Andrew Neiderman: Deficiency

She raised her hands from the small of his back and ran her fingers through her hair, pressing her palms against her temples as if she wanted to keep her thoughts contained or her head from exploding. He was kissing her neck and moving his lips down over the base of her throat to the valley between her supple breasts. She felt the tip of his tongue move over one nipple and then the other, but when she heard herself moan, she thought she sounded more like someone moaning in pain than in sexual delight.

She opened her eyes and he raised his head so she could look into his. They no longer looked light blue. Instead they looked blacker, deeper, larger. It was as if they were absorbing the rest of his face until he would be nothing but eyes. Suddenly she felt a terrific aching in all her joints. It was difficult even to bend her arm without experiencing some pain. The back of her neck felt tight, as tight as it would if someone had placed a metal clamp over it and had begun closing the clamp. She opened her mouth to express her discomfort, but he pressed his lips over hers and his tongue jetted into her mouth and over her own tongue, attaching itself to it like fly paper.

She began to gag. She willed her arms to push him away, but they remained limp at her sides.

Vaguely she knew he had entered her and they were making love, but the initial pleasure was gone from his thrusts. There was a terrible ringing in her ears that grew louder and louder. She was struggling now to extricate herself from his embrace. The chill that had come into her face grew even colder. She felt her eyes going back in her head and she fought desperately to remain conscious, but it was impossible. Everywhere his body touched hers, it felt sticky. The last thing she thought was, it feels as if he is oozing over me. Then she went dark.

STAT!

Dr. Terri Barnard dropped Irene Heckman's medical chart and rushed from her hospital room. The seventy-two-year-old woman had just begun to describe her chronic back pain in a slow, monotone voice as if the aches had taken over completely and turned her into another one of the walking dead, aged zombies parading through the corridors of Medicare, haunting the consciences of doctors. Terri knew it was arthritis and there was little she could do in the way of a cure, especially an instant cure, but she was prepared to be patient and sympathetic despite Mrs. Heckman's laying all the blame for her aches at the foot of her doctors and an uncaring medical community. Terri had an especially good bedside manner when it came to elderly patients. It made sense for a doctor to have that quality, she thought. Most of his or her patients would be elderly, wouldn't they?

STAT!

It was originating from the emergency room, and the Community General Hospital serving the once-famous resort area in the Catskills had no doctor on duty during the fall months. The participating physicians were rotating the responsibility. Tonight, it was hers, and for the first time!

Tough luck, she thought. Only hours after beginning her rounds she was thrown right into a crisis. At age twenty-eight, she had just finished two months as an assistant to Dr. Hyman Templeman, a sixty-eight-year-old family physician who had become something of a fixture in the upstate New York community of Centerville, a village of just fewer than two thousand year-round inhabitants. During the summer resort months, it and its surrounding hamlets and villages used to jump to ten times their population. It still multiplied five or six times, and Hyman's patients did come from all the surrounding hamlets in the Fallsburg township and not only Centerville.

Terri Barnard considered the elderly hands-on physician a perfect mentor: a doctor who diagnosed almost as much from instinct as from knowledge, maintaining an almost gleeful distrust of the new technology, but willing to learn and seize upon any aid to diagnosis and treatment that proved itself. Hyman Templeman liked to refer to himself as a medical iconoclast. Despite her youth and her high-tech medical education, Terri had an affinity for the human touch. She believed in her grandmother's adage: people get well faster when they feel the doctor really cares whether they do or not. Her grandmother always wanted her to be a doctor, but "a real doctor, like your great-uncle Abe, who thought a doctor was a man with a gift, not a man with an expensive education." It followed then that if someone was given a gift, it was ungrateful, no, sinful, for her not to use it whenever and wherever possible. Terri seemed to be following the dream life design. She had been a brilliant student, and she had returned to practice medicine in her hometown, where it was presumed she would marry her high school sweetheart, Curt Levitt, who had himself come back to the community to become a successful attorney in his father's firm, now taking it over with two partners since his father's retirement.

"Mr. and Mrs. Yuppie America," her girlfriends called them, "the dream couple." They teased, but she recognized their underlying envy, too. Was her life too perfect? Could such a thing be so? She thought about it often. Her grandmother had brought all of her Old World superstitions with her, not the least of which was a belief in the Evil Eye. Whenever things were going too well for you, some covetous witch could cast a wicked spell. According to her grandmother, it was best to be humble, even secretive about good fortune. At this moment in the emergency room, however, she thought about nothing but the problem at hand. She was doing what she was quickly becoming noted for...

concentrating so intently she looked like she had shut away all distracting noise and sight.

A young woman had been brought in by ambulance and was on the gurney in one of the examination rooms. The woman had lost some of her teeth, but it didn't appear to be the result of a blow to the mouth. There was no trauma, no blow to any part of her face. It appeared her teeth had simply fallen out. In fact, the young woman's face seemed to age right before Terri's eyes. The emergency room nurse looked up from the young woman, her eyes pleading for Terri to do something miraculous quickly. She pointed to a large hemorrhage on the woman's arm, just above the blood pressure cup.

"I did that," the nurse said. "With the blood pressure cup. I'm afraid to squeeze the bulb. Pressure, no matter where I place it on her body, and no matter how gently I do it, immediately produces hemorrhages."

Terri moved quickly to her side and examined the woman's neck and chest. Her eyes were open, but they were glassy, the pupils barely dilating. She stared up at the ceiling light. Petechia appeared up and down her arms and legs and over her stomach and chest. It looked as if some madman had come along with a darkblue Magic Marker and poked her body for hours and hours.

"There's barely blood pressure," the nurse warned.

"My God..." Terri brought her stethoscope to the young woman's chest, but before she could suggest a therapy, she heard the young woman's heartbeat thump into silence. She looked at the nurse and then started CPR. Nothing helped. Death had too tight a grip.

Terri felt her own face whiten in disbelief.

"How long... was she like this?" she asked the nurse.

"I don't know, Doctor. The ambulance and the police just brought her in. She was found in a motel outside of Monticello. What is it? What killed her?" the nurse said, grimacing. She pulled herself away from the dead young girl as if she had already concluded whatever killed her was highly contagious. Terri shook her head. The symptoms were clicking off against a computerlike memory bank, and what resulted made no sense.

"I don't know," she confessed. "Not without the blood work. There are too many possibilities. You better call the coroner," she said softly. This was almost a nonstop trip directly to the hospital morgue for this woman, Terri thought. She felt like a toll booth operator, a modern-day Charon ferrying her patient across the River Styx, full of disease and illness. Actually, this was the first patient to die in her care, as short as that care was, and although she was cognizant of the way she should react, she couldn't help what was going on inside her. Of course she was used to corpses from her medical training, and when she had interned, she had seen patients die, but this was different because it was so bizarre and had happened so quickly. And on her watch!