Some Nerve

by Jane Heller

  “We’re full up in the gift shop,” she added. “But, considering your background, maybe we should put you in the magazines program. You’d be perfect.”

  “You want me to interview the patients?” My God, did she somehow sense I was there under false pretenses?

  “Interview them?” She laughed. “Lord, no. As a matter of fact, I need to tell you about HIPAA, which stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Basically, it’s a federal law regarding privacy. It mandates that any breach of confidentiality about a patient’s medical condition will land you in big trouble. We’re talking about a fine and possible imprisonment.”

  “Wow. You could never have that law at hospitals in L.A.,” I said. “Everybody’s frantic for information when a movie star is admitted there, right down to the diagnosis. The paparazzi stake out all the entrances.”

  “They do have that law at hospitals in L.A.,” she said. “They have it at every hospital in the country. But I’m sure it’s tougher to enforce when celebrities are involved. We don’t have much of a problem, fortunately, not being a magnet for the movie-star set.”

  If you only knew, I thought as she went back to her computer. Of course, it occurred to me then that Richard’s blabbing to me about Goddard was more than a harmless attempt on his part to dazzle me; it was a serious breach of ethics that really could land him in big trouble. It also occurred to me that writing about Goddard while he was a patient and I was a volunteer could land me in big trouble—unless I avoided any mention of his medical condition and stuck strictly to his life and career prior to his hospitalization. Yes, I would write the story without even a passing reference to Heartland, with no information about where I’d interviewed him or under what circumstances. I would say we met at an “undisclosed location.” It would give the piece a hint of mystery. Harvey would love that.

  “So. We’ll put you in magazines,” said Shelley. “You’ll be in charge of the cart that has new issues of all the major ones. You knock on the patients’ doors, ask if they’d like anything to read, and give them a copy of Famous or People or whatever else they want. If they ask you to read to them, you read to them. If they ask you to sit with them, you sit with them. If they ask you to talk to them, to be their companion for a little while, you do that too. How does that sound?”

  It sounded like an odd juxtaposition. I used to write pieces on the entertainment world. Now I would be reading somebody else’s pieces on the entertainment world—to people with tubes sticking out of every orifice. I realized there was no getting around it: I’d have to do more than stand around looking useful. “It sounds incredible,” I said, bursting with positive energy. I intended to convey to Shelley that I was looking forward to a wonderful, horizon-expanding adventure. I would touch lives and, as a result, become a stronger, more courageous person who would go on from this experience and reach great heights. Or whatever.

  THAT AFTERNOON I stopped in at the hospital’s lab to obtain my health clearance, then underwent three hours of orientation in a conference room with a half dozen other would-be volunteers. I learned that Heartland General had 250 private rooms and 1,500 employees, and catered to every conceivable medical specialty. I also learned that my mode of dress as a volunteer would be white pants, white shirt, white shoes, and a pink-and-white-striped smock; that we should always use the staff elevators, not the visitors’ elevators; that it was imperative that we leave it to the nurses to both examine the patients and escort them in and out of bed; and that my mission as a volunteer was to treat patients with compassion, dignity, and respect, no matter what their demeanor.

  Blah blah blah, I thought, wishing we could just dispense with the formalities so I could start my campaign to track down Goddard. But no. Jeff, our leader, a pleasant-looking man in his forties with a receding hairline and one of those walruslike mustaches that curls up at the ends, was frustratingly thorough. He even asked us to introduce ourselves and say which program we’d chosen. Ethan, a muscular twentysomething with a mullet, was volunteering in the ER because “that’s where the real action’s at.” Nadine, a woman in her sixties who wore a nun’s habit, wasn’t offering spiritual services but rather musical ones; she was going to play the harp for the patients. Hank, a tiny, wrinkled man in his eighties, was participating in the puppy program along with Tillie, his cocker spaniel. And then there was Jeanette, a conservatively dressed blonde about my age—the very essence of the wholesome, corn-fed Midwestern gal. When asked what had brought her to Heartland, she said, “I got drunk and fell down a flight of stairs while I was pregnant. I lost the baby. My husband left me. I had a complete breakdown. My therapist suggested that by working with sick and needy children in pediatrics, I would feel better about myself.” Everyone applauded.

