Notorious D.O.C. (Hope Sze medical mystery) (15 page)

Stan said, "We haven't rounded on
her yet, but I think she was stable. At least, she doesn't look like she's on
dialysis."

I had to click through that. With NMS,
the muscles seize up and start to break down. If the kidneys can't handle the
protein load, you need dialysis. But twenty-nine year-old kidneys should be
okay. I took a deep breath. I still felt responsible.

Stan said, "You know what the
differential is?"

I shook my head. I'd blown my load with
NMS.

"Serotonin syndrome. She's like a
walking teaching case. We should bring the med students here."

I checked my watch. I was running out of
time before my clinic. "Can I swing by her bed?"

Stan smirked. "Go crazy." He
caught himself, glancing at Dr. Wharton. "I mean, good idea."

Reena looked even paler than the night
before. Someone had smeared Vaseline on her closed eyelids, protecting her eyes
from drying out, but rendering her even more unfamiliar. She was still on the
respirator. Her breath condensed inside the translucent tube. The nurse clicked
her pen closed and glanced at me questioningly. I explained, "I'm from
psych."

"Thought so. She can't talk to you
yet."

"I know."

I heard a bang from the doorway. The
nurse and I both turned. Reena's sister, Wendy, had dropped a big box of Tim
Horton's doughnuts just inside the automatic doors. She wailed, "I'm
sorry, I'm sorry."

Another plump, middle-aged nurse hurried
over to help her. The box was still closed, but Wendy had stopped and folded
her arms around herself like she was in pain.

The nurse managed to pick up the box and
put her arm around Wendy, almost simultaneously. "Are you okay, hon? Who
are you here to see?"

"Reena Schuster."

The nurse led her over while I debated
staying at the bedside. I chewed the inside of my cheek while the nice nurse
said, "Isn't she lucky to have a friend get up first thing in the morning
to visit."

Wendy wiped her face with the back of her
hand, muffling her word, but I caught it. "Sister."

"Oh, I'm sorry." The nurse
paused at the central desk to hand her a tissue.

"It's okay. Everyone says that.
We're f—f—foster..." She burst into tears.

I twitched. It felt wrong, me being here.
"I'll come back later," I muttered to Reena's nurse, and fled.

The psychiatry department was located on
the third floor of St. Joseph's hospital. No other specialty or patients came
here, to what Stan called "the land of vomit carpet" (short orange
shag carpet flecked with green). Between that, dirty cream walls and narrow
hallways, and residual cigarette stink from "the smoking room," it
was enough to make you run right back out again.

If you could. The ward was locked,
meaning you had to press a buzzer and identify yourself before they let you in
or out. So the suicidal and psychotic patients were kept in, for their own
safety, but still.

I remembered my med school psych rotation
in London, Ontario. I was assigned to the psychosis ward. Just the name made me
laugh uneasily.

However, when they let me in, the nurse's
station was filled with light from large windows. It seemed calm and bright
and, as one, the nurses turned to smile at me and bid me welcome. Nothing like
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
. It was
actually much more organized than the internal medicine wards I'd just left.
One thing I couldn't get used to, though, was that the psych patients kept
wandering up and asking for things. Can I have a smoke break? Can I have my
pills? Can Shirley have her pills? Is it lunch time yet? Can I have another
cigarette? Did my brother come?

Here in Montreal, it wasn't just the ugly
décor that bothered me. It was the silence. The section where you get off the
elevators and have to either turn left, towards the locked wards, or right,
toward the outpatient hallway, the silence had a peculiar, heavy, muffled
quality, as if the carpet had absorbed all sounds and signs of life.

If I were crazy, I'd go even crazier
here.

I turned to the outpatient side. None of
the staff or patients had arrived for the day. The metal cage at the
appointment desk was closed, reminding me of a canteen after hours. Even with
the stop at the ICU, I was still eager-beaver early for my first outpatient
clinic with Dr. Ludovich. I strode down the hallway. All the interview rooms
were empty, even though the signs on some of the doors were turned to
"occupied." I paused to drink at the water fountain, then walked back
to the stairs, still uneasy. I'd rather leave and come back than hang around
here.

In the hallway, outside the office, I
paused to study the plaques arranged at eye-height. They were your usual
variety, gold etched on black, mounted on a wood plank. One was for the St.
Joseph's Residents' Award in Psychiatry. I was always on the lookout for
awards, in case cash played a part, but I nearly choked when I saw the name for
2002.

Dr. Laura Lee.

My breath hissed out between my teeth.
Maybe it was a coincidence, but it felt like a well-placed reminder from Mrs.
Lee.

To calm myself, I scanned the other
names, but the only other one I recognized was Omar. He was the second-year
resident on my team, along with Stan, and had won the award last year.

I checked my watch. Five minutes until
show time. Not enough time to go anywhere, but an eternity if I had to hang
around this hall of creepiness.

The stair door banged open at the other
end of the hallway. I jumped.

A young man with chestnut hair stood
there. His face pointed away from me. His hair was haloed in the light from the
windows at the end of the hall. His arms bent casually at his side.

My entire body seized up. Alex.

The last guy I slept with, and the last
person in the world I needed to see.

The guy turned toward me. "Hey. Can
you tell me where the cafeteria is?"

His voice was too high, his hair too
curly, and his nose was too big. Just a random teenager. Not Alex. My heart
still raged in my chest. I pressed a fist against it and said, "You're on
the wrong floor. Go down one more."

"Thanks." He waved a hand at me
and disappeared back down the stairs, the door banging shut behind him.

