by Brynn Stein
After bringing up Sheri’s name, he pressed Call. When she answered he could barely breathe. “Cher, help.”
“Ellie?” Sheri’s panicked voice came over the phone. “Where are you?” When Elliot didn’t answer, she screamed. “I’m on my way to your house. Is that where you are?”
It took all the breath Elliot could muster to answer, “Yeah.”
He couldn’t breathe or move. Remaining conscious was a constant battle that he wasn’t sure he was going to win. There was no way to know how long he lay on the floor before Sheri finally arrived.
“Ellie.” She knelt by his head. “The ambulance I called pulled in right after me. They’re bringing the stretcher in now. Hang on.”
Elliot was only vaguely aware of faces and questions and lights and sirens. Of flickering lights in the hospital corridors and of more faces. There were tests and IVs and vials of blood. Mostly there was blessed oxygen. He could finally breathe again.
He didn’t know if they gave him something to make him go to sleep or if he lost his battle for consciousness on his own, but he didn’t feel the pain anymore, so he didn’t really care.
Time passed without his knowledge. His world became flashes of awareness.
Sheri sitting by his bed, slumped in an uncomfortable-looking chair, sound asleep but still clutching his hand…
Sunlight changing angles in the window…
A nurse changing the IV bag…
Another injecting something into his IV tube…
Daniel walking alongside Elliot’s moving bed, holding his hand…
Being wheeled down the hall for some test or another…
Doctors giving grim details that Elliot couldn’t quite grasp…
The one constant seemed to be falling back to sleep after each brief glimpse of life.
“Hey, Elle.” Sheri was sitting by his bed again, as he’d remembered her from one of the flashes. “Well, you don’t look quite as stoned this time.” She chuckled as she slipped her hand under his where it lay on the white sheets, concern heavy in her voice.
“I was stoned?” He couldn’t understand that. He’d never done drugs.
“Well, it seems you reacted a little, um, strongly, to the morphine they had you on for pain.” She let out a nervous chuckle. “You were pretty entertaining the few times you were awake.” She stroked his hair off his forehead. “They thought effective pain management was important enough to keep you on it, though. It wasn’t adversely affecting your vitals. It just made you act really drunk, or sleep.”
“So, what’s going on?” Elliot took in the heart monitor, the nasal cannula, the call button near Sheri’s hand. He was in a semiprivate room, but there was no one in the other bed.
Thank God.
“The doctor will come in soon and tell you all about it.” She ran her hand down his cheek, avoiding the oxygen tubing but apparently needing to touch him.
Elliot lolled his head toward her and slurred, “Not asking for a medical dissertation. I only want a general summary.”
It appeared as if she wasn’t going to answer, as though she was struggling to contain emotion that threatened to tear from her against her will. Then she lost the battle and her voice became frantic. “Scaring the hell out of me. That’s what’s going on.” Elliot fought the impulse to recoil but vowed to lie still and hear her out. He did ask, after all. The raw terror in her voice almost undid Elliot’s tentative control of his own emotions. “God, Ellie, I found you on the floor. I’ve heard enough from conversations the doctor and nurses don’t think I hear to get that you had a heart attack. They won’t tell me anything directly. I’m not next of kin. I don’t have a medical proxy. I’m nothing really, as far as the hospital is concerned. I couldn’t even see you in the ICU. You’re in a step-down unit now, and they still didn’t want to let me in, but by now I’ve finally convinced them that you don’t have anyone else. So, here I am.”
Elliot tried to take all this in. He had been in the ICU before being here? He didn’t remember anything but this room in his fevered flashes of consciousness. “Do I remember seeing Daniel?”
Sheri wiped her suddenly wet eyes with the back of her hand and tried to smile. “See, that proves you know his name.” Then she answered, “They wouldn’t let him in, but I knew when they were going to move you, and he was in the hall as you passed. He spoke to you, grabbed your hand for a second, but you were out of it.” She got serious and grasped his hand in both of hers, careful of the IV tubing, and held it to her lips. “He really cares about you, you know.”
