After treatment with cortisone and immunosuppressive drugs, her symptoms improved. But the effusion persisted. She was warned that if her symptoms worsened again, the doctors would have to remove the fluid from her heart with a needle. Marci shivered to herself, not wanting even to imagine what that would be like. They said it wouldn’t hurt. But that’s what they told her when they took fluid off her lungs. And it had hurt like hell.
“You’re not taking me to remove the fluid from my heart, are you?” Marci asked at length.
“No,” Carolyn assured her. “There’s no need for that, not with your symptoms getting better.”
“The drugs are really helping,” Marci said, but she was being less than honest. The drugs had been working, making her feel stronger and stronger, until just after lunch. Then her symptoms of weakness and shortness of breath began to return. It wasn’t as bad as before, and Marci kept hoping the beneficial effects of the drugs would kick in again. “Dr. Ballineau says that sometimes the drugs work even better with time.”
“Dr. Ballineau is a straight shooter,” Carolyn told her. “If he says it’s so, it’s so.”
“And he said we could even increase the dose of my medicines if we need to,” Marci went on, wondering if she should tell the nurse about her worsening symptoms.
“Let’s hope that won’t be necessary.” Carolyn reached for a hand mirror on the night table and asked, “Do you want to carry this?”
“Yes.”
Marci took the mirror and carefully studied her face. She still considered herself pretty, with her soft features, doe-like brown eyes, and blond ponytail. But the cortisone was making her cheeks puffy, and the red rash on her forehead was more obvious. And she knew deep down that it was just a matter of time before her illness caused her beauty to disappear altogether. Then people would stare at her rash and her bloated face, and feel sorry for her. And she would be ugly and never have another date or get married and have children. Tears welled up in her eyes, and she looked away to hide them.
“Do you have anything hidden away we should take with us?” Carolyn broke into Marci’s thoughts.
“My Mickey Mouse slippers under the bed,” Marci said, still looking away.
Carolyn reached for the slippers adorned with the Disney character and placed them on the bed. “Anything in the bathroom?”
“My curling iron and hair dryer are in the cabinet drawer.”
Carolyn hurried into the oversized bathroom, with its marble fixtures and glass-enclosed shower, and fetched Marci’s personal items. She gave the bath and bidet a final glance before returning to the sitting area, where a housekeeper was dusting off a 42-inch plasma television screen that was set into the wall. Another housekeeper was carefully arranging leather-upholstered chairs around a polished coffee table.
Although Carolyn had worked on the Beaumont Pavilion for over a year, she was still impressed by how luxurious the individual suites were. They looked like rooms you would expect to find in a Ritz-Carlton hotel. And that was the intent when the Pavilion was designed. The rooms were reserved for the privileged and wealthy, and particularly for those benefactors who contributed generously to the hospital. The house staff had aptly nicknamed the floor the Gold Coast. Tonight, Carolyn thought somberly, it would be called by another name—the Western White House.
“Will my parents be notified that I’m changing rooms?” Marci asked.
“We’ll see to it,” Carolyn replied.
“Maybe I should call my dad,” Marci suggested.
“Let us take care of it,” Carolyn said. Marci’s father was a powerful entertainment lawyer who made demands every time he came onto the floor and, on a few occasions, when he was unhappy, ended up calling the dean’s office. The last thing Carolyn needed this evening was an angry phone call from a pain in the ass like Bert Matthews.
“Done!” the head housekeeper called out.
“Grab the foot of the bed,” Carolyn instructed, glancing around to make certain all the wires and monitors were disconnected. Then she quickly put the side rails up.
With care they guided the bed, Marci still in it, out the door and down the hall. Just past the nurses’ station they stopped and waited while another bed was being wheeled out of a nearby room. It carried Diana Dunn, a movie actress in her early sixties who had once starred alongside some of Hollywood’s most handsome leading men. But her beautiful face and body were now withered and wasted by progressive liver failure. As usual, her skin color was yellow, her breathing labored, and she was asleep. And she would sleep forever, Carolyn thought grimly, unless a donor for a liver transplant was found soon. Very, very soon.
Carolyn shouted over to Kate Blanchard, the junior nurse on the Pavilion who was pushing Diana Dunn’s bed, “Kate, would you take Marci down to fourteen and get her set up?”
“I’ve got to connect Diana to her monitors,” Kate shouted back as she repositioned an IV line. She was tall and young, with sharp features and jet-black hair. “It’ll take a few minutes.”
“Have one of the interns do it,” Carolyn directed.
“Gotcha.”
“Did you put Sol in his new room?” Carolyn asked.
Kate shook her head. “He won’t move until he talks to you.”
“Christ!” Carolyn grumbled under her breath. She put a confident smile on her face and squeezed Marci’s hand. “Kate will take good care of you. You’re going to do fine, kiddo.”
“You promise?” Marci asked, trying to read the nurse’s expression.
“Carolyn doesn’t lie.”
Marci waved with her fingers as her bed was wheeled away. She grinned almost enough to cover her fear.
