KATACLYSM: A Space-Time Comedy (17 page)

Dr. Avery had told no one other than the urologists about his maroon urine.

“Get on with it,” he grumbled.

“So this one is really a head-scratcher, at least for me.  It’s a fifty-six year old male nuclear physicist who hasn’t worked in nearly thirty years because of a presumptive diagnosis of bipolar disorder.  His past medical history is unremarkable, but from what I understand from his wife who gave me virtually the entire history, he’s had at least eight hospitalizations for mania with psychotic features and five for dep…”

“Skip the psych nonsense,” Dr. Avery interrupted tersely, reaching across his desk for a burgundy handkerchief and wiping his face with it.  “This is medicine.  Why is he here?  What’s he got?  And quickly, I don’t have a lot of patience today.”

“Well,” Eric began enthusiastically, “it’s strange.  He presents with multiple severe but non-specific signs and symptoms.  Right now, his cognition is quite impaired.  From the collateral history, I gather that he had been experiencing blurred vision, headaches and numbness in his hands.  Yesterday, he found an angry red rash all along his arms and then this morning, he started babbling nonsense which is when his wife brought him into the ER.  The blood-work was so wild that I sent it in to biochemistry twice to double check.  He’s anemic, leucopenic, his liver enzymes are through the roof and he’s in renal failure.  CT scan showed numerous abnormalities including diffuse infiltrates in his lungs, liver and kidney…”

“Did you bring the blood?” Dr. Avery said giving his resident a sharp glare.

Eric produced a vial from his pocket.  By now, he was used to his boss’s peculiar requests.

“Good,” said the chief of medicine as he placed a single drop of Max Trenton’s blood on a glass slide he had produced from his desk drawer. He slid it under the microscope on a nearby table and began fiddling with the dials to get the cells into focus.

“Now, what’s your differential diagnosis, Dr. Silver?”

Eric knew that this question would be coming, but in the ER he had made the decision to go up to see his supervisor with no good answer in his mind.  He took a deep breath and prepared to look foolish.

“I’ll be honest.  I haven’t the slightest idea what it is.  Something neoplastic or degenerative probably, but I can’t think of anything that would account for all of those symptoms.”

Dr. Avery extended a finger and beckoned to Eric to peer into the microscope.

“Look at the white blood cells.  What do you see?”

Eric scanned the field.  He knew that the cells were abnormal but didn’t quite know how to describe them.  He hated hematology.

“Do you see the mess of broken, mangled white cells?” the chief asked impatiently.

“Uh huh.”

“That’s cytolysis.  Now find an intact cell and look at the nucleus,” he instructed.

Eric did so.

“They look weird.”

“Pyknosis and hypersegmentosis.  So there you have it.  This is where the money is.  He’s a nuclear physicist.  What’s the diagnosis doctor?”

“I’m sorry.  I still don’t know,” said the genuinely baffled resident.

“Too bad.  It would be quite a feat to be the first physician at Massachusetts General to make a diagnosis of uranium poisoning.  You almost had it Silver, but I guess I’ll be the lead author on this one.  Shall we have a look at him before he dies?”

Dr. Avery turned off the microscope, grabbed his white coat and the two men quickly exited the office, marching in the direction of the emergency room.

“Should be a good autopsy,” Dr. Avery said casually with a cough.  “I hope you won’t be such a wuss about it this time.  So, anyway, what’s the evidence for using chelating agents in this kind of patient?” he asked smugly, knowing full well that his resident wouldn’t know the answer.

Eric ignored the question and picked up his walking speed.  Dr. Avery huffed and tried to match his pace.

“So what does this guy have to say for himself?” the chief went on.  “Did he give any clues that he’d been working with uranium?”

“Not only did he not give a clue,” Eric replied, “he practically didn’t say anything at all.  I tried for about ten minutes but he just kept repeating the word ‘Shambhala’ over and over again.  It was as if…” Eric turned his head towards his supervisor but was surprised to find that Dr. Avery was no longer along side of him.

Turning around, he was shocked to find the man lying lifeless in a maroon puddle several paces behind him.  Albert Avery was dead.

The autopsy was quick and dirty and, somewhat fittingly, it was performed in the very basement room in which Dr. Avery had preached the virtues of the autopsy on an almost daily basis.  Grossly, everything appeared to be normal.  But unlike the autopsy procedure for Amish’s prodigy, this time the pathologist took several tissue samples from the cadaver’s bladder and examined them under the microscope.  The doctor was quite surprised by what she found.  Weaving their way in and out of the layers of the chief of medicine’s bladder muscle were literally thousands of tiny purple parasites which she was quite sure no one had ever seen before.