Alex was officially on a leave of
absence. No one knew when, or if, he was coming back. I did hear he was going
through counseling somewhere, but he obviously wouldn't choose to do it at St.
Joe's.

I forced myself to take deep breaths.

I couldn't get used to the fact that you
could fall for someone, make love with him, and, weeks later, have no idea
where he was or what he was doing. Even if it was supposed to be Good for Both
of You.

Right.

I'd lost touch with Ryan, but it wasn't
the same. The Ottawa Chinese grapevine, i.e. my grandmother, kept me in the
loop the whole time.

Alex could be incarcerated or incinerated,
and I'd have no idea.

By the time I'd calmed myself down, it
was one p.m. Time to amble toward Dr. Ludovich's office and pick up my first
case.

Dr. Ludovich was a fifty-something blonde
in a proper burgundy suit. She didn't waste much time on niceties. She said,
"Welcome." Her accent sounded Eastern European or Russian. "Your
first patient is a young man, Daniel Culpin. Here is his chart. He should be in
the waiting room. You may pick either of the two interview rooms down this side
of the hallway. Make sure you turn the sign to 'occupied' so that no one
interrupts you. You should take a maximum of 45 minutes with each patient, so
that we have time to review the case. You may go now."

Talk about getting to the point. Well, at
least she didn't call me the
'
detective
doctor
.
' Also, organized doctors tend
to start and end on time, instead of yammering away about hypertension for an
extra hour while you try not to peek at your watch.

The "waiting room" was a bench
near the elevators. St. Joseph's was not big on patient confidentiality. Just
as I stood up to go there, my pager went off.

I didn't recognize the seven-digit number
after the 514 area code. It looked like someone's phone number. It certainly
wasn't St. Joe's. But what if they paged me to the pregnant patient's house or
something?

"Excuse me," I said to Dr.
Ludovich. "I'm just going to answer this now so I don't interrupt my
session."

Her lips compressed. "Very well. You
may use my phone, line one."

I punched the number in.

A woman moaned at me.

Chapter
15

I stopped breathing for a second pulled
the phone closer to my ear. Was someone in trouble?

Was I hearing right?

She moaned again, louder.

"Hello?" I ventured.

She spoke right over me. "
Ohhh, non. C'est pas vrai!
" She
carried on, in French, groaning and gasping.
Oh, no, you can't do this to me. You're too big and so strong. Oh, I
can't take all of you, oh, please...

My eyes bugged out as I automatically
translated it in my head, and then I burst out laughing. She carried on, asking
me to call another number so I could hear the very juicy details.

Then she cried out,
Oh no!
 
Not the two of you
together!

That was the end of the recording.

Dr. Ludovich tilted her head, unamused.
"Are you friends sending you funny calls?"

I shook my head. "I think it was a
wrong number. Sorry, I thought it might be my obstetric patient. She was in
early labour last night."

Her lips softened a little, but not much.
"I understand many of your colleagues use the pager as a contact for their
friends."

Oh, great. Now she thought I was a
slacker. "I don't. I don't like to be paged, so I ask my friends to call
me at home. I know my patient is waiting, so I'll go get him, if you'll excuse
me."

I stalked down the hall. It wasn't until
I was halfway down to the waiting room that I remembered the creepy tombstone
picture from last night. Was the sex line thing really a crank call?
 
Or something more sinister?

Especially if someone happened to know
about Ryan and Tucker.

Not
the two of you at the same time...

How could anyone know about Ryan and
Tucker? There wasn't anything to know yet. That was ludicrous.

Wasn't it?

There was one way to find out: see if
anyone else got the crank page.

Work first. I saw the patient, a
thirty-five year-old depressed man. Dr. Ludovich reviewed the patient with me,
spending a lot of time on the fact that he owned five cats, but we agreed that
he didn't seem at risk of hurting either himself or the cats. Then I waited for
an anxious, nineteen year-old patient who never showed up.

Dr. Ludovich waved me away. "Why
don't you finish your charting and research depression."

I skipped back to my interview room and
paged Tucker.

He called back right away. "Hello,
this is Dr. Tucker, returning a page."

I smiled and nestled the beige hospital
phone closer to my ear. "Hello, Dr. Tucker."

"Hope." His voice dropped and
softened, lingering over the O.

He could convey so much intimacy in a
single syllable, it made me shy. "Hi." I almost whispered it back.
Then I remembered Ryan and felt disloyal, which was ridiculous. All I was doing
was paging a colleague.

"What can I do you for?"

I had to laugh. "Well, I got this
weird page this afternoon. I've still got the number." I clicked through
my pager and read it out to him. "Did you get it, too? Or anyone else at
the FMC?"

"What's so special about this
number?"

So he hadn't gotten it. I refused to
dwell on it at the moment. "Call it and call me back. If you're not
busy."

"I'm just charting. Talk to you in
five."

The phone rang again in about two. He
burst out laughing, which was contagious. I laughed until my stomach hurt. Then
he said, "That was the most creative come-on I've ever gotten in my
life."

Heat flooded my cheeks. I wound the cord
around my index finger. "Hello? It wasn't a come on. It was a crank call I
got."

"Sure, sure. So what's the
story?"

"Maybe I'm just being
paranoid." I explained about the tombstone flyer. "If I hadn't gotten
that, I probably wouldn't have thought twice about the call."

He sobered. "I don't like it."

I sighed. "Yeah, me neither."

"I mean the flyer. The call could
just be a coincidence. I'll ask around if anyone else got it. But the
flyer—" He paused. "Are you in the phone book?"

"Yes."

"Under your full name?"