Carolyn raced down the corridor and checked her wristwatch. She was already behind. The rooms should have been cleared out ten minutes earlier for the President. And it would take at least another ten minutes to get everything in order. But Carolyn loved the adrenaline surge and excitement of an emergent situation, where things had to be done quickly and correctly under pressure. That was what had attracted her to being a flight nurse for MedEvac, hopping into helicopters and flying to crash scenes, where life-and-death predicaments awaited her. And often she was the only trained medical person aboard, so she served more as a doctor than a nurse, starting IVs, administering drugs, and opening airways. Her schedule was hectic, twelve hours on and twelve hours off, with frequent double shifts.
But how she loved it, and she would still be doing it if her mother hadn’t become ill. A couple of years earlier, her mother started becoming forgetful, and a few times wandered off and got lost. With her mom’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, Carolyn could no longer be away erratically and for prolonged periods of time. So a year and a half earlier, she gave up flight nursing and took the position of head nurse on the Beaumont Pavilion.
In this luxurious ward, which often felt to her like a boring prison, she worked a tedious eight hours a day, five days a week, on a regular schedule. The only good part was the generous salary that allowed her to hire a sitter to care for her mother during the time she was on duty at the hospital. That damned disease takes away so much from the patient and the patient’s family. It changed everything for everybody, destroying hopes and dreams and lives. A wave of sadness came over Carolyn as she thought about her mother withering away, now only a shell of the person she used to be.
An alarm suddenly sounded behind Carolyn.
She spun around and saw an intern trying to reattach a monitor wire to Diana Dunn’s chest. He was having a difficult time with it.
“Do that when you get her into a room,” Carolyn called out. “Let’s keep this corridor clear.”
“Mrs. Dunn won’t stop twisting and turning,” the intern called back. “I don’t think the wire will stay on.”
“Then tape it down with double strips.”
Caro
lyn hurried along as she turned for an open door, now thinking about the half-dozen things she still had to do before the President arrived on the ward. There just wasn’t enough time to do everything. And only God knew what else the Secret Service would want done.
She entered Sol Simcha’s room and gave the small, thin man a stern look. “Why won’t you move?”
“Oh, I’ll move,” Simcha said pleasantly, looking up from his chair. “I just wanted to talk with you first.”
“About what?” Carolyn asked impatiently.
“Anything,” Simcha said with a shrug. “You’re the only person who talks to me. And more importantly, you’re the only one who listens.”
“And that makes me special, huh?” Carolyn asked.
“Doubly special,” Simcha replied sincerely. “And besides, it’s not often that an old man like me gets to talk to a pretty girl like you. And there’s something else you should know.”
“What?”
“Whenever I see you, I automatically feel better.”
Carolyn’s heart melted, as it always did in the presence of Sol Simcha. She wasn’t sure how he did it. Maybe it was his kind face, or maybe his gentle voice, or maybe the sweet disposition he had despite having lived through the hell of a Nazi concentration camp called Auschwitz. Her gaze drifted from his heavily lined face and thinning gray hair to his forearm, where a row of faded numbers were tattooed. “We’ll talk as we go. Now let’s get you in bed, and we’ll wheel you to—”
“No,” Simcha interrupted. “If I’m to move, I’ll walk, like a mensch.”
Carolyn groaned good-naturedly. Although she was in a hurry and short on time, she’d make time for Sol Simcha. She helped him up and waited while he steadied himself on legs damaged by an inflammatory muscle disease called polymyositis. “Okay, let’s go nice and easy.”
Simcha shifted his feet, barely able to lift them off the floor, but somehow he managed to get them moving forward. They made slow progress out of the room and into the hall, with Simcha holding on tightly to the nurse.
Carolyn noticed that the old man was breathing more heavily than usual. A progressive type of interstitial fibrosis was affecting his lungs. It was a rare complication seen in some patients with polymyositis. And it made the shopping mall magnate’s condition even more miserable, but he never complained about it. He figured it was minuscule compared to what he had already been through in life.
“Your arms seem stronger,” Carolyn said.
“They are,” Simcha agreed. “But my legs are still weak as a kitten.”
“Maybe the strength will come back to them soon, too.”
“From your lips to God’s ear.”
Carolyn gently patted the old man’s hand. “Somebody once told me that most Holocaust survivors had lost their faith in God.”
“That’s not true,” Simcha said at once. “We just think He was looking the other way when it happened.”
After a pause, Carolyn said, “You’re a remarkable man, Sol Simcha.”
“I like the way you say Simcha, with a hard cha,” Simcha praised. “You say it pretty good for being an Episcopalian.”
Carolyn smiled briefly. “Simcha sounds like an unusual name. Do you know its origin?”
“I picked it myself,” Simcha told her. “When I was rescued from the concentration camp and brought to America, it was the happiest time of my life. So I said to hell with my Ukrainian name, which was filled with bad memories, and chose the word in Hebrew and Yiddish for happiness or celebration. Simcha.”
