Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [257]
Perhaps that same day, perhaps a few days later, a man was on the edge of my bed. He took my pulse, called my name. It was my former Chief Resident and now my colleague at Our Lady, Deepak Jesudass. I desperately held his hand and asked him not to leave—I must have recognized the danger of my situation.
“I'm not leaving,” he said. “Just pulling back the curtain.” My memory is that I told him everything that had transpired. He examined me as I spoke. He pulled down my eyelids, interrupting me only to ask that I look down at my feet, or say “Ah!” At one point he inquired if I had a stethoscope in the house. I said, “Are you kidding? I'm a surgeon,” and we laughed together, a strange sound that had been missing from my home. I said “Ouch” when he probed just under my ribs on the right. I found this funny. I heard him murmuring on the telephone. All the while, I did not let go of his hand.
Three men whose faces I knew arrived with a stretcher. They wrapped me in a flannel cocoon, carried me out to the curb, and lifted me up into their ambulance. I remember wanting to say something about the beauty of their motion, the inherent grace, and how incredible it was, this baby-kangaroo-in-pouch feeling. I apologized for not having appreciated their skill all these years.
Deepak rode with me. At Our Lady, he walked alongside my gurney past the shocked faces of the staff we encountered in the halls and elevator. He wheeled me into the Intensive Care Unit of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour. My eyes glowed yellow under the harsh fluorescent lights, but I didn't know it. My skin, too. I bled wildly from every needle stick. Too late, the nurses tried to hide the ominous tea-colored urine in my catheter bag from me, but I saw. For the first time, I was very, very scared.
The increasing swelling in my brain made me desperately sleepy. I held on to consciousness long enough to ask Deepak to come near. “Whatever happens,” I whispered, “don't take me from Our Lady. If I must die and can't die at Missing, I want to die here.”
At some point I was aware that Thomas Stone came to my bedside and was studying me, but not with the concern of a clinician. It was the petrified look I knew so well, the look of a parent whose child had suffered some misfortune. It was at about this time that I lost consciousness.
AS I LEARNED LATER, the cable to Hema read: COME AT ONCE STOP MARION CRITICALLY ILL STOP THOMAS STONE STOP P.S. DO NOT DELAY STOP—and she did not. Hema called in her favor with the Comrade President-for-Life's wife, who understood all too well Hema's need to be at her son's sickbed. The American Embassy readily provided visas, and by day's end, Hema and Shiva were on their way to Frankfurt via Cairo. Then, still on Lufthansa, they crossed the Atlantic. Hema pulled out the telegram more than once, studying the letters, looking for a hopeful anagram. Over Greenland, she said to Shiva, “Perhaps this means Thomas Stone is near death, not Marion.”
Shiva said with absolute certainty, “No, Ma. It's Marion. I can feel it.”
At ten in the night New York time, they floated into the Intensive Care Unit, a graying woman in a maroon sari, the face striking despite the raccoon rings around her eyes. With her was a tall youthful man who was so obviously her son and my identical twin.
They slowed outside my glass cubicle, weary Old World travelers peering into the glow of a New World hospital room. There I was, the son who went to the States for