“I don’t do relationships,” Elliot spoke automatically. He hadn’t asked anyone to care about him. He wasn’t sure where this thinly veiled anger came from.
“I know,” Sheri muttered, kissing his hand. “And he knows. He only wants to be your friend.”
“With benefits,” Elliot sneered, still saying anything that came into his head, showing any emotion that wanted to appear, without any kind of filter or explanation.
“What’s wrong with that?” She chuckled and returned his hand to the bed. “Hell, I’d be friends with benefits if you swung that way.” She gave his hand a little pat.
Elliot smiled, finally banishing the unwarranted ire. “Nothing wrong with it, I guess. I’m actually more okay with the benefits part than with the friends part.” That, at least, he could understand. He’d always been almost allergic to commitment on any level, hence the bare handful of people he actually considered friends.
“He knows that too. But he likes you. He says he’s even willing to put up with your ghost.” She chuckled, laughing it off. She sat back into the ugly institutional chair as though the conversation had turned toward a more lighthearted topic.
“I really do have one, you know,” Elliot said seriously, flexing his fingers against the wrinkled sheets as if in remembrance of trying to grasp the cell phone.
“Ellie—” She sat up straight again, leaning toward him.
“No. I do.” He grabbed on to the sheet, making as much of a fist as the IV in the back of his hand would allow. “He’s the only reason I’m still alive.”
Sheri screwed up her face but caressed his hand, trying to calm him. “How do you figure that?”
“I dropped the phone, Cher.” His voice held such a tone of awe that Sheri actually seemed to be listening to what he had to say. “It was too far away. I couldn’t reach it. The ghost moved it closer to me.” He was lost in his thoughts. “It almost has to be Ben… from the dreams.” He let his gaze roam the white walls, trying to figure out what had happened. “I mean, according to the dreams, Patrick left. Ben stayed in the house. In my house. I recognized the bedroom in the dream. It has to be Ben.” Elliot looked Sheri in the eye. “Ben died in my bedroom, and he’s still in that house. He moved the phone to me so I could call for help.”
Sheri didn’t seem to know what to say to that, so she took Elliot’s hand and looked him in the eye. “If that’s true, Ellie, then we all owe Ben a huge debt of gratitude.”
Elliot simply nodded. What else could he say?
THE DOCTOR came in to talk to Elliot later that day. Sheri was still sitting in that god-awful contraption that the hospital called a chair while Elliot tried to shake himself awake enough to understand anything the doctor might have to say.
“Hello, Mr. Graham.” The older man extended his hand, and Elliot shook it as best he could with the IV in one hand and the pulse oximeter on the other. “I’m Dr. Proust. I took over your case once they brought you up from the ER.” The doctor looked in Sheri’s direction. “If you could ask your friend to step out, I’d like to discuss your condition with you.”
Sheri moved her chair closer to the bed as if to protest, but Elliot spoke first. “You can say whatever you need to in front of Sheri.” Elliot spared his friend a small smile and then looked back to the doctor. “I’d just tell her all about it later anyway.”
Dr. Proust nodded and launched into his recitation of Elliot’s diagnosis. “Very well, Mr. G
raham.” He glanced at Sheri as she took Elliot’s hand, and then he regained Elliot’s gaze. “I’ve looked at your blood tests, chest X-rays, and echocardiogram. We’ll want to do more tests in the coming days, but the short answer is you have coronary artery disease and congestive heart failure. A fairly advanced case. We’d call it Stage C at this point. Mostly what all of that means is that your heart is enlarged and working harder than it should have to. Because it’s not working at peak efficiency, other organs are feeling the strain. That’s often the case with congestive heart failure. Fluid backs up in the lungs, not enough oxygen gets to the other organs, so the kidneys can’t get rid of the fluid. Judging from the edema—the swelling—in your extremities and some of the blood work that’s come back, I’m betting we’ll find that the kidneys have already been affected. The liver could be damaged too. It’s not just heart involvement that we have to worry about. That’s why we’ll do more tests to check the other organs.”