“Nice,” Carolyn said, warmed by the story. “And I think you’re still a happy man, even with your illness.”
“I am,” Simcha told her. “And you should be happy too. You’re a wonderful nurse, and you have such a handsome doctor for a boyfriend.”
Carolyn looked at him strangely. “I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“The way you gaze at Dr. Ballineau says otherwise.”
“God! Is it that obvious?”
“Yes.”
Carolyn shrugged indifferently. “I don’t think he even notices me.”
“Then you’re blind,” Simcha said bluntly. “He looks at you the same way you look at him.”
Just ahead, the elevator door opened and Aaron Wells stepped out, followed by two other agents. He hurried over to Carolyn and asked, “Are you the head nurse?”
“I am,” Carolyn said.
“I’m Agent Wells,” he introduced himself. “Have you got this ward cleared?”
“I’ll need another ten minutes.”
Wells frowned, unhappy with the report. “How many rooms have been vacated?”
Carolyn pointed to her left. “All those from the end of the corridor up to the nurses’ station.”
“And how many people work on this ward?” Wells asked. “Limit it to essential personnel.”
Carolyn thought for a moment. “There would be five altogether. Two nurses, two interns, and a ward clerk.”
“No resident?”
“He’s out sick.”
Wells motioned to the agents behind him. “Bill, Owen—check every room wall to wall, ceiling to floor. Throw out everything that’s not furniture.”
The agents dashed down the corridor as Wells spoke briefly into the microphone on his wrist. He was directing another agent to come up and run security checks on all the medical personnel.
Simcha’s jaw dropped as he noticed the wire snaking down from the agent’s earphone to his collar. He quickly turned to Carolyn and asked, “Are we being moved for the Pres—?”
Carolyn brought a finger to her lips, hushing him. She gestured to Kate Blanchard, who was behind the nurses’ station. “Kate! Put Sol in room twelve for me, please.”
Wells waited for the patient to shuffle away, then came back to Carolyn. “I need to look at all the rooms that won’t be occupied by patients.”
“Let’s begin here,” Carolyn said, heading for the chart room.
Two interns, wide-eyed, stepped aside as the powerfully built Secret Service agent entered. Wells quickly searched them, then turned his attention to the charts hanging on a metal rack and made certain they contained only medical records. Next he went through the drawers of two desks and the overhead shelves above them. Finally he opened the interns’ doctor bags and poured their instruments on a tabletop. He rummaged through stethoscopes, ophthalmoscopes, and small reflex hammers, and found nothing that could be used as a weapon.
“Sorry for the inconvenience,” Wells told the interns, then turned to Carolyn. “Lead on.”
They walked through a door and into a large closet, which served as the medicine room. The shelves were stocked with bottles of tablets and liquids and plastic bags of IV fluids. A locked narcotics cabinet was off to the side. There were no windows or other connecting doors.
“Okay,” Wells said, backing out.
Carolyn showed him the way into the nurses’ station. A husky young African American man with very broad shoulders and hands the size of hams was sitting behind the desk. He quickly got to his feet and straightened his tie.
“This is Jarrin Smith, our ward clerk,” Carolyn said.
“I’ve got to search you,” Wells informed the clerk.
“No problem,” Jarrin said, turning around with his hands held up high.
Wells frisked him and found only a small nail clipper. “Sorry for the inconvenience.”
“No problem,” Jarrin said again.
Carolyn led the way across the corridor and into the nearby nurses’ lounge. It was spotless, with a refrigerator, microwave oven, coffeemaker, and two couches. The tall metal lockers were open and held only jackets and umbrellas. A bathroom at the rear had been recently scrubbed.
As they left the lounge, Wells asked, “The guy at the front desk i
s big as a tree. Is there a reason for having a clerk that large?”
“His size is irrelevant,” Carolyn replied. “He’s a sophomore in medical school, and works some of the night shifts because he needs the money.”
They hurried on and came to the treatment room. In its center was an operating table with overhead lights. There were two metal stools around the table, and behind them a glass cabinet filled with medicines and supplies. Off to the side was a basin and, next to it, a countertop that held blood-drawing equipment. The walls were covered with white tiles, the ceiling with removable synthetic panels.
“Can they do emergency operations in here?” Wells inquired.
“Only minor procedures,” Carolyn replied. “Things like tracheotomies and thoracenteses.”
“What is the last thing you said?”
“Thoracentesis. It’s the removal of fluid from the chest using a needle.”
They continued on to the end of the corridor and entered a windowless room that had stacks of serving trays and gleaming silverware. A cabinet off to the side contained linen napkins, fine glassware, and colorful tablecloths.
“This is where we get our patients’ meals,” Carolyn said.
Wells glanced around, looking for ovens and stoves or adjoining rooms. There weren’t any. “Where is the food prepared?”
“Down one level,” Carolyn replied. “The Beaumont Pavilion has its own chefs, and all meals are ordered by the patients from a menu. The meals are sent up to us on the dumbwaiter next to the cabinet.”
Patient One: A Novel Page 5