by Carl Shuker
‘Oh yes you are. You’re trouble. I know all about you,’ he said, and he changed his face to a smile and laughed in sucking slurps in his cheeks. ‘You’re trouble. What do you want you naughty wee girl.’
‘Well I was just wondering . . .’ she said. She was casting her eyes over the ceiling and then her face became a great smiling wince as if she were watching something terrible occur. ‘. . . I was just wondering if we could just possibly fit Mr Pattinson in late this morning. I know. I know.’
He became very serious and looked down at the clipboard. He frowned at it and squinted. Then he moved the clipboard and looked at her up and down, slowly from her feet to her face and back again, twice. Then he raised the clipboard again and looked at it and then he frowned and then he sighed.
‘You want to fit Mr Pattinson in last minute, do you.’
‘If we could. I’m so sorry.’
‘Slip him in when you feel like it.’
Susan laughed, almost gasping, her face moving, her eyes almost closed.
Elizabeth typed and edited and read. All the arguments lined up against what was now accomplished.
‘Just slip him in. No heads up. No phone call. No glass of wine, no small talk, no foreplay or anything,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Not even a kiss.’
Susan looked for a moment slightly lost and kept her smile. She said, ‘Yep, if you could. We really need that bed for tomorrow and it would be so nice.’
‘It’ll hurt. It’ll sting,’ the theatre coordinator said to the clipboard. ‘Feel sorry for the man.’
‘Oh thank you so much,’ Susan said. ‘That’s awesome. Thanks so much.’
‘Well you’re pretty desperate, I’ll see what I can do, hold on,’ he said and he’d taken his phone from his pocket and he turned away down the hall to answer it.
Elizabeth typed, and edited. Deleted and restored.
When he was gone Susan took out her phone and stood still. The booth was otherwise empty. She typed on her phone and all expression had gone from her face. Then she went and sat at a computer and typed.
Elizabeth finished the proof. She uploaded it to the manuscript manager and added a short cover letter addressed to Denise Cohen. Thanking the Royal London Journal of Medicine for this opportunity, referring to her by name.
Elizabeth gathered up her papers and journals and put them in her tote bag and stood up.
She looked at the back of Susan’s head.
‘You don’t have to do that, you know,’ Elizabeth said.
The woman swung around in her seat. ‘Excuse me?’ she said. ‘Do what?’
‘You don’t have to do that.’
The woman looked angry but moved behind her eyes. She looked away from Elizabeth. Then she raised her eyebrows and looked directly at Elizabeth and was about to speak but then something seemed to overwhelm her and she didn’t.
Elizabeth was halfway home when she received an email from Andrew.
The astronauts
She knocked on the door and waited.
‘Come,’ his voice finally said.
He was in his grey suit. The double-breasted with the peak lapels. He sat at his desk writing. He looked up and beckoned her without smiling and bent again to his work.
She sat.
He signed the document and sat back slightly.
‘Hello Liz.’
‘Hi Andrew.’
‘Well, look I have some bad news.’
‘Oh?’ She raised her eyebrows for him.
‘Look, Richard Whitehead has killed himself.’
She blinked. His office always seemed larger inside than was possible from the layout of the corridor. A glossy plant had dust on its leaves in the corner. Diplomas everywhere.
‘What,’ she said with no inflection.
‘I’m afraid so.’
There was a silence and he watched her.
‘Well that silly bugger,’ she said. ‘That stupid bugger.’
‘Ah,’ he said. He sighed. ‘Yes.’ He watched her. Then he moved his eyes away over the office as her face worked.
At last she said, ‘When did this happen.’
‘I don’t really have any details, I’m afraid. I think family or a girlfriend found him. Staff don’t know at present. Do you want to know the circumstances?’
‘Yes.’
‘It was a hanging at home in a garage and this occurred yesterday. That’s all I’m aware of.’
‘That stupid bugger.’
He watched her. He said, ‘Do you have this in hand?’