The pathologist coined these parasites Albertosoma Averyosis and they were subsequently shown to be the cause of hundreds of thousands of unexplained deaths in Southern India alone.  Even more shocking was the discovery that a simple and inexpensive antiparasitic drug was one hundred percent effective at eradicating Albertosoma Averyosis from all of those unlucky people carrying the parasite.  Ironically, Albert Avery had easily proved in death what he so struggled to show throughout his life, that autopsies do save lives.

Finding someone willing to eulogize Dr. Avery at his funeral was a far trickier matter.  The vast majority of his trainees and colleagues flat out refused with or without accompanying mocking laughter.  In the end Ralph, a nurse working on one of the medicine floors, who had spoken to Dr. Avery once or twice, agreed to do the job.  Now, most eulogies in the Western world are given by intimate relations of the deceased who can speak to and embellish the dearly departed’s virtues. In this case, however, having barely known the man was widely regarded as a considerable asset.

Attendees at the funeral, held in the Old North Church on Salem Street, were an interesting bunch.  Johnson, Dr. Avery’s prized resident, sat in the front row sobbing quietly and even jotting the occasional note down on the side of the official program, a kiss up to the last.  There was a member of the Silver family in the audience, but it was not Dr. Silver.  Eric’s father sat at the back in one of the many white cubicles, taking in the eulogy along with the church’s magnificent white columns and antique chandelier.  He was thoroughly enjoying himself.

In his defense, Eric had far more important things to do.  He had a wedding to plan.  You see, one month earlier, he had collapsed into his call room bed only to find a pristine orange suggestions card staring at him from his tiny night table.  It read:

The cleaning staff at Massachusetts General Hospital value your opinion and would like to serve you better.  Please rate our cleaning and list any suggestions in the space below.

Eric was happy to oblige and, before dozing off, he scrawled the following note underneath in his doctor chicken scratch:

Thank you very much for doing such an excellent job cleaning the room.

The only thing that’s missing is a place for me to make a cup of tea.

                                                                                                  Eric Silver

Eric thought nothing more of this comment until his next night on call four days later when he stumbled into the room to find a teacup, some teabags and an electric kettle sitting on a new desk next to the sink with a note attached.  The note said:

Dear Dr. Silver,

Cleaning your room is our pleasure and we thank you for your kind words. In our continuing efforts to make your nights here as bearable as possible, we have decided to implement your suggestion.  The staff sincerely hopes that you will enjoy a good cup of tea on us.

                                                                                                                              Marta

Hmm, the resident thought, those ESL courses are really paying off for Marta.  Just as he finished this thought, the phone on Eric’s night table rang and the man at the other end of the line identified himself as the lawyer representing Eric’s former patient Mr. Alden.  The resident’s heart sank.  Though he knew Mr. Alden’s lawsuit was ridiculous, Eric had been dreading the inevitable proceedings.  But, just as Eric plopped onto his rock-hard mattress in annoyance, the lawyer said something entirely unexpected.  It turned out that Mr. Alden had once again survived a cardiac arrest.  This time, however, the frail old man had emerged convinced that his lawyer was trying to poison him on instructions from Satan.  Indeed, Mr. Alden was so agitated that he had hired a second lawyer to help him sue the first for emotional distress.  Apparently, the old man had completely forgotten the suit against the hospital and, given the circumstances, his former lawyer wanted nothing more to do with it either.

Eric allowed himself an inward smile as he expressed his sympathies to the man at the other end of the phone.  But the lawyer seemed unfazed, saying that rarely did a day go by without him being accused of some kind of affiliation with the prince of darkness.  Eric thanked the man and hung up.  He was ecstatic.

Five minutes later, the euphoric resident was pouring himself a hot cup of orange pekoe when a knock came at the door.  It was Emily.  The two had been dating for eight months.  It was an improbable sort of romance.  Originally, they had both secretly thought that their relationship was just a coping mechanism, a way of banding together to weather Dr. Avery’s constant harassment.  But it quickly became apparent that there was something more meaningful going on between them.

Now by this point in his residency, Eric certainly had a warped view of what constituted a ‘good day’, but he truly believed that no matter how one looked at it, this day qualified as one.  So, after sharing his tea with Emily, he mustered the guts to do what he had wanted to do for months.  He proposed to her…and Emily said yes.

Since then, the smitten residents were spending every moment of their spare time planning the wedding and neither could be bothered to waste an afternoon at their former tormentor’s funeral.

