His shoulders slumped, which made me feel guilty. I tried to rationalize: Don't be ridiculous. The dead have no feelings.
“Why do you keep coming back?” I asked.
He pulled a handkerchief out of his translucent pocket and wiped his forehead.
“You know why.”
“Why?”
“I want to live.”
“I'm sorry Mr. Trapper, but much as I'd like to, I can't change what happened.”
He blew his nose and put the handkerchief away.
“It wasn't any fun dying alone on the bathroom floor, doc. They didn't find me for a week. I trusted you. This whole thing is so unfair,” he said quietly.
I looked directly into his hollow eyes.
“I truly am sorry,” I said.
I stepped over his shimmering suitcase, entered the hallway and gently pulled the door closed behind me.
“It's so unfair,” he whispered as it clicked shut.
Time to Go
Recently a pleasant 95-year-old widow named Rose presented to our ER after a brief episode of chest pressure. The discomfort subsided en route to the hospital and never recurred. One of my colleagues examined her and ordered a battery of tests, all of which turned out to be normal. Later that evening he reviewed the results with the patient and her son and recommended she stay in our department overnight for cardiac monitoring. Rose was not interested in any form of aggressive resuscitation, but she didn't mind a brief period of observation. After helping her get settled in for the night, Rose's son departed saying he'd be back at nine in the morning to take his mother home.
At 4:00 a.m. Rose awoke from a deep sleep and rang the call bell. When her nurse arrived Rose said, “Laura, it's time for me to go.”
Laura glanced at her watch in the half-light and replied, “Oh, it's not time yet, ma'am; it's only four o'clock. Your son said he'd come get you around nine.”
Rose gazed up at her nurse through sibylline eyes. She clasped Laura's hands in hers and patted them gently.
“You don't understand, dear. It's time for me to go.” She then smiled, folded her arms across her chest and closed her eyes. On the cardiac monitor above the head of the bed Rose's heart rate plummeted from 80 to 50 to 20 to flatline in less than a minute. And just like that she was gone, with a cryptic little Mona Lisa smile still fixed on her lips.
Piece of Cake
Joanna is a seasoned Winnipeg emergency room RN. We’re talking old-school here. Hard-boiled. Always prepared. The original Swiss Army nurse. Recently she worked a long string of 12-hour nights. On Saturday morning when she got home she was exhausted. She knew she needed to get some sleep because she was scheduled to host her twin daughters’ 8th birthday party that afternoon and her husband was out of town. Unfortunately, between household chores and all the pre-party preparations she never made it to bed. At 2:00 p.m. the guests arrived. The kids had a great time running around and playing games. At 4:30 they sang Happy Birthday, cut the cake and opened gifts. By then Joanna was wishing she had a pair of toothpicks to help prop her eyelids open. She had only enough energy left to smile blearily at anyone who approached and croak, “Would you like some cake?”
At 5:15 the last guest left. Our sleep-deprived heroine tidied the house, made supper, helped her kids pack overnight bags and dropped them off at their grandmother’s. She then got herself ready and drove to the hospital for the last of her 7:30 p.m. to 7:30 a.m. night shifts.
By midnight she was a complete zombie. To make matters worse, the elderly gentleman she was trying to triage was a rambler.
“How can we help you tonight, sir?”
“Well ma’am, in the summer of ‘52 I injured my back while I was working in the oil patch out in Alberta, but in those days there wasn’t no such thing as Compensation so I just kept plugging away until one morning the damned thing just seized up on me and I couldn’t even get out of bed so I had to get my best friend Wilbur Mercer to drive me to the nearest hospital and the doc there took one look at me all bent over like a pretzel and he said… .”
Joanna’s eyelids began to droop.
“… my back was just plain old worn out and there wasn’t really a whole heck of a lot he could do for me except for maybe some kind of steroid injection thing but he sent me off to see a sawbones anyway and believe it or not that doc operated on me the very next day and lucky for me he did because…”
Joanna’s eyes drifted shut. As she quietly snoozed while sitting upright in her chair at the triage desk, the Midnight Rambler carried on with his ever-so-precise and focused history.
“… within a month or so I was back at work on them rigs like nothing had ever happened and that’s how I ended up with this here little scar right above my tailbone. Once in a while when there’s a change in the weather it aches something fierce for a few hours and I have to take a couple of them Tylenols to settle it down. Tonight I got to thinking about it and I started wondering if there might be a good medical explanation for why that happens. But that’s not actually the real reason why I’m here tonight. No, ma’am, the main reason I decided I should come see a doctor tonight is because about 40 years ago I was on top of my neighbour Phil Resch's barn helping him patch a hole that had been leaking for pretty near a month and best I can figure I must have slipped on some pigeon poop because wouldn't you know it all of a sudden I took a spill right off that goldarn roof and… Ma’am?” Our patient had just realized his nurse was asleep. He gently nudged her arm. “Ma’am, are you okay?”
Joanna lurched awake, bug-eyed and completely disoriented.
“WOULD YOU LIKE SOME CAKE?”
Skunked
One morning this spring Jan looked up from her newspaper to see a skunk ambling across our backyard. We’re accustomed to seeing all sorts of wildlife in our neighbourhood, but we had never witnessed a skunk before. She grabbed my camera and snapped a picture of it. That evening my daughters and I viewed the image and marvelled. It’s not every day you see a skunk, even if it’s just on the LCD screen of a digital Canon.
The next morning the skunk reappeared at exactly the same time. We all stared as she casually meandered around for several minutes before disappearing into our neighbour’s backyard through a crack in the fence.
“I think we should do something about this,” Jan announced.
“Nah,” I responded. “She’s probably just passing through.”
The skunk was back at seven o’clock the following morning. And the next. And the next… . She was so regular you could set your watch by her. My daughters took to calling her Skunky. Not long after that the words pet skunk began creeping into their conversations.
“We definitely need to do something about this,” Jan would mutter darkly.
“Maybe she lives at the neighbour’s place,” I’d reply, fingers crossed.
One morning Skunky didn’t show up at her appointed time. She missed her cameo the following day, too. Two months passed with no further skunk sightings.
“Told you,” I’d say smugly from time to time. “She was just passing through.”
Jan would just roll her eyes.
Two weeks ago Jan and I were looking through the living room window at a peculiar strip of shredded grass in our front yard when, lo and behold, Skunky sashayed into view.
“I wonder where she’s been?” I pondered aloud.
Jan banged on the window. Skunky jumped in alarm and zipped down a hitherto-unnoticed hole in the earth where our garden meets the concrete of our front steps. Uh-oh. Jan turned to me with one eyebrow raised. That’s always a bad sign.