‘Yes,’ she said, after a moment. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘This is a very bad business and a very poor show for the hospital and this department and we need to put a stop to all gossip and speculation and uncertainty before it starts. It is down to us to control this situation.’
She breathed in through her nose and out through her nose.
‘Does his father know?’
‘Yes, yes. Brian has flown up and will shortly be giving a statement to the media and is handling the funeral tomorrow. It’s to be family only. Richard’s body is being held in the hospital morgue.’
‘Okay. What—what can I do?’
‘It is family only.’
‘I understand that.’
‘I assume you probably have some thoughts as to what this is about.’
‘I think I probably do.’
‘It’s not an uncommon phenomenon. Burnout. I suspect this will be a first for a lot of staff here, however, and we need a united front. Let’s have one version of the truth, as it were, for the sake of everyone.’
‘How exactly do you mean?’
‘Let’s be very clear. I wasn’t sure which way any of this would go. This was a very tricky situation from an administrative point of view. Here we have you. You’re an F-16, Elizabeth. You’re fast, you’re effective and you represent a considerable investment of institutional resources. You are valuable. But you’re not cut from marble and I think we’ve observed that in the last little while.’
She stared at him.
‘My father,’ he said, ‘was a surgeon in Korea. He was a prisoner of war and he told me how he took the limb traumas in the camps for walks down the latrines to conduct his examinations. For the flies. Never told the men. They complained about the itching under the dressings but the maggots do the job very well. Debride the dead flesh. Clean the wounds. Never sleep. Never need breaks. Vigilant. Consistent. Persistent. Trustworthy. People aren’t like that.’
Her face felt flushed and strange.
‘Outside of perhaps dermatology, medicine generally isn’t a good lifestyle for women. I wouldn’t actually recommend women go to med school.’
She was flinching, her eye ticcing, and she controlled it.
‘At least if they’re married,’ he said, ‘there’s some trust there. Some stability. Someone who ideally likes and supports the career. Children are a problem but not necessarily insurmountable. Do you think I’d be having this conversation if you were a man?’
‘I’ve aborted one child for this job, Andrew, that was enough for me,’ she said at last.
He sighed, and looked down at his desk.
‘When I have a vested interest, Elizabeth, I act, irrespective of the risk.’
‘I’m not sure what we’re talking about here,’ she said.
‘Well, it’s already decided.’
‘What is decided.’
‘You called me stupid, do you remember that? In the Morbidity and Mortality meeting you were quite rude to me.’ He leaned back and half laughed.
‘Is that what you’re making this about?’
‘I’m not making this about anything. This is what it is about. You might not ever have worked again, do you realise that? That performance in front of your colleagues. The quite public bisexual dalliances. The complaint from the family. Complaints from the nurses. Loco Liz, they call you. And now the embarrassing data.’
She openly sneered at him, and he laughed and then he stop
ped.
‘I can honestly take you or leave you, Elizabeth,’ he said.
‘I see,’ she said, and she nodded and nodded and sneered at him.
‘No you don’t,’ he said. ‘Because you’re getting a second chance. You’re back on call after a week’s leave. It’s already decided. If you fight this, none of it’s going to go your way. There’s to be a piece published in the New Zealand Medical Journal’s next issue on burnout and suicide and Richard’s effects on your data. The spot’s being held for us. You will contribute your name. We are going to control for the confounding of Richard, as it were. Young, inexperienced, out of his depth. He skewed the data. He was protected too much. You protected him too much. A lay media piece will follow in response to the boyfriend’s very confused article discussing the recent patient death that was attributed to you. Front foot all the way. A tragedy for the hospital and the community that is now at an end with Richard’s suicide. Staff counselling, a candlelight vigil, business as usual. I expect you there for it all. Faithful. Like a maggot, Elizabeth.’
‘What is wrong with you,’ she said.
‘Now, how’s that peer review coming along?’ he said.
Their dates all end in 1986.
Sharon Christa McAuliffe, 1948–1986; Gregory Bruce Jarvis, 1944–1986; Judith Arlene Resnik, 1949–1986; Francis Richard ‘Dick’ Scobee, 1939–1986; Ronald Erwin McNair, 1950–1986; Michael John Smith, 1945–1986; Ellison Shoji Onizuka, 1946–1986.