Perhaps the most interested spectator at Albert Avery’s funeral was the man’s brother Louis.  He too had declined to give the eulogy and instead sat inconspicuously in the cubicle across the aisle from Mr. Silver, watching the proceedings with keen interest.  When the brief service was over, Louis made his way down the red carpet to the open casket and bowed his head in deference to the deceased.  On seeing his brother up close, he was surprised to find him looking somewhat healthier in death than he had for most of his life.  Louis wasn’t sure if it was just the mortician’s makeup job, but it seemed that the colour had returned to Albert’s face.  After a few moments, one of the staff gently tapped Louis on the shoulder and whispered in that nearly inaudible funeral director way that they needed to load the casket into the hearse for the trip to the cemetery.  He asked Louis if he would be riding with his brother, but the mathematician-philosopher politely declined, saying that he was late for an appointment.  Leaving the funeral worker with a puzzled look on his face, Louis Avery confidently lumbered out the door of the old church, at last on his way to see a real cardiologist.

Twenty minutes later, Louis sat down in the waiting area of the busy cardiology outpatient clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital with a broad smile confidently spread across his face.  He was free.  Finally unfettered by his brother’s quack acquaintances and their unintelligible solutions to his heart disease, he could now do what had been the obvious thing all along, to go back to his real cardiologist.  Within no time, Louis was striding out of the hospital with a prescription for cholesterol and blood pressure medication in hand and a stern admonition from his doctor that he go on a diet and lose some weight.  Louis could see the fat bulging out of every crevice of his massive frame, so he knew that he ought to heed these words.  After all, as a mathematician he didn’t exercise much and being a philosopher did little to help in this regard either.  So, at that moment, stepping off the curb, Louis swore to himself that, by God, he would go to the gym and start eating healthy for the first time in his life…starting tomorrow.  His sights set on the familiar neon sign, Professor Avery hastily crossed the street and ducked into Wu’s Chinese Smorgasbord.

On entering the eatery, Louis sat down in his usual booth, wedging himself into a groove that he had painstakingly worn into the seat.  After scrawling the numbers of the three main courses he felt like having for lunch on the pad provided, he looked up to watch the short, greenish proprietor of the restaurant arguing with two burly looking men wearing construction uniforms who were sitting in the booth directly across.

“Pete,” said one worker to the other as Wu flailed his arms and shouted angry gibberish at them, “why don’t you give it a rest?  This really doesn’t have anything to do with feminism.  Beside, we have to get back.  Let’s pay the bill.”

“Shut up Ernie,” snarled his partner.  “I can’t let him get away with this.  Now listen here,” he said turning to Wu and waving a sausage-like finger in the alien’s ovoid face, “until we can make some kind of fleet of asexual robots to do our work for us, these kinds of gender inequities will always hang over our heads.”

“What does that have to do with the bill?” retorted an exasperated Wu.

“Well…” Pete began, screwing up his face in thought, “…the sweet and sour chicken was overdone.”

Strange as this conversation may have seemed to the uninitiated, it was the usual fare in Wu’s restaurant, so Louis watched unperturbed until at that moment, all of a sudden, he saw the most bizarre thing he could have ever imagined.  Just then, a tired looking robot popped its head out the back room door and called over to Wu in its mechanical voice.

“I have a delivery to make in forty-five minutes.  Are you going to be long?”

Now just why a robot would be taking food out of Wu’s Chinese Smorgasbord would be a bit of a mystery without knowing what had happened two months earlier to a little green Adnexian by the name of Paroophoron.  You see, one night, after bringing home takeout from Wu’s for his wife’s ladies’ complaint league dinner party, the little alien had happily walked downtown and spent the evening sipping limoncello liqueur at a jazz club.  When he returned home, all of the guests were gone and he found Epoophoron crying, her head in her hands, on the couch.

“What’s wrong, dear?” Paroophoron beeped apprehensively, sitting beside his wife and rubbing her back gently.

“It’s all gone!” she wailed, tears and mascara streaking along her cheeks.  “I didn’t want to tell you before the party but…b-b-but…it’s all gone!”

“What’s gone, dear?” Paroophoron said without any idea what his wife was talking about.

“Everything!...Everythi-i-ing!”

What the friendly little green alien could not conceive of was that his wife meant exactly what she said.  Indeed, other than their beautiful house and their various belongings, Paroophoron and Epoophoron had absolutely nothing.  They were broke.

Now, in his wildest nightmares, Paroophoron could never have imagined that this would be the case, because before his relatively recent retirement, the alien had been renowned for being a marketing genius and he had earned quite a good salary for an Adnexian.  But while he was a savvy businessman, Paroophoron was never very good at keeping track of the finances and had left it to Epoophoron to take care of their money.  Unfortunately for the Adnexian couple, Epoophoron’s love of extravagance and lavish dinner parties meant that while Paroophoron amassed roughly 100 million years of savings, his wife took about the same 100 million years to spend it all.  Paroophoron was despondent.  Because of their retirement policy, his old company would never take him back and, at his age, he had no idea how he was going to support himself.  Confused and hopeless, he went to the only person he thought could possibly help him.