Of Flesh and Blood (48 page)

Still wearing the same mask, Jill lay flat on the stretcher in the room’s center. Helen was on her right side, squeezing an intravenous bag on the pole above her with both hands to increase the speed of fluids running into Jill’s arm. Another nurse, about half Helen’s age, squatted on the other side attempting to insert a second IV in his wife’s left arm.

Jill’s head flopped back on the bed, her eyes were unfocused and her eyelids half shut. She didn’t even look up at Tyler as he reached the foot of her bed. Above her, the monitor showed that her heart was galloping at over 150 beats per minute. Her blood pressure hovered at sixty over forty. Tyler recognized that the reading was barely compatible with consciousness.

He reached out and clutched his wife’s leg through the blanket. “Sweetheart, I’m here.”

At the sound of his voice, Jill’s gaze drifted toward him. He could not tell if she was focusing on his face or the curtain behind. Her lips moved slightly but only garbled sounds emerged.

“It’s okay, sweetheart. These fluids will make you feel better,” Tyler said in a calm voice, but his own heart fluttered with worry. He had an ominous feeling that, with Jill’s profound shock from dehydration, their unborn baby might already be beyond help.

“She’s bone dry and burning up,” Helen commented without looking over her shoulder as she inflated a blood pressure cuff around the intravenous bag to speed up the flow of fluids. “She’ll perk up with some saline. You’ll see, hon.”

Tyler felt desperately grateful to Helen. Aside from his mother’s sudden
death—and she had not even reached the hospital alive—he had been sheltered his whole life from the “patient experience” on the other end of the stethoscope. He ached to do something useful for Jill but felt desperately impotent and largely in the way.

He sidled around the younger nurse to an open spot near the head of the bed. He reached a hand toward his wife’s brow. Helen stopped his hand with a quick shake of her head. “Remember the Norwalk?” she cautioned. “You best wear some gloves.”

Helen reached behind her, grabbed a pair of disposable gloves off a cart, and tossed them to Tyler. Though the precaution made sense, he hated the barrier the rubbery layer created. The gloved contact with his wife struck him as cold and clinical.

When his hand reached her brow, her eyelids opened a fraction wider. “Ty? That you?” she mumbled through her mask.

“I’m right here, Jill.”

Her eyelids lowered again. “Whatever happens, don’t let them . . .” Her words drifted into incoherence.

Tyler mopped her brow with the back of his gloved hand. He turned his head and lowered his ear nearer to her mouth. “Don’t let them what, Jill?”

“Our baby, Ty . . .,” she said. “Don’t let them give me anything that will harm her.”

Her
. The word moved Tyler deeply. His wife couldn’t actually know the fetus’s sex yet, but with a single mumbled word the life inside her seemed so much more real to him. So did the risk of losing their baby.

“They know you’re pregnant, sweetheart. They’ll be careful.”

“Please, Ty,” she insisted. “Nothing to harm the baby. It’s so . . .” Her words petered out.

Jill’s eyelids shut and she appeared to drift off to sleep. Tyler glanced over to Helen, who nodded reassuringly. “It’s the Dramamine,” she said. “For the nausea. It’s knocked her out, hon. It’s totally kosher in pregnancy.” She pointed to the monitor above Jill. “Look at that blood pressure. I told you.”

Her blood pressure now read seventy on forty-five. Though still critically low, it had at least moved in the right direction. Jill’s heart continued to race at almost 150 beats per minute. And she still looked as pale as the moment he had swept her up off the carpet.

Helen finished adjusting the intravenous lines and then turned to Tyler. “You’re in good hands with Angela over there.” She nodded toward the younger nurse whose flaming red hair was tousled from all the activity. “I have to get back to the triage desk now.”

“Helen, you’ve been wonderful,” Tyler said. “Thank you.”

Without responding directly to him, Helen leaned closer to Jill. “When I get back from Florida, I want to see you back at the Alfredson. As a doctor, not as a patient. You understand me, hon?”

Jill muttered something unintelligible, and Helen turned for the curtain.

Tyler had never faced Norwalk virus in his practice. He reflected on the little he had learned about the virus from training. He did remember that, while highly contagious, it was not supposed to make its victims particularly ill, even if in the early stages of pregnancy. Clearly, Jill was an exception. Something gnawed at him. Pregnant or not, her story did not fit.

What if Jill is wrong about her own diagnosis?

The curtain pulled open again and a middle-aged, balding Indian man walked in. He wore green scrubs under his lab coat. His hound-dog eyes suggested he had already been on shift for a long time. “Dr. McGrath? I am Bal Dhillon,” he said in a refined accent that sounded British, tinged with a trace of Punjabi. “I am afraid your wife is stuck with me for her attending physician.” He showed a tired grin. “It is a pleasure to meet you.”

“Likewise, Dr. Dhillon.” They shook hands.

“I saw Dr. Laidlaw briefly when she arrived.” Dhillon gripped his chin with his thumb and index finger. “Helen has kept me abreast of the events. As you know, your wife shows all the signs of hypovolemic shock. However, we do not know whether she is also manifesting a form of septic shock.”

“That would be unusual for Norwalk virus.”

“
Most
unusual.” Dhillon frowned. “Perhaps the pregnancy combined with her very advanced dehydration explains her condition.”

“Maybe.”

Dhillon grabbed a pair of gloves from the wall-mounted box beside him and then moved closer to the bed as he pulled them on. “Dr. Laidlaw, I am going to examine your belly, if that is all right?”

Eyes still closed, Jill murmured her consent.

After Dhillon applied the buds of the stethoscope to his ears, he gently folded down the sheet covering Jill. With equal care, he lifted her gown up
to the level of her bra line. He placed the stethoscope’s bell on the center of her abdomen and let it rest freely as he listened for a few moments. Next, starting at her left upper abdomen, he palpated her belly with one hand pressing down on the other. As soon as he reached the left side, Jill emitted a small moan of discomfort. Dhillon appeared to ease up on the pressure of his probing fingers as he continued to move them clockwise around her entire belly.

He pulled the stethoscope from his ears. “Dr. Laidlaw, we have to run a full battery of blood tests, of course, but we will also need stool samples to test for the exact microorganism you have acquired.” He smiled at her shyly. “The good news is that your blood pressure has responded to the fluids. I am hopeful you will