of the corner of his mouth, "All you want is a car? For
the tape?"

I nodded. What can I say? I'm really a soft touch sometimes.

***

When I unlocked my bike at the end of the
day, I saw a heavy-set woman out of the corner of my eye. She turned and her
lustrous black hair caught the sun. It was Wendy, pacing on a small rectangle
of lawn in front of human resources, across from the emerg entrance.

She didn't see me, she was too busy
yelling into her cell phone.

"Where are you?
 
Why didn't you come?" Pause. "Don't
give me that. You couldn't leave her alone before, and now that she's in a
coma, you...No. That's
bull
shit. I
did everything you—
everything
.
And what...oh, yeah, you're doing it all for me. You are sick." Pause.
"Don't you dare hang up on me. Don't you—goddammit!"

Slowly, I wound the chain around the seat
of my bike. It clanged on the frame. Wendy's head jerked up.

Uh oh. I nodded at her and secured the
lock on the chain. Better to pretend blissful ignorance. Hear no evil.

She advanced on me like a bull. The only
thing missing was the cartoon smoke rising from her nostrils. "You spying
on me?"

I pulled my bike out of the rack, keeping
it between us. "Nope."

"You're always around. Watching.
Listening. Giving everyone the creeps."

I unhooked the helmet from my backpack
and snapped it on my head, never taking my eyes off her. "Thanks." I
backed up, wheeling my bike away.

"Don't you walk away from me."
She walked around the rack.

I wasn't walking, I was biking, but
something told me she wouldn't appreciate the joke.

She planted her hands on the handlebars.
Or she would have if I hadn't backed up fast enough to scuff up a bit of sand
on the pavement. I switched from defense to offense. "Why don't you call
back whoever it was on the phone? That's who you're really mad at."

Her eyebrows soared before she slitted
her eyes. "You playing with me?"

"Not at all." I glanced around,
catching the eye of the parking guard lurking in the front entrance, but he was
immediately distracted by someone holding a bill in his hand.

"Just stay out of our business,
okay? We don't need your
counseling
."
She made sarcastic quotes in the air. "We don't need your help. We just
need you to fuck off."

I mentally flipped through a few
responses. I try not to get riled up with patients or their families. It was
only five p.m., so there were plenty of people around. I didn't need to feel
threatened. I opened my mouth to defuse the situation, but instead, I said,
"Is that why you're harassing me?"

Her head snapped to the side, but her
eyes never wavered. "What?"

"I don't know what you'd call it. A
picture of a gravestone in my mailbox. Calling me at home. You were trying to
scare me off?"