The Sisterhood - Michael Palmer [26]
“I’m going off to a conference on the Cape for a few days. This handsome young doctor will be covering for me. He was the chief resident a few years ago at White Memorial. I couldn’t even get accepted for an internship there. His name’s David Shelton.” Huttner motioned David over to the head of the bed.
David took Huttner’s place, setting his arms on the sheet and resting his chin on them, six inches away from Charlotte’s face. It seemed to take several seconds for her to focus on him.
“I’m David, Mrs. Thomas. How do you do?” he said, realizing at the same instant that she had already answered his ill-conceived greeting several times. “Is there anything you need right now? Anything I can get for you?” He waited until he felt certain no response was forthcoming, then made a move to stand up. Suddenly Charlotte Thomas reached out a spongy, bruised hand and grasped his with surprising force.
“Dr. Shelton, please listen to me,” she said in a husky, halting voice that had its own unexpected strength. “Dr. Huttner is a wonderful man and a wonderful doctor. He wants so much to help me. You must make him understand. I do not want to be helped anymore. All I want is to have these tubes taken out and to be kept comfortable until I go to sleep. You must make him understand that. Please. This is torture for me. A nightmare. Make him understand.”
Her eyes flashed for an instant, then closed. She took several deep breaths and settled heavily back on the pillow. Her breathing slowed. It seemed to David that it might stop altogether, but within a minute a coarse, rhythmic stertor developed and held.
All David could manage was a whispered, “You’re going to be all right, Mrs. Thomas,” as Huttner took him by the arm and led him out of the room.
In the hallway the two men faced one another. Huttner was first to break the silence.
“Quite some night we’ve had for ourselves, yes?” he said, smiling his understanding.
“Yeah,” David answered. He pawed at the floor with one foot. He would have said more but for a persistent sliver of fear that he was about to come apart in front of the man.
Huttner scrutinized his face, then said, “David, never forget that many times patients with serious illness express the wish to die when they’re in a stage of weakness and pain. I’ve been around for a long time. I’ve seen many patients as sick or sicker than Charlotte Thomas recover. This woman is going to make it. She is to get total, aggressive treatment and, if necessary, a full-scale Code Ninety-nine resuscitation. Understand?”
“Yes, sir … I mean, yes, Wally,” David said mechanically, although he was searching his memory for the last time he had seen a sixty-year-old patient recover from the sort of severe, multisystem disease that beset Charlotte Thomas.
“We’re in agreement, then,” Huttner said, beaming with pleasure at having successfully made his point. “Let’s go write a few orders on this woman, then we can call it a day.”
As they approached the nurses’ station, David bet himself a guitar and six months of introductory lessons that the last critical moment of the hectic evening had passed.
An instant later, a portly man dressed in a turtleneck sweater and tweed sportcoat emerged from the visitors’ lounge at the far end of the hall and headed toward them. He was still thirty feet away when David knew with certainty that another wager had been lost. The anger in the man’s jaw-forward stride was mirrored in his reddened face and tight, bloodless lips. His fists were suspended several inches away from his body on rigid arms.
David glanced over at Huttner, who showed a flicker of recognition but no other emotion.
“Professor Thomas?” David whispered.
Huttner nodded his head a fraction, then moved forward. David slowed and watched as the two men closed on one another like combatants at a medieval joust. The grandstand for their confrontation was the nurses’ station, where several nurses, an aide, and the ward secretary fell silent, fascinated spectators.