The others carried on. Hardy, Ebeling, Nesbitt. Feynman. Boisjoly.
George Hardy, deputy director of science and engineering at Marshall Space Flight Center, argued with the Morton Thiokol engineers who warned of the mystery of the cold. They all got one line for which they became famous. Hardy’s was: ‘I am appalled. I am appalled by your recommendation.’ Lawrence Mulloy, manager of the solid rocket booster programme, was supposed to have said: ‘My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch, next April?’ Thiokol vice-presidents overruled their engineers; they didn’t have the data, they couldn’t prove the danger. Mulloy and Hardy both took early retirement later in 86, and Mulloy was named in a US$15m negligence suit by an astronaut’s wife. Their dates effectively end in 1986 too, though they carry on in quiet new worlds.
Nesbitt became famous for his commentary, the deadpan way he delivered his line: Flight controllers here are looking very carefully at the situation. Obviously a major malfunction. He was criticised for his tone. It caused another controversy when Beyoncé used the recording to open her song ‘XO’ in 2013. Nesbitt wasn’t in fact rostered to report the launch that day. He’d volunteered for a colleague who was exhausted from staying up for delayed launch after delayed launch. After the accident Nesbitt was the last one to leave the empty offices of Mission Control and two years later volunteered to announce the first shuttle launch since Challenger. Because ‘the last one ended badly’. For every launch thereafter, he told reporters, he would cross his fingers for the first two minutes and five seconds until the boosters separated. He was strange, like all the NASA men; dedicated and compassionate and strong, yet abstracted, and bad on camera. They got the tone wrong so many times.
Feynman became famous for putting a piece of twisted rubber in iced water live on TV during the Rogers Commission. Showing how slowly it returned to its previous shape. Making it all graspable. ‘I believe this has some significance for our problem,’ he said. A movie was made and he was played by William Hurt.
Ebeling, the Morton Thiokol engineer who warned Hardy about the cold, retired early after the accident. ‘I couldn’t stand another malfunction that I had anything to do with.’ At Morton Thiokol he and Boisjoly and the others who testified were ostracised, became known as ‘the five lepers’. After he retired Ebeling volunteered on a bird refuge and won an award for volunteer of the year. In 1990 he told a newspaper, ‘Space is the new frontier. It’s the future of things. Ducks are in the past tense.’ He died in 2016, aged 89.
Boisjoly, who wrote a warning memo about cold O-rings in July 1985, died on January 6, 2012, of cancer of the colon, kidneys and liver. Boisjoly used the phrase ‘away from goodness in the current database’. He sued Morton Thiokol twice, and became a speaker on workplace ethics, got depressed and had headaches. He reported being angry at his family, avoiding church. After he testified at the Commission the first woman in space, Sally Ride, hugged him. ‘She was the only one,’ a New York Times reporter wrote he ‘whispered’ to them in 1988. ‘The only one.’
Whole careers go by with nothing else to compare; the mistakes like port-wine stains on their faces.
Something Vladi used to say. Behind the data are people. Even if you do economic analysis, again, it’s about people. And their souls are running around us, telling us: do it right.
The doctors see them. Their ghosts in the passenger seats frowning back at them in traffic.
The recovered fragments of Challenger were analysed, coated with a grease preservative and buried underground in two disused missile siloes.
Two memories
She has two memories of her father that crowd out other memories now. She returns to them, especially when she’s tired, and studies and revises them but they never change. They reify and increase in density. The sun and moon over the dissolving territory of her young adulthood. Her father gave her his old camera when she went to medical school. He was an amateur photographer and he had bought something digital. It was a Konica he’d used since he was a young man. She never used it at university and she lost it in one of the freezing flats she’d lived in in Dunedin. She never told him, never said anything to him. Afraid. When he died she found the camera boxed up with her stuff when she cleared out his house. The leather case filmed with grey mould. She’d forgotten that she’d taken it home and left it there and he’d had it the whole time, neither of them aware it was found, or, for him, that it was even lost.