  “How about you?” asked Jeff, nodding in my direction. “It’s Ann, right?”

  “Yes, Ann Roth,” I said, nervous suddenly. “Like Ross, only with a lisp.” It was a silly line and I vowed that minute to stop using it, but Jeanette was a tough act to follow and I felt pressure to top her on the schmaltz meter. “I’ll be working in magazines, because, um, magazines are the literature of hope, the people’s poetry. I’ve seen how they offer a distraction for the sick and needy and help take their minds off their problems. And, like Jeanette, I’ve had my own personal crisis, my own breakdown of sorts. I came to volunteer here so I could heal myself in the process of healing others.” Oh God.

  “That’s beautiful,” said Nadine, the nun, while Ethan, the one with the mullet, pumped his fist in solidarity.

  “Thank you all for being so forthcoming,” said Jeff. “Now we’ll be turning our attention to serious matters. Matters that affect the health and safety of our patients. Matters that could, if not handled correctly, trigger panic and fear.”

  Panic and fear. My two least favorite words in the English language. I felt my palms moisten.

  “We’ll start with the emergency codes,” he went on. “Code blue is a life-threatening situation involving cardiac arrest or respiratory failure. If you’re with a patient who’s exhibiting signs of either condition, your job is to determine if the patient is breathing and/or has a pulse and, if not, to find the nearest hospital phone and dial 111, our equivalent of 911. Then—”

  “Excuse me, Jeff,” I interrupted, raising my hand. Shelley hadn’t mentioned cardiac arrest and respiratory failure, had she? “You told us never to examine the patients ourselves.”

  “Right,” he said. “I misspoke. In a code blue situation, it’s really up to you. If you’d rather get a nurse to check the patient for unresponsiveness, do that. And thanks for the question, Ann.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said, somewhat reassured that I would not have to make the decision as to whether or not a person was dead, let alone touch that person.

  “When a code blue is announced over the paging system, a specially trained team will exit the staff elevator and rush to the scene,” he said. “As a volunteer, you must remember to stay out of their way, which is why you should always use the visitors’ elevators.”

  My hand shot up.

  “Yes, Ann?”

  “You told us to use the staff elevators.”

  He thought for a minute, then nodded. “I guess it’s more practical to use the staff elevators, except when there’s a code blue emergency.”

  “But we won’t know in advance if there’s a code blue emergency,” I said. “We could be on a staff elevator, minding our own business, and—bam—the code blue team shows up.”

  He nodded again. “Then use the visitors’ elevators unless you’re transporting a patient in a wheelchair.”

  Up went my hand.

  “What is it, Ann?”

  “You told us to let a nurse escort patients in and out of bed, so why would we ever be transporting them in a wheelchair?”

  Jeff twirled the ends of his mustache. “In special cases, you might be transporting them, but I wouldn’t worry about it. Okay?” He said that as if to mea
n: “Will you shut up now?”

  “Got it,” I said.

  Jeff moved on to other codes, including code gray, which related to “suspicious unknown individuals.”

  “I’m not here to alarm you,” he said, immediately alarming me, “but because we’re a highly visible entity in the area and our doors are open day and night, there’s always the possibility of a confrontation with an abusive or even dangerous person.”

  Up went my hand.

  “Ann?”

  “Are we talking about a terrorist?” I said, which elicited gasps.

  “It’s unlikely,” said Jeff, “but don’t hesitate to call 111 if you’re afraid.”

  If I’m afraid? I started to feel more and more dizzy as I listened to Jeff warn us about things like hazardous-materials spills, abductions of newborns, and lapses in infection control, which could lead to contact with contaminated blood, which could lead to—

  “And finally, we need to talk about code red,” he said. “Fire is the worst thing that can happen at any hospital.”

  “What should we do if we smell smoke?” asked Hank, the man with the cocker spaniel.

