Bad Case of Loving You

by Laney Cairo

I left my spare house key on the kitchen bench, along with a note and the alarm system code.

  * * *

  Rhonda yawned tiredly and looked at me in confusion when I poked my head around the staff room door.

  “Dr. Maynard?” she said, sounding surprised. “Um, I haven’t paged you or anything. I paged the night reg about Mrs. Silva, but I thought it was Ghastly George this week.”

  “It may well be Ghastly George; I just came in early to do rounds. Want to walk around the ward with me?”

  Rhonda nodded, put her shoes back on, and we started out on rounds. Ghastly George was a plump, vivacious young woman, competent and cheerful, and no one was quite sure how she got her name, but it had stuck so firmly to her that even the patients called her that. I hadn’t known she was on nights; it was a subject I tried my hardest to remain oblivious to, just in case it happened to me.

  “What’s wrong with Mrs. Silva?” I asked Rhonda, hand on the door of her room. “I mean, that wasn’t wrong on Saturday when I saw.”

  “She’s Cheynes-Stoking,” Rhonda said. “That’s why I called George.”

  I pushed open the door of Mrs. Silva’s room, lit by the subdued lighting that the nurses used on the critically ill. Kira, the other night nurse, was sitting quietly in the corner of the room, and Mrs. Silva’s brother was sitting beside the bed, holding his sister’s hand. Mrs. Silva’s breaths filled the room.

  Each one shuddered in and rasped out, and the pauses were erratic. Her brother was in tears.

  I touched his shoulder and said, “Come outside and we’ll talk.”

  While I led Mrs. Silva’s brother to the staff room, which was the only private place on the ward, I searched my brain for his name. John, that was it.

  We all sat around the stained table.

  “She’s dying, isn’t she?” John said, his pale eyes weary.

  I nodded. “She is.”

  “Is there nothing you can do for her?”

  This was the tricky part.

  “There are interventions we can use that might extend her life, but they may be painful for her. What do you think she would want us to do? Keep her alive if she was going to suffer? Or let her as gently as we can?” I asked him.

  A surprising number of people, when offered this choice, could put their own need to hold onto their loved one aside and make the right decision, and I didn’t doubt that John was one of them.

  “She won’t suffer, will she?” he asked. “When she dies?”

  I patted his hand. “No. We’ll make sure that she just slips away.”

  Rhonda was studiously avoiding my line of sight, and I understood why. We were about to do a tricky and illegal thing, and we had to do it in such a way that there was no possibility of either of us being charged with conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm.

  John went back to his sister’s room, and sat beside her bed, and I stood outside the room, Mrs. Silva’s medication chart in my hands. “I’m going to adjust her pain management,” I told Rhonda.

  Rhonda nodded. “Yes, doctor.”

  “Page me or ring me, if you need me.” Argh, I was striking today. “Up until eight a.m.. After that, my pager and cell phone will be off, but I’ll be down at the front entrance to the hospital. Make sure you let the day staff know they can come and get me any time. I’ll cross the picket line if I’m needed.”

  “I’ll put that in the handover, make sure they know.” She very carefully didn’t look at the medication order I’d just written, and I was glad she knew the process well enough not to ask difficult questions.

  She put the chart back in the holder, and we moved onto the next patient.

  I’d made ‘a mistake’ while changing Mrs. Silva from morphine to pethidine, and hadn’t ceased the morphine order.

  It wasn’t euthanasia, not quite, since the combined doses still weren’t fatal, but it was certainly over-prescribing, and it meant Mrs. Silva would slip away in a drug-induced fog very quickly.

  We shuffled around the ward, waking the patients that I really needed to examine, leaving the others resting while I reviewed their notes. It took a while, and Rhonda had to keep darting off to answer bells since Kira needed to sit with Mrs.

  Silva.

