Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott [104]
The nurse on duty was Dana Cunningham, just beginning her three-to-eleven shift. A tall, large-boned woman, she was capable of wrestling a two-hundred- pound patient to the floor. Cray had always thought she bore a certain resemblance to Walter, though he was tactful enough to avoid making the observation.
He waved at her, passing the desk, and she stopped him by rising from her chair. “Doctor? May I speak with you a moment?”
“Of course, Dana. What is it?”
“It’s about Kaylie McMillan.”
“I’m on my way to see her right now. Her daily therapy, you know.”
“Usually you’re earlier.”
“Well, there was Walter’s funeral. And an unwanted visitor who required my attention.”
“I see. It’s just that I don’t often have the chance to consult with you about her. I’m getting concerned.”
“In what way?’
“The dosage she’s on—it’s really very high.”
“Not extraordinarily so, for a loading dose.”
“I’m seeing side effects. Tremors, agitation, restlessness ...”
Cray waved off this objection with a flutter of his elegant hand. “If we lowered the loading dose for every patient who exhibited those symptoms, we’d have a hospital full of unmedicated florid schizophrenics.”
“But we may be overmedicating in this case. And the treatment program doesn’t seem to be having the desired effect. If anything, she’s become more agitated over the past week. I’m told she refused her breakfast this morning, and at lunchtime she threw the tray at the tech who brought it in. She hasn’t eaten anything all day. She’s clearly decompensating.”
“Well, then the dose should be increased, not reduced.”
“We’re already maxing her out. Doctor, what I was thinking was, maybe we should cut the chlorpromazine and trifluoperazine in half. That still ought to be high enough for a loading dose. If her condition continues to deteriorate, we could try a different strategy....”
Cray was growing bored. “I’ll tell you what,” he said smoothly. “Why don’t we continue with the current dosage schedule today, and tomorrow we’ll look at a reduction?”
Cunningham didn’t like it, but she had sufficient sense not to argue. “Okay, Doctor.”
Cray smiled. He had no concern about Kaylie’s treatment tomorrow. For her, there would be no tomorrow. He would see to that.
“Fine, then,” he said, and headed briskly down the hall, glad to escape a discussion that was, after all, not only irrelevant but premised on an entirely faulty supposition. Kaylie McMillan was indeed becoming more agitated and disturbed, but not as a consequence of any antipsychotic drugs.
She was not, in fact, receiving any antipsychotic drugs.
The vials used by the nurses for Kaylie McMillan’s three daily intramuscular injections—vials Cray himself had mixed—contained no chlorpromazine, no trifluoperazine. They contained only methyl amphetamine, the most potent amphetamine available, in an extraordinarily concentrated dose.
Speed, in street parlance. That was the medication dear Kaylie was on.
She had been taking the drug for the past week, receiving more than three hundred milligrams of meth each time she was injected by the unwitting nurses. Three injections daily. Nearly one thousand milligrams in total, day after day after day.
Methyl amphetamine’s psychotropic effects were gradual and cumulative. During the first two days Kaylie had been lucid. For that reason, Cray had kept her strapped down, with a bite block in her mouth. He didn’t want her saying too much, raising doubts among the staff.
On the third day the drug had begun to take hold. By now it had taken nearly full control of her.
The symptoms of amphetamine psychosis were almost identical to those of acute schizophrenia. Kaylie was hearing voices, harsh and accusatory. The close weave of her thought processes had unraveled. She was scared, scared all the time.