  “Your first priority is to remove the patient from danger,” said Jeff. “Then you—”

  “Sorry to repeat myself, but you told us not to escort a patient in or out of bed,” I reminded him without bothering to raise my hand this time.

  “Fire is a different story, Ann. Your job is to get him out of the room, close the door, pull the nearest fire alarm, and call 111.”

  “What if he’s not ambulatory?” I said, hearing myself sort of screech.

  Jeff yanked on his mustache. Hard. “Just find the fire alarm and pull it,” he said curtly. “And then get a nurse to move the patient.”

  I sat back in my chair and felt my knees knock, my mind filled with visions of all the ways I could fuck up as a volunteer.

  “Psst.”

  I glanced to my left. Jeanette was leaning over to speak to me. “What?” I whispered.

  “You ask a lot of good questions,” she said. “You should be a reporter for one of those magazines you’ll be giving out.”

  “Actually, I used to be,” I said, “but I was fired.”

  “I hear you.” She patted my hand. “You’re doing this to prove that you have what it takes to get your job back.”

  “Exactly,” I said. Well, maybe not the way she meant it, but close enough.

  Chapter Thirteen

  On Friday afternoon at ten minutes to one, early as usual, I reported to the volunteers office outfitted in my uniform and photo ID card, which hung from my neck on a lanyard. As I appraised myself in the full-length mirror on Shelley’s office door, I thought with intense pleasure, Goddard won’t have a clue who I am and he’ll spill his guts to me willingly.

  I couldn’t help grinning. I mean, I really couldn’t.

  Shelley laughed at the way I was admiring myself. “Little Miss Hollywood is getting a kick out of this, isn’t she?”

  “You have no idea,” I said.

  She surprised me by reaching out and hugging me. She was so tall that I ended up wrapping my arms around her hips.

  “Just remember that you can come to me with any problem, large or small,” she said after letting me go. “That’s what I’m here for. So whenever you’re confused or in the mood to vent, my door’s always open. Don’t forget that, Ann.”

  “I won’t,” I said. I smoothed out my smock and retied the laces on my white shoes. “So, Shelley. I’m ready to roll. Just point me in the direction of the magazine storage room and I’ll get to it.” I was dying to find out if Goddard had been admitted yet. During the orientation, Jeff had explained that the sixth and highest floor of Heartland General was the so-called VIP floor, and I figured he’d be up there somewhere. Its rooms were more spacious and more luxuriously appointed—they had bathrooms with both a tub and a shower, as well as a sofa bed where visitors could spent the night—and they had a distant view of the lake as opposed to the roof. My plan was to head straight up there and offer the guy a copy of Famous. Ha-ha.

  “I do love your spunk,” she said with a smile, “but we have to rein it in just for today. We don’t send our volunteers out solo, not for their first shift. We have you shadow one of the other volunteers, so you get the hang of things.”

  Swell. How was I supposed to interview Goddard as someone’s shadow? Unless I found a way to shake him or her off and go my own way. Maybe I’d get lucky and be assigned one of the octogenarians who’d want to leave early and let me finish up the shift by myself. Maybe I could request—

  “Ann?”

  A high-pitched, oddly familiar voice pierced my reverie. I turned. And then I did a double take. “Claire?”

  “Bet you didn’t expect to see me,” said the brunette who was standing very close to me.

  “No, I sure didn’t.” Claire Honeycutt was the cheerleader/slut in my high school class who grew up to become Aunt Toni’s ex-husband Mike’s second wife. I hadn’t seen or spoken to her in years. I’d only heard that she’d brought her Ford Taurus into Uncle Mike’s body shop one day following a fender bender, lured him into a room at the Middletown Best Western, and destroyed his happy marriage. That was my aunt’s version anyway.