Elliot wasn’t as surprised as he thought he should have been, but Sheri seemed crushed. She sank against the bed and grabbed hold of Elliot’s hand in both of hers. He turned it over as best he could and tried to take one of her hands in his.
The doctor continued. “I imagine you’ve been experiencing extreme fatigue for a while now, probably shortness of breath, racing heartbeat?”
“Yeah,” Elliot confirmed, gripping Sheri’s slender fingers but trying to stay focused on the doctor’s face. He didn’t think he could look her in the eye right then. “For several months at least. Getting worse and worse.”
Sheri squeezed his hand and her voice was rough with emotion. “Why didn’t you see a doctor about it sooner?”
He forced himself to look her in the eye. “I thought it was just old age. You and Daniel both like to tell me how old I’m getting.” When Elliot saw the stricken look on her face, he knew trying to use levity right then wasn’t the way to go. “No, seriously, Cher, I thought I’d been working too hard and was getting out of shape. I was thinking of going to a gym or something.”
The doctor watched the exchange and nodded as he shifted his weight, still standing at the foot of the bed, holding his clipboard. “It might not have been noticeable at first. I often get patients who have probably been experiencing symptoms for years but not severe enough to notice or to act upon until they actually have a heart attack.”
“So that’s what happened for sure, then?” Elliot asked, not sure why he was shocked by that. “I had a heart attack?”
“Yes,” Dr. Proust confirmed, and all of a sudden, he dropped the hand holding the clipboard as if to appear more accessible. “A fairly severe one. We’ll treat your symptoms with medication and a controlled diet for now. Since you also have coronary artery disease, we’re going to need to insert a stent in your heart to open the most severely affected artery and increase the blood flow. We’ll do this before you leave here. There are more intrusive treatments we may have to consider down the road as your symptoms progress, but there are risks to any invasive procedure, so we want to try the less invasive ones first.”
“And that will fix everything? The meds and diet and the stent?” Sheri sat up straighter in her chair, looking hopeful, but still clutching Elliot’s hand for dear life.
“Well….” The doctor hedged his bets. “It will open the artery. There is already some pretty extensive damage to the heart. From this heart attack, but also from congestion over time. And of course it will do nothing to help the other organs, though the increased blood flow may help minimize further damage. We’ll wait for the test results, then formulate a plan of treatment, which, of course, will change as symptoms progress.”
“So you’re saying the symptoms will progress. There’s nothing we can do to stop it?”
“Stop it completely? No. There’s already too much damage done, and we can’t reverse any of that.” The doctor met Elliot’s eyes and shifted his weight again. “But we can slow down the progression.”
Elliot stopped listening after that. He stared blankly at the doctor until he finished whatever else he had to say and left the room, promising to be back tomorrow. Sheri sat in the chair, still gripping Elliot’s hand tightly. He didn’t dare look at her. He was afraid she’d have tears in her eyes and if he saw that, he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t start crying too.
As the machines beeped merrily away, Elliot could do nothing but berate himself. Why hadn’t he realized those annoying but seemingly mild symptoms over the last several months were more than just him being out of shape? Why hadn’t he done anything about them? Why hadn’t he gone to the doctor?
Elliot had no idea how long it might have been after the doctor left when he finally shook himself back to full awareness. He’d allowed himself to drift in shock and self-pity, but he couldn’t keep doing that. He also couldn’t deal with Sheri’s emotions right now—he was barely dealing with his own. “Cher, why don’t you go get some coffee or something to eat?”
She looked as if he had struck her and grasped even more tightly to his limp hand. “I’m not going to leave you.”
Elliot became very interested in the wrinkles on the sheets where they bunched across his hips. “I kind of need to be alone for a little bit, Cher.” When he finally forced himself to look at her, gaze into that stricken face, he added, “Just for a little while. A half hour or so? Just a little while.”
