Bobby Hutchinson - Good Medicine

Yesterday morning he’d begged her to write him yet another prescription for morphine. She’d refused, and he’d sworn at her, just as he had a moment ago. For a man with an expensive education, he had a limited vocabulary.

“Hey. Hey, Jordie,” he called over his shoulder as the guards hustled him out. “I’m sorry, babe, I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean it, it was just, you know, the shock of coming to in this place.” He dragged his feet, going limp.

“Jordie, tell these goons to back off me, okay? Please, honey?”

She didn’t reply. The security guards had stopped, holding him upright. They turned and looked at her, questioning. Her co-workers were all pretending hard to be busy with other things. By morning the whole episode would be all over the hospital, probably posted on some Web site.

“Jordie, talk to me here, okay?” Garry’s voice dropped, and he assumed the wheedling tone she’d come to despise. “See, the thing is, I’ve got no money for a cab. I shot the whole wad on that fix. Could you maybe—? Please, honey?”

Amazed that her legs worked, she hurried to the staff locker room and got twenty dollars from her handbag. She had to keep swallowing, and her hands were shaking so much she could hardly get her handbag opened or the door to her locker closed.

Security had escorted Garry to the exit by the time she got back, and Jordan marched into the rain and wordlessly held the money out to him.

He glanced at it and his mouth turned down petulantly before he snatched it, jamming the single bill into his pocket. “Twenty isn’t enough, not when I’m really in pain like this. I told you how bad it hurt this morning, Jordie, you could have given me something then and this wouldn’t have happened.” In one lithe motion, he twisted out of the guard’s grip.

“C’mon, babe, don’t be chippy with me, surely you can spare another couple twenties?”

She jerked her head from side to side and then turned her back on him, fleeing through the doors that led into Emerg. Inside, not one person looked at her, but their curiosity was like a scent in the air.

She couldn’t remember anything about the rest of that shift except that the trembling and nausea grew more and more difficult to control. She felt disoriented, far away, watching herself go through the motions of treating one patient after the other, amazed that she looked and sounded so normal.

When morning finally came, she had trouble driving home to the apartment. Fortunately the morning rush hour hadn’t really started yet, because she drove through a red light and sat through a green one. She scraped the side of her red Toyota against a cement beam when she tried to park it in the underground lot, and when she got out she didn’t even bother to check the extent of the damage.

She took the elevator to the second floor and after three tries, unlocked the door. The apartment was empty; Garry wasn’t there. She hadn’t expected him home. She’d hoped he wouldn’t be.

She knew he wasn’t at work, he hadn’t been all week. It was Thursday, and his secretary had left increasingly desperate messages for him every day. Up until this week, he’d managed to keep up a relatively professional facade at his law office. The partners had been lenient with him, blaming his erratic behavior on the accident. They’d covered for him the same way Jordan had, she mused as she walked through the rooms she’d painted and decorated with such care.

It felt as if she were seeing her home clearly for the first time in weeks. A great many things had disappeared lately, and she’d tried to believe it had nothing to do with Garry, but now she forced herself to face the truth.

In the living room, an empty CD holder stood beside the equally empty space where the expensive audio system had been. They’d bought it on their first anniversary. Several weeks ago, the apartment had been broken into while they were both supposedly at work. Her few good pieces of jewelry had been taken as well as all the electronic equipment—even the damned microwave.

Garry had taken them. She’d known it even then, but hadn’t been able to face the fact that her husband was an addict who’d steal and lie and cheat to get drugs.

Slowly and painfully as though she were old and brittle-boned, Jordan lowered herself to the dove-gray sofa and forced herself to look at what her life had become.

It had started with that damned car accident. Garry had been driving home late, undoubtedly going too fast. The expensive little sports car he’d insisted on owning had been struck by a pickup truck at an intersection. Garry had come away with a compound fracture of the left arm and a concussion. He’d also complained of excruciating pain from torn muscles in his back, pain that nothing seemed to alleviate.

Garry’s physician, Albert Mayborn, had finally prescribed morphine.

Jordan blamed herself for not recognizing that Garry was becoming addicted. She ought to have known, the signs were all there. Garry complained of pain long past the time when any muscle strain should have healed. She’d finally seen the physical signs of drug abuse in her husband’s bloodshot eyes, his jumpiness, his inability to sleep, his hair-trigger temper.

At last she’d confronted him about it, and of course he’d denied it. Until tonight, she’d managed to deny the extent of the problem herself.

The awful scene in the E.R. kept replaying in her head, and Jordan’s humiliation and shame grew. She drew her knees up to her chest, trying by sheer force of will to impose control over her shaking arms and legs.

She couldn’t get a deep breath. Her heart hammered against her ribs. She began to cry, deep, tearing sobs that scared her. Try as she might, she couldn’t stop them. Soon her stomach and chest hurt, her lungs felt as if they were on fire, and still the wrenching sobs went on and on. She was completely alone.

Hours passed. The phone rang, and she couldn’t answer it. She couldn’t move. She was thirty-two today, and she didn’t want to live. She began to think of the many ways there were to die.

And then the physician in her recognized that she needed help.

She forced herself up off the sofa, dialed the telephone and ordered a cab.

Sweating and shaking, still gulping back sobs, she found her handbag and made her way outside.

The Native driver gave her a concerned and wary look. “You okay, lady? Where you want to go?”

“St. Joseph’s Medical Center,” she gasped.

St. Joseph’s was an old building, and she knew every inch of it, having interned there. She dragged herself up a set of stairs at the back of the building to the third floor. It was the only place she could think of to get help.

The psych ward.

THE INTAKE NURSE WAS both intuitive and gentle. Jordan managed to choke out her name, adding that she was an Emerg physician, and without even asking her to fill in any forms, the nurse guided Jordan to a tiny private room with a cot and a chair. She helped her lie down, covering her with a blanket.

Jordan curled into a ball, too exhausted and spent to resist the emotions coursing through her. After a time, the door opened and Helen Moore, the resident psychiatrist, came in. Jordan knew her slightly, and had always liked her kind smile and forthright manner.

“Hi, Jordan.” Helen sat down beside the cot and reached for one of Jordan’s hands. She took it gently, cradling it between both of hers. “Can you tell me what’s made you so upset?”

Jordan tried, but it was impossible to talk through the tears. Helen reached for a box of tissues and handed over a fistful. “Try to take deep breaths.”

After a few moments, Jordan was able to put words together. “My hus-husband is—is a drug addict,” she began. Once she’d said the words aloud, it became easier to tell the rest of the story. She began with the car accident, the morphine, the prescriptions she’d written him and, when she’d refused to supply him, how the apartment was ransacked. Amid fresh bouts of weeping, she managed to recount what had occurred the previous night in the E.R.