  I was leaving the ward when Ghastly George walked up to the nurses’ station, and, as always, she made me smile. She was prone to luridly bright clothing, and tonight was no exception. She trailed a purple scarf over a lime green T-shirt, and was wearing black and silver harem pants and red sneakers

  I loved someone who didn’t take the hospital’s dress code too seriously. ‘Professional attire’ this was not. I felt like a sell-out in my sedate pale blue shirt and grey trousers.

  She smiled widely at me and said, “Hey, Andrew. You answering my pager for me tonight?”

  I shook my head. “Nope, just doing rounds before the industrial action starts.”

  “Figured as much.” She leaned against the nurses’ station to take the weight off her feet a little. “Lucia is down on orthopedics doing rounds, too, and I ran into Cecelia in the lift.” She smiled tiredly at me. “Do I need to look at the patient I was paged for? Did you check her out?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Mrs. Silva is Cheynes-Stoking. I altered her analgesia.”

  Ghastly George nodded. “Good.”

  She walked to the elevator with me, and rode down a couple of floors before disappearing into the unlit hallways and gentle snores of the wards.

  It was six now and I needed coffee. The house physicians’

  common room was the only place in the main building that had coffee at this time of the morning, and I couldn’t be bothered hiking through the corridors to my own office, so I punched the pass code into the lock, confident that it wouldn’t have changed since the last time I’d used the room.

  There were a couple of doctors asleep on the couches so I left the lights off and crossed the darkened room to the lit alcove containing the kettle and cups. There was no milk, of course, but I could drink black coffee.

  Hell, right at that moment, if there was no water, I’d eat the spoonfuls of instant coffee I needed.

  I was tired. While there were real advantages to having a young lover, it was seriously affecting my sleep. Then I thought of the bar through Matthew’s cock, and what the beads could do. I could get by without sleep. I’d survived interning; I’d survive Matthew.

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  When I woke, it took a few moments to work out where I was.

  Everything was wrong; there was sunlight streaming around the edges of the blind, the bed was too soft and too clean and it smelled deliciously of sex, not of sour, unwashed sheets.

  Andrew’s Ikea bed. Which had withstood our attempts to shake it to pieces.

  I hugged the other pillow contentedly. Andrew had left hours ago. I vaguely remembered him getting up in the middle of the night.

  It wasn’t time to get up yet; there was no clinical today because of the strike. I’d arranged to meet Lin and Nevins, and a couple of the other students from the stop work meeting, at nine. For someone who woke up at five-thirty every morning, that was a late start.

  I rolled out of bed and found my robe. It was even better than borrowing Andrew’s. It might not smell of him, at least not yet, but he’d bought it for me.

  There was cold coffee in the percolator downstairs so I ditched it and emptied the filter, then refilled the machine.

  There was a note for me on the counter top, and a key.

  ‘Dear Matthew,’ it said, and I sat down on one of the stools against the counter.

  There were instructions for the security system, and the code. Then Andrew said, ‘There will no doubt be some kind of post industrial action get-together, probably at F’s place, since he triggered the whole thing. Come with me? I can call you, then come and pick you up from wherever you are.

  ‘Stay at my place for the day if you want, there’s broadband upstairs in my study and plenty of food in the cupboards. You won’t have to
eat olives and pears for lunch.

  Unless you want to, of course. Andrew.’

  I put the note carefully in my robe pocket, along with the key.

  I’d never seen Andrew’s study. Somehow, by the time we made it upstairs, we were pretty focused on the bedroom or the shower. When the coffee percolator had gurgled to a halt, I poured myself a cup, added milk and sugar, and carried the mug upstairs.

  There were five doors off the hallway; the three I knew were Andrew’s bedroom, the bathroom and the loo. The fourth door was to Henry’s bedroom; I’d know that teenage boy pong anywhere from my own adolescence. There were clothes piled on the floor and the bed was unmade. Henry had plastered the walls with movie posters, Blade and Underworld, and a faded Rocky Horror poster that made me nostalgic for midnight screenings and outrageous costumes and interjections.

  “A toast,” I muttered to the empty room.

