John Locke - Lethal Experiment

There was a swooshing sound in the doorway as a young blonde with a perky smile slid the privacy curtain aside and entered the room.

“How are we doing today?” she said, in a practiced tone.

“We’re hanging in there like a hair in a biscuit,” I said.

She stopped a second, and then smiled.

“You’re funny,” she said.

She’d brought a small tray of medical items that included hypodermic needles, cotton, rubbing alcohol, and some type of rubber tubing. She placed the tray on the counter by the sink and I heard the snap of sterilized gloves being put on. Then she started swabbing the center of my forearm with alcohol.

“You’ll feel a little stick when I numb the area, and then I’ll set the IV,” she chirped.

It had been almost three hours since Camptown, and the pain in my chest had long since subsided. I considered getting out of bed and foregoing the emergency heart cath they’d been discussing, but decided I’d rather know if my ticker was going to be an issue. I couldn’t see any veins in the area the nurse had deadened, but I figured she knew what she was doing.

“Oops,” she said. “I missed. That happens sometimes.” She pressed a piece of gauze against the wound to stop the flow.

I nodded to show her I was a sympathetic guy.

“I’ll move up your arm a bit and try this nice vein just below your muscle.”

She was exceedingly young. Young enough that I felt dirty just reading her name tag, though it was nicely elevated.

Dana.

I forced my eyes to stop lingering in the area of her name tag and watched her face as she stuck me to numb the vein she thought was nice looking.

Dana’s mouth twitched slightly as she gracelessly plunged the IV needle into the crook of my arm. She had a pleasant face and flawless skin, but something caused her to frown.

“Oh dear,” she said.

“What now?”

“This one seems to have collapsed.”

I glanced at my arm and saw that my vein had done nothing of the sort. She had in fact missed it by a full centimeter.

“You’re a tough one,” Dana cooed. “You didn’t even flinch.” She gave me a wink that, due to her age, seemed practically obscene. She pushed the IV needle into a third spot and missed.

“Don’t be offended,” I said. “But you’re done here.”

She looked at me to see if I was serious.

I was.

Her eyes welled up with tears and she packed up her needles and bloody gauze pads and ran from the room.

Before Dana had time to tell her tale to the other candystripers, a disheveled young man in a wrinkled lab coat came in. He appeared to be exhausted. Dana was practically a child, but this guy could have been her kid brother.

“Mr. Creed, I’m Dr. Hedgepeth.”

“Your parents know you stole that lab coat?”

He sighed. “Don’t start with me. I’m a fully-qualified, first-year resident in Internal Medicine.”

“Of course you are,” I said, thinking, I wouldn’t trust this kid to set up my Xbox .

Dr. Hedgepeth looked at my arm. “Sorry about that,” he said. “Dana’s new on the job.”

“What happened to the old nurse?”

“Mary? She was great. Best needle nurse I ever had. It broke my heart to let her go.”

I shook my head at the absurdity of his comment. This so-called doctor couldn’t possibly be in charge of hiring and firing staff . He couldn’t possibly be out of junior high school, for that matter. But I was committed to the conversation, so I forged ahead.

“If Mary was your best needle nurse, why’d you fire her?” I said.

“The patients kept complaining she was too young.”

“Of course they did.” I locked my eyes on his face. This had to be a joke. I can usually break a man’s resolve just by staring at him. This kid was about to crack. I could feel it.

“So what made you choose Dana?” I said.

“Dana’s the oldest nurse on the ward.”

“Is she,” I said, thinking, any nurse younger than Dana would have to be wearing a training bra .

“Dana will be just fine,” Dr. Hedgepeth said, “but there’s a learning curve, you see.”

I decided to move things along.

“Are you doing the heart cath or shall I look forward to meeting your grandson, the Chief of Surgery?”

“No need to be contentious,” he said.

“Contentious,” I said, wondering if that had been one of his spelling bee words.

“Performing a heart catheterization would be premature at this point,” he said. “You’re relatively young, you’re in great physical shape, your blood pressure’s excellent, your EKG is perfect, and the tests we’ve done showed none of the classic heart attack symptoms.”

“So what happens now?”

“We do a Cardiolite stress test. If that comes back normal, I’d advise you to get the hell out of here as soon as possible.”

“Why’s that?”

“You can get sick faster in a hospital than almost anyplace on earth.”

I was beginning to like Dr. Hedgepeth. “So I don’t need a heart cath?”

“I don’t think so. What you probably need is a couple of hours and a bathroom.”

“A bathroom.”

“Your problem could be acute heartburn, a precursor of food poisoning. Did you eat something of questionable origin recently?”

I thought about the beef burrito I’d choked down at the Horse Head Inn a few hours ago. And realized “beef ” didn’t necessarily mean cow.

“Could you have eaten something truly vile and shortly thereafter engaged in some form of physical activity?”

I thought about the Peterson sisters.

“Look,” I said. “I’ve had heartburn before. But this pain was severe, and emanated from the center of my chest.”

“Hey, we can always do the heart cath if you want. I mean, the hospital would love to pick up another thirty grand today. Ten times that, if we manage to poke a hole in your artery while performing the procedure."

I frowned. "Is that type of complication likely?"

"How to put this delicately," Dr. Hedgepeth said. "Our cath guy seems to be a cardiologist, but according to law he doesn't have to be a surgeon. He's from India and appears very bright, but he's quite young and his experience with heart caths is limited."

"How limited?"

"You'd be his cherry."

“Uh huh. Heartburn, you say?"

"Acute heartburn, yes. That, coupled with physical stress, could certainly produce the types of symptoms you’ve experienced.”

I understood why he’d said it, but I’ve always had a cast-iron stomach. In years of testing weapons for the Army, I’ve had to swallow pills that made Horse Head burritos seem like Saltines.

“If the stress test comes back clean, what should I do?" I said.

"Go home and spend some quality time bonding with your toilet.”

“And if that doesn’t work?”

Dr. Hedgepeth hesitated. “Do you currently see a psychiatrist?”

I frowned. “You think I’m imagining this pain?”

“I believe the pain is very real. But you appear to be the sort of man who can handle a great deal of pain.”

If you only knew , I thought, wondering if I should tell Hedgepeth that I’d been testing torture weapons for the Army for years. In the end I decided to just say, “I’ve certainly never had a problem handling heartburn in the past.”

“Well, the pain’s coming from someplace,” he said, “and I’m almost certain it’s not the heart. But the heart is what I do, so we’ll test that first. Then the toilet, then the brain.”

“Okay, I’m sold,” I said. “What’s the first step to this Cardiolite thing?”

Dr. Hedgepeth, without the slightest trace of a smirk, said: “We need to get an IV started.”

Then he walked to the doorway and yelled for Dana.