Notorious D.O.C. (Hope Sze medical mystery) (14 page)

I paused, my keys jangling in the air.
"Yeah, actually." As far as I was concerned, there was no other
reason to go into medicine.

He reached for his shoes.

"Ah, Ryan. I could be there all
right and the rest of tomorrow and even the next night."

"I'm coming with you. I'll walk back
from the hospital. You're driving this time, right?"

I nodded. "You sure?"

He kissed the top of my head.
"Someone's gotta look out for you."

***

Mrs. Valdez, my patient so recently
assigned by Dr. Callendar, was waiting in the tiny triage room on the
obstetrics floor. She sat in one of the padded chairs, her black hair loosely
braided, her eyes glazed with fatigue. Her husband stood at her side, holding
her shoulder.

"Took them long enough to find
you," said the triage nurse, handing me the chart.

A volcano of anger erupted in my breast.
How was that my fault?
 
It took me a good
five seconds to come up with a mild response. "Sometimes locating needs a
little help." I took the chart. "Hello." I nodded at the couple
while I refreshed my memory with the file notes. This was Mrs. Valdez's third
pregnancy. Her contractions were eight to ten minutes apart. The nurse thought
her cervix was closed and posterior. No blood or leaking fluids.

In other words, she wasn't in active
labour. Yet.

"Doctor, we are very worried,"
said Mr. Valdez.

"I understand that. Hi, I'm Dr. Sze.
I was supposed to meet you in my clinic, but looks like the baby wants to meet
me now." I smiled at both of them, concentrating on Mrs. Valdez. She nodded
at me and closed her eyes, leaning back in her chair and spreading her legs
under her loose green skirt while I said, "I have a few questions. I know
your regular doctor is Dr. Mackenzie. Is that right?"

She nodded. Her eyes tightened.

"Are you having a contraction
now?"

She nodded again. Her husband squeezed
her hand and said, "Can you help us, doctor?"

"I'll do my best." I glanced at
my watch to monitor the time of contractions myself. "But first I want to
know what happened to your other pregnancies. You had two miscarriages, one at
six and one at twelve weeks?"

Mrs. Valdez said something in Spanish.
Her husband translated and said, "Babies gone. All gone."

"So it's good this baby has made it
this far. Let me examine you." Things weren't fancy at St. Joe's. The
triage room consisted of one curtained examination bed, crammed right beside
the nurse's desk, across from two padded chairs.

Although I'm no obstetrician, it took a
lot longer for me to get her gowned, draw the curtain around her, and find the
speculum in the second drawer and lube it up, than it did to check her and to
agree that her cervix was nowhere near ready.

I explained that active labour meant
contractions lasting at least sixty seconds, of strong intensity, every five
minutes or less. The whole time, I was wishing I hadn't sent Ryan home.

It wasn't quite 1:30 a.m. when I slipped
into the apartment, trying not to rattle my keys too much.

My heart in high gear and my brain was in
about Mach-3, imagining what sinful situation Ryan had set up.

One fall, he planted tulip bulbs in a
giant "H" on my lawn so that in the spring, I'd see my initial in
bloom. He'd meant to do a giant HS&RW with a heart around it, but he ran
out of bulbs. I was so overcome, I ended up doing him up against a tree, even though
it was still pretty freaking chilly out.

Obviously, Ryan didn't have time for any
great prep tonight. But he might be lurking in my bedroom, ready and waiting.
Or he could have made me dinner with himself as the dessert.

I crept into my bedroom. He'd left the
door open. The closed blinds filtered the street lamps into translucent moons.

The bed was empty.

I detoured into my living room/study,
following his breathing. Here the shades were open. It was easy to find him
crashed on the futon with his eyes closed, legs akimbo. As I stared at him, he
rolled on his back and gave a slight snore.

Man.

No sex tonight for Dr. Sze.

I draped a fleece blanket over him, the
one with a lion and a giraffe printed on it. Ryan muttered a bit.

I dropped a kiss on his lips.

He stirred and lifted his head.

I couldn't resist. I slipped my tongue
against his lips.

He groaned.

My heart beat faster.

He slid back into sleep, and this time, I
let him.

***

In the morning, my clock radio fired up
and Smash Mouth sang "Daydream Believer," prodding me out of a dream
that I was in an elevator. Before I'd fully processed that, I heard the door
open and felt the mattress indent on the other side of the bed. Ryan sat beside
me, balancing something in his arms.

I blinked and rubbed my eyes. He smiled,
which only increased his gorgeousness to my grunginess factor. His hair was wet
and combed back from a shower. He smelled like soap. He seemed to be holding my
round cookie sheet draped in a red-and-white striped tea towel. Huh?

He whipped off the towel to display a big
white bowl of Cheerios, a glass of milk, and one other item I couldn't
decipher.

I had to laugh. "What is that?"

He handed it to me. "Your sunflower
looked like it belonged in the kitchen, so I made you another one."

It was a piece of newspaper he'd folded
into a tulip. My heart turned over. "Oh, Ryan."

"Hey, I gotta make it up to you for
crashing last night. I wish you'd woken me up."

I wasn't sure how to answer. Part of me
wanted to yell, Hey, why don't we make up for it right here, right now?
 
Who needs Cheerios?
 
The other part of me hesitated.

He saw that and patted my leg through the
blanket. "I'll leave you to it. I've got to meet some guys for breakfast.
Are you going to be okay?"

I nodded.

"I'll call you." He kissed my
cheek. Ever the gentleman, he closed the door behind him.

So instead of wake-up sex, I ended up
bolting down my cereal and calling the police.

I got a relaxed young constable, Donald
Stewart, who told me that harassing phone calls are illegal under the Criminal
Code. The first step is to figure out who's calling and the second is to prove
they're harassing calls.

