Cannot Wait to Get to Heaven - Fannie Flagg [69]
“Patient. Mrs. Shimfissle, closest relative, Mrs. Norma Warren.”
“Yeah?”
“Mistakenly pronounced dead, left for five hours.”
“You’re kidding?”
“No, I saw the file.”
“Have they signed anything yet?”
“Yes…the two happiness boys got to her right away.”
“That’s OK. This could be big. Really big. Telling you somebody’s dead is one hell of a misdiagnosis.”
“I thought so.”
“If it goes, you’re in for twenty percent this time. OK?”
“Plus my usual finder’s fee.”
“Of course,” he said, thinking but not saying, “You greedy little bastard.”
But when the two-hundred-and-eighty-pound lawyer hung up, he was ecstatic. This could be a really good case. He was not worried that the family had already signed the usual no-responsibility waivers. There was not a waiver, an irrevocable trust fund, a prenuptial agreement, a contract, verbal or written, that he could not get somebody out of, or around. Caraway Hospital was his big fat personal gold mine, just waiting to be mined over and over again. He calculated that after he paid off the nurse and maybe threw a little dough at the clients, by the time he got through, he would make plenty. Of course his wife, Selma, hated it whenever he took on another lawsuit against a hospital. She said, “Gus, you keep suing these hospitals for every little thing. God forbid if I should ever wind up in the emergency room, and they find out who I’m married to, they will be afraid to touch me.”
A Doctor’s Dilemma
At around five that afternoon, Reverend Susie Hill, who was still a little shaken up from the ordeal of having seen a woman she thought was dead fly by her and wave at her, left the hospital, and Norma, Macky, and Linda stayed with Elner until visiting hours were over. They decided Linda would go home with Norma and Macky that night, and they would all try to get a good night’s sleep and come back in the morning. If Aunt Elner was still doing as well as she was tonight, Macky would drive Linda to the airport so she could get back to work tomorrow.
Downstairs, Dr. Bob Henson had just handed his urine sample over to the guy working in the lab, and walked out the door. He had started out in medicine the same way most had: young, full of ambition, fueled with the desire to help mankind, to save lives, make a difference. Now he was thirty-two, a little jaded, but mostly exhausted and pretty fed up with the stupidity of the mostly flotsam and jetsam array of humans that came in and out of the emergency room, day and night. The sheer futility of spending hours digging bullets out of young men, sewing up knife wounds, dealing with drug overdoses, drunks, insane people, beaten-up prostitutes, suicide attempts, treating the same ones over and over again for the same thing, had made him quick-tempered and irritable. Having to constantly deal with the screaming mothers of dead sons shot down in the streets over some gang rivalry, having to tell nice middle-class parents that their children were dead because they had been driving doped up or drunk, or had been hit by someone who was. In only two years of ER his opinion of the human race had plummeted.
He was beginning to believe that a lot of people were just taking up space, wasting the time of doctors, draining the hospital’s resources, using up time and energy and money that could be used elsewhere. When he confided his feelings to a fellow ER physician, the guy had said, “Jesus, Bob, what an attitude, you better get some help.” But he hadn’t. He hadn’t had time; with his life at the hospital, where he spent long hours either in ER or in his grubby, messy little office, doing endless paperwork, or trying to grab a few minutes of sleep on the lumpy futon, he barely had time to brush his teeth.
And home was no better. He had married a girl a few years older than he was who had been intent on getting pregnant as soon as possible. He had wanted to wait but she had been determined, and now, thanks to all the new fertility methods, he had two small children, one three, the other two, and now according to the sonogram she’d had last week