  I backed away so I could get a better look at Claire. She wasn’t the perky cheerleader anymore—gone was the ponytail, gone were the gold hoop earrings, gone was the lithe little body that did splits and somersaults and other contortions I could never do—but she was still smiley and fairly trim and short (the top of her head came up to my nose). She wasn’t unattractive, just unremarkable looking, someone you’d never figure for a home wrecker. She wore her brown hair in a haphazardly cut, layered style that was messy as opposed to flattering. She painted her full lips in a retro peach color and applied too much concealer under her eyes. And her body was thicker around the middle now; she was trim, as I said, but there was a pouch sticking out of her smock.

  Yes, the smock. Claire Honeycutt—Pardon me. “Claire H. Benvenucci” was how her name was printed on the ID badge that dangled from her lanyard—was a volunteer too. But not just any volunteer, apparently. My volunteer. Such was life in a small town. People from your past were always turning up.

  “Shelley asked me to train you today,” she said, bouncing up and down on the toes of her white sneakers. “She had no idea we were semi-family until I told her a few minutes ago.”

  Semi-family. Aunt Toni would flip if she heard that. “Just curious, Claire. How long have you been in the magazines program?” She couldn’t be all bad if she was motivated to donate her time to the hospital.

  “About a year,” she replied. “I was arrested for forging one little check, can you believe it? Anyhow, they let me do my community service by volunteering.”

  Lovely. But then, who was I to talk? I too had another agenda for being there.

  “Shelley wants you to shadow me today,” she went on. “So you gotta stick to me like glue, okay?”

  THE STORAGE ROOM where the magazines were kept under lock and key was a short walk down the hall from the volunteers office. Issues of the publications were stacked on shelves by title and included everything from Redbook and Martha Stewart Living to Popular Mechanics and National Geographic.

  “But the most popular ones are right here,” said Claire as she pointed to the shelf where copies of Famous, People, and Up Your Ass Weekly were piled. “We always run out.”

  “So even patients in hospitals want to know what’s going on with Jessica Simpson,” I mused.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “You’ll see. They want the light stuff when they’re recovering. It takes their minds off the pain.”

  So I hadn’t been exaggerating in my speech at the orientation. The patients did need the distraction that the celebrity magazines provided.

  “Your biggest trick will be to keep Famous and the other Hollywood ones away from the nurses,” said Claire. “Sometimes they steal ’em off the cart when you’re not
looking.”

  Speaking of the cart, it was a longer but no less clunky version of your basic metal shopping cart, with partitions for each category of reading material (fashion, news, sports, cooking, etc.). Once we loaded it with fresh issues, it weighed as much as my Honda.

  “How are we supposed to push that thing around the entire hospital?” I asked, since I hadn’t anticipated that there would be strenuous physical labor involved in my pursuit of Goddard.

  She answered by grabbing the handlebar of the cart and shoving it out the door. “It’s hell on your back,” she said through gritted teeth, “but Mike gives me a massage after my shift.”

  Men who gave massages. I couldn’t get away from them.

  She steered the cart to the visitors’ elevator and in we went. “Why don’t we start on the sixth floor?” I suggested. Yes, I’d have to stick to her like glue, but at least I could get a glimpse of Goddard, I figured, get a sense of how receptive he’d be to a visit from a volunteer.

  “Sure,” she agreed. “We can work our way down. Shelley says to cover as much of the hospital as possible during our four hours, but the key thing is bonding with the patients, not giving out magazines. Nobody’s gonna yell at you if you come back with a full cart.”

  Claire seemed to be relishing her role as my teacher. Either that or she was just paying her court-mandated debt to society.

  “Here we are,” she said as we exited the elevator on six. She pushed the cart down the hall, waving to a passing nurse like an old pro, while I walked beside her, smelling the hospital smells and hearing the hospital sounds and suddenly feeling afraid. My hunt for Goddard notwithstanding, who knew what lurked inside those rooms? Gross things. Upsetting things. Things I might catch. “Okay, a few don’ts before we start.” Claire parked the cart in the hall, against the wall. “If the door is marked with a sign that says ‘Must Wear Gloves Before Entering,’ you don’t go in. If the door says ‘No Visitors,’ you don’t go in. If the door is completely closed, you don’t go in, because the patient could be sleeping or getting examined by a doctor.”