"How often do you get them?
 
How many times a day?"

I tried to think. "Well, it's only
been two days. If I include the hang-ups, up to five a day. I get weird pages
too, but I don't know if that's a problem with the hospital operator or someone
harassing me."

His silence told me he wasn't that
impressed. Good thing neither of us had mentioned the 'detective doctor' thing.
"What makes you think it's harassment?"

"I got this picture in the
mailbox." I described it to him.

He said he could bring it to the station
and they'd have a look, but no promises about the fingerprints. "It's not
like in the movies. Now, for the phone calls. Press *57 right away, before
anyone else calls. That's 'Call Trace.' You'll get a message saying if the call
was successfully traced and you get charged five dollars per call up to ten
dollars a month. The information gets sent to the police. But we have to get a
warrant to access the information. It's not like the good old days when we
could just talk to Bell Canada and get the lowdown."

"Oh."

"It's not that big a deal to get a
warrant. All you need is a few hours' typing and a JP on your side. But we need
it to figure out what residence it's coming from. That's the best-case
scenario. A cell phone server is a little trickier, but still possible."

"What about a phone booth?"

"Then you're pretty much Euchred.
Oh, can you hang on a minute?" A male voice crackled in the background and
Donald Stewart answered him before coming back to me. "Could I call you
back?"

"Of course." I gave my name and
phone numbers, but I already had my suspicions. If I were making phone calls
like that, I'd use a phone booth. I wouldn't have a pattern. I wouldn't leave a
trace.

"We encourage you to press charges.
But I've only done that once in nine years. Most of the time, once we figure
out where it's coming from, the person drops the charges. It's usually someone
you know."

Great. I'd tell Ryan about it when he
called, but he was going back to Ottawa in the next two days.

This was up to me. I activated Call
Display online. I also decided to keep a phone log and make *57 my friend. When
I had a chance, I'd bring the tombstone pic to the police. Now that I squinted
at it, I could make out some of the original words on tombstone:

William.

Beloved
husband and father.

1869-1911

Whoever made this picture wasn't even
good at Photoshop. That comforted me a little.

I arrived uncharacteristically early for
work so that I could visit Reena in the ICU. I hadn't rotated through the Unit
yet, so I felt a little shy when I passed the small, dimly lit waiting room and
pressed the button for the automatic doors.

I felt even more out of place when I saw
the row of patients along one wall. What was I doing here? I wasn't on ICU. I
wasn't responsible for the psych consult. And I'd decided to wear a miniskirt
today, so even with the white coat, I looked like I'd taken a wrong turn.

A nurse looked up and frowned at me.
Fortunately, Stan Biedelman hailed me from a large, square table by the window
where he was reading charts and drinking coffee. "Dr. Sze!
 
Are you bringing us more business?"

"Not if I can help it," I said,
sliding beside him. "How's she doing?"

"You'll never guess what she
has."

I pointed at an open chart, hoping it was
Reena's. "Can I have a clue?"

"No, and you can't call a friend,
either," he said in a bad
"
Who
wants to be a millionaire?" impersonation. "Try this on for size. She
was unconscious. Her vitals were a little abnormal, temp of thirty-eight
point-o, heart rate one-hundred to one-ten, otherwise normal. Her first drug
screen came back negative."

The ICU doctor arrived and nodded at
Stan. I stood up to go, but Stan said, "This is Hope Sze. She's the psych resident
who was looking after bed 4."

The doc held out his hand. "Hi, I'm
Dr. Wharton." He had a British accent.

"Hi."

"I was just asking her to guess the
diagnosis," Stan said.

Dr. Wharton folded his hands and regarded
us with some interest. "Don't let me stop you." The unit coordinator
handed him a form, but he was still watching me.

Just what I needed, an impromptu
audience. "Uh..." Fever. Unconscious. I mumbled to myself, "Dry
as a bone, hot as a hare, blind as a bat..."

Dr. Wharton smiled. "The anticholinergic
syndrome. But her pupils weren't dilated and her skin was sweaty, not dry. I'll
give you another clue. Her tone was increased."

The problem is, you study syndromes, but
patients present with symptoms, and you have to figure out what it is, under pressure,
without sleep, without a textbook, and patients don't tend to follow the
guidelines anyway.

"It's something you might consider
with a psychiatric patient," Dr. Wharton added.

There are only a few reactions they
emphasize with psych patients, so that narrowed it down. My brain clicked.
Fever. Sweating. Rigid muscles. "Neuroleptic Malignant Syndrome."

"Right on," said Stan. "We
figure she got some Haldol or something. She was allergic to it, you
know."

Dr. Wharton nodded at me and took the
paper from the unit nurse, ignoring us.

"That's right," I said slowly.
I vaguely remembered that from her chart. "But how would she end up taking
Haldol? We didn't prescribe it."

Stan shrugged. "Who knows?"

"Especially if she had a serious
reaction in the past," I said to myself. None of it added up. Haloperidol
was a relatively unusual allergy, not easily forgotten. And what about her
Medic Alert bracelet? A nurse wasn't likely to ignore that and jab Reena with a
syringe. Haldol is an antipsychotic, but Reena wasn't hallucinating. Sure,
she'd been agitated, and we use it to calm down dangerously agitated patients.
But Reena wasn't psychotic and she probably hadn't fled from our ER to another.

Stan said, "If you go through her
chart, the first time she got Haldol, she got a bit spacey, temp of
thirty-seven point nine, that was it. Nothing like this." He waved his
hand at her bed. From here, all I could see was the nurse, curved over a
metallic cooling blanket.

"So is she going to be all
right?
 
How was her night?"