  The last door was Andrew’s study, and it looked exactly like his office at the hospital, awash with papers, littered with coffee cups, except he had an LCD screen on his PC. Oh, yeah, that was a nineteen inch screen.

  I sat down at his desk and dragged a finger gently across the top of the screen, disturbing the dust. God, if I had a nineteen inch LCD screen, it would be lovingly dusted every day and carefully cleaned with a fifty percent solution of isopropyl and water every week. “You’d get microfibre from me, baby,” I said. “Nothing but the best.”

  The chair was pretty comfy, too, padded, with armrests.

  There were empty Coke cans nestled amongst the debris on the desk, and sweet wrappers, and it seemed that all this technology was wasted on a kid.

  There were bills stuck up above the desk, too, and I couldn’t help but see them. I guess I wasn’t really intruding since Andrew had specifically told me I could use his study.

  He didn’t owe anything on his credit cards; they were all in positive balances. I’d never imagined a life without debt.

  Presumably he owed money on the house, but it had never occurred to me that Andrew might actually earn enough to not be in debt like everyone else.

  Not that I had a credit card, of course, but I owed my mum several hundred pounds, and my student loan debt was staggering. I’d be paying that one off for the rest of my working life.

  There was a bookshelf behind me and I swiveled around to check it out. Underneath the piles of photocopied journal articles stuffed randomly onto the shelving there were textbooks. Microbiol, communicable dieases, cardiology, haemotology, orthopedics. No ob-gyn and no paediatrics, though.

  There were novels, too, hardback editions with sumptuous covers, from small press companies I’d never heard of. Books of poetry, including a leather-bound Emily Dickenson.

  Thoreau. Walt Whitman.

  The art was gorgeous. There were canvases on the wall, like the rest of the house. I’d never paid any attention to them even though I had harboured secret thoughts of being an artist myself once. The less than secret desire to have a real career that would challenge me and make me feel like my life was not a total waste, while earning me a good income, had won. I stood up, ran a finger over the canvas over the desk. Blue ridges of oil paint, an impasto explosion in aquamarine and cerulean and cobalt blue. When I peered at the painting I could see there was scrawl underneath the paint, random pieces of handwriting.

  I took the note out of my robe and chose a bit of the canvas where the scrawl was the right way up and held the note up to it.

  There was no signature on the canvas to confirm it, but I was sure that the handwriting was Andrew’s. He must have made coarse papier-mâché out of his own handwritten material, coated a canvas in it, and painted over it.

  There was a pattern to the paintings once I had gone carefully around the upper floor of the house, peering at the art. In all of them, the two blue canvases in the study, the green and yellow in the bedroom, and the smaller mixed palette paintings in the hallway, Andrew had painted over handwritten material.

  The painting in the bedroom was the most intriguing.

  Nothing showed through the thick spread of forest and moss greens, but the yellow was translucent enough to make out that the handwritten material was sheets of scribbled music, written on plain paper, not musical score.

  I wasn’t sure how to interpret this. He’d said his ex was a musician, a violinist. I couldn’t read music at all, so couldn’t tell whether it was music for a violin, or for a slide trombone for that matter. It wasn’t torn up or shredded, unlike the painting in the study. The sheets were carefully laid out, lines of musical notes matching up, and I wondered why it was what Andrew chose to keep in his bedroom. Was it a secret message, a memento of a marriage? Or did he just like it?

  There were no painting supplies of any kind in sight, no stacked canvases, no easel, no sketchpads, and I wondered why Andrew had stopped painting.

  It made me kind of ashamed of my grotty room, too.

  There was nothing artistic in my room; the only thing I had that played music was my laptop; there wasn’t a shred of creativity to be found there.

  I had a couple of books on piercing, a pile of porn magazines, and not quite enough textbooks. The walls were covered in revision sheets, and the only reason the walls of the upstairs toilet weren’t covered, too, was that Geoff number two had beaten me to it, and now we all crapped while staring at physics equations.

  No poetry, no art, anyone would think that my degree had subsumed my life. Oh, yeah, that was right, it had.