Her father had good things. Ray-Ban Wayfarers from the 60s. A leather jacket. Good British boots he stopped wearing when the cartilage in his knees went. He cleaned the boots with his work shoes and her brown Rangi T-bars every Sunday night. Listening to National Radio. He warmed the nugget in a crude bain-marie on the stove. He had one rag for black and one rag for brown. The corners of the rags were stiff with old nugget till it softened under his hands. When he had his knees replaced he was taller by almost an inch. When the myocardial infarction killed him he was leaned against the hedge, watching her mow the small lawns of his new ownership flat. He fell as if in slow motion from that extra inch the surgery had gifted him, from that distance of the extra four years he walked without pain. The other memory is of the feeling of her father watching her work. That sea anchor dragging, the awful compromised feeling.
In the ICU
Wellington ICU was on the third floor. She walked there, up the stairs, beside her theatres, and she swiped her card at the main entrance. She saw Ben Matthews at the nurses’ station on the ward. Black dress trousers and a blue gingham shirt. Dark short hair, dark eyes in Specsavers frames. Asymmetric face with a touch of eczema, half a sneer, half a neutral smile. Rubbing his hands together as he listened to two nurses in identical white polo shirts and blue trousers.
‘Dr Matthews?’ she said.
‘Yup, that’s me,’ he said and assessed her.
‘Hello.’
‘Hello?’ He laughed.
‘Excuse us for a minute please,’ Elizabeth said to the nurses.
He’d recognised her then and was looking at her differently. No more smile.
‘Would you like us to take this somewhere,’ he said.
‘No, this is fine,’ she said.
‘What can I do for you. Elizabeth isn’t it?’
‘Taylor, that’s right.’
‘Pleased to meet you.’
‘Pleased to meet you, too. I’d like to ask some questions about a patient of ours.’
‘Lisa Williams.’
‘That’s right.’
‘What would you like
to know?’
‘I’d like to know about her time in ICU and how she died.’
He watched her face. He thought for a while, then he looked over towards the nurses in the station. They’d stopped talking.
‘Are you sure you don’t want a cup of coffee?’ he said. ‘We could head down to Wishbone, or an office?’
‘No. This is fine.’
‘Okay.’
‘Okay.’
‘Okay. All right. Lisa was transferred to us in ICU post-op, breathing spontaneously but with some difficulty. Low BP, tachycardic. We had her on a Hudson mask and my plan was for high-flow nasal oxygen and then try some CPAP if her sats dropped below 90. She was awake and oriented and she was tolerating a few sips of liquid. How much detail do you want, Mrs Taylor?’
‘As much as you recall.’
‘As much as I recall. Well, I might bring Jan in on this if you don’t mind. Jan was running the ward.’
He looked over at the nurses and there were three and all of them were examining screens or notes.
‘Jan? Can you help us out?’
They stood and looked at the nurses and the senior nurse in a purple shirt was signing some documents.
‘So. The parents and the boyfriend were here for the death,’ Matthews said.
‘Uh huh.’
The senior nurse signed another document and said something and the other nurses laughed and then she turned towards them.
‘I read that piece by the way and it was bullshit. That thing online they published,’ he said before she was close enough to hear.
‘It was his bullshit though. It was true for him.’
He watched her.
‘Yes. Okay.’
The senior nurse had white hair and watchful eyes and her smile was stiff when she saw Elizabeth.
Matthews said, ‘Jan, this is about Lisa Williams, 24-year-old girl. The sepsis from a little while ago now.’
‘Oh.’
‘Mrs Taylor here was her surgeon. Wants to know a bit about her admission.’
‘Okay.’
‘Okay,’ Matthews said. ‘We had her on the usual lines. We examined her surgical sites and they were clean. Her abdomen felt soft. She said she wasn’t in pain and she was talking to the family. Awake, alert, talking in full sentences. Communicating her needs. Is this the sort of detail?’