It didn’t seem to be lessening the impact of his asking her to leave. She looked confused and hurt as she slowly disentangled her hand from his and stood up. She’d been sitting too long and looked stiff, stretching her back this way and that to work out the kinks.
“Okay, Elle,” she agreed finally. “A half hour. But then I’m coming back.”
He nodded and tried to smile. “Wouldn’t have it any other way, Cher.” As she reluctantly turned toward the door, he called out, “Oh hey. Before you leave, could you get my phone for me?”
She tried to smile. “Calling Daniel? Or playing spider solitaire?” She fished his cell phone out of her pocketbook and slid it under his hand where it lay on the mattress.
“Yeah, something like that.” He wasn’t going to do either of those but didn’t think she’d agree with what he planned to do.
She nodded, probably knowing there was something he wasn’t telling her, but for once not calling him on it. She made her way to the door slowly, as if hoping he’d call her back.
He let her get completely out of the room before swiping the screen on his phone to bring up the Internet. He had no idea if it was okay to use a phone in the hospital. He had heard somewhere that he shouldn’t, but at that moment, he didn’t care. If they wanted him to stop, they could come in and tell him.
“Congestive heart failure. A fairly advanced case.”
The doctor’s words rang through Elliot’s head on a never-ending loop. In the next half hour, he looked up everything he could about congestive heart failure. He wasn’t sure why he was shocked by what he found. The diagnosis explained the fatigue and the swelling and the weight gain, which was mostly fluid retention. Even the shortness of breath and racing heartbeat. Most of the symptoms were caused by his heart trying to compensate for a lessened ability to pump enough blood to the lungs. The part that Elliot got stuck on, though, was that it was usually fatal. Maybe not right away, but there was a serious possibility that he could die from this eventually. He already had the enlarged heart that came with it.
He couldn’t help but wonder if he had come to the doctor when he first started noticing symptoms if it would have made any difference. But he couldn’t undo past decisions. He had to go on from here.
There was treatment.
As the doctor had said, he would probably be leaving the hospital with a fistful of medication and a list of heart-healthy foods and heart-safe exercises, as well as an admonition to stop drinking. Even with all that, though, nothing would reverse the damage, or even stop the progression of the disease. The best they could do was slow it down, just as the doctor had said.
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HE HAD tests scheduled for later that day, and they told him they would put the stent in tomorrow or the day after. They couldn’t give him a clear answer about how long he’d have to stay in the hospital after that. At least he was in a regular ward now, not the ICU. The advantage of that—or disadvantage, depending on Elliot’s mood, which seemed to change by the minute—was that he was allowed a wider range of visitors. Daniel was one of the first besides Sheri.
“Hey, old man.” He smiled as he pulled a hard plastic chair toward the bed, turned it around, and straddled it, looking at Elliot.
Elliot wasn’t in a good frame of mind for the joke. “I guess I have to own that label now. Congestive heart failure. That’s an old man’s disease if ever I’ve heard one.” His bed was elevated to a reclined sitting position; he picked at a piece of blanket fuzz on the sheet by his hand, not meeting Daniel’s gaze.
Daniel turned serious and tapped Elliot’s fingers until he looked up. “Not only old people get heart diseases. You know I’m only teasing you with the old-man shit, don’t you? I don’t think of you as old at all.”
“Yeah.” Elliot grinned, but he could tell it didn’t reach his eyes as he went back to fiddling with the fuzz.
Daniel tried to talk about other things, but they really only had one thing in common, and it would probably be a long while before Elliot felt up for that.
“So I hear you believe me now.” Daniel leaned on the back of his chair and plopped his head on his arms. “About the ghost.”
Okay, maybe they had two things in common.
Elliot nodded and actually did meet Daniel’s eyes this time. “No doubt in my mind.” Then it occurred to him that Daniel had had no doubt either, as early as that first night. “I think I owe you an apology.” He tried to grin.