  I went back downstairs and heated up leftover curry for breakfast, and made myself curry sandwiches to take with me that day.

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  My pager woke me.

  I fished it out of my pocket, blinked, and peered at the screen. Someone had turned the light on in the house physicians’ common room and people were milling around, talking quietly so as not to disturb the people who were still asleep on the couches.

  It was Clarissa, who’d seconded the motion to stop work at the meeting, and before I could get my cell phone out to call her back, she pushed the door to the common room open.

  The cracked vinyl of the couch creaked as I sat up. She walked over and sat down beside me, inspecting my cup of cooling black coffee hopefully.

  “Damn,” she said. “I was hoping you had something decent there. I thought Americans were coffee aficionados.”

  “I’d like to be,” I said, rubbing my face sleepily and then checking the temperature of my coffee, too. It wasn’t stone cold, so I drank what was left. It was twenty to eight when I checked my watch, which explained why Clarissa had paged me. She was wearing scrubs and rubber clogs and smelled of the lingering stench of diathermy.

  “Been working?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Open reductions, two of them. Two theatres will be running through the day, there’re enough surgeons and anesthetists working for that, but we started at five this morning to try and get through the night’s Casualty intake.”

  She looked awful, nervous and close to tears, and I squeezed her hand reassuringly. “If you’re needed, you can always go back inside,” I said. “Just make sure that the surgical coordinator knows to send someone to get you.”

  She blinked and nodded. “Have you done this before?” she asked. “Gone on strike?”

  I shook my head. “Unless you count quitting a job flipping burgers at sixteen because the unnamed mega-corporation I worked for sacked someone for joining a union, no, I’ve never gone on strike.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Clarissa, we’re doctors. The administration is telling us how to practice medicine, what we can and can’t do for our patients. I worked in an Episcopalian community hospital in the US because I couldn’t stand an HMO telling me what I could and couldn’t do, and when I had to leave someone untreated. I didn’t expect to come here and work in a socialised national health service, and have the hospital tell me the same things.”

  She hugged me quickly and I could feel how tense she was. �
�I’m going to go check my patients in post-op, I’ll see you outside.”

  Ghastly George came over and took Clarissa’s place beside me. She didn’t say anything, just took hold of my hand and held it tightly. She was presumably off-duty, having been on the wards all night, and was also presumably working tonight, too, and I wondered if she was insane enough to join us on the picket line instead of sleeping.

  We walked out just before eight, a solid elevator of doctors. Clarissa was crying beside me so I wrapped one arm around her shoulders and Ghastly George kept hold of my other hand.

  I hadn’t thought what this moment might feel like, hadn’t tried to imagine it, and I wished I had.

  I was deeply moved. People slapped my back in the elevator, and when we stepped out into the main hallway through to the hospital’s front entrance, orderlies and nurses and the women in striped aprons who worked in the candy store in the lobby all started clapping. There were doctors coming out of the main stairwell, too, and from the side hallway down to the orthopedics outpatient clinic and Casualty.

  I could still hear Clarissa sobbing beside me, and I understood why.

  We walked out the main entrance and onto the paved courtyard in front of the hospital, into blinding sunshine and the flash of cameras. Another thing I hadn’t thought of.

  There were doctors I didn’t recognise standing outside, all wearing their BMA membership cards outside their pockets or clipped around their necks. They must have been the BMA stalwarts, the divisional reps and board members. There was a smattering of nurses uniforms’ amidst the group of doctors that were massing in the courtyard, most wearing their RCN membership cards, presumably as a sign of support.

  I handed Clarissa to Ghastly George and walked up to where a very forlorn F was standing with the BMA people. We hugged, and he said, “Really, this is all some terrible mistake. I don’t actually mind being buggered by the admin and fired. Probably not enjoying it as much as you would, though.”

  I kissed him on the cheek. “We can’t all have your good luck,” I said. “Besides, what makes you think I’m a pillow biter?” Got to love the UK slang, so much more descriptive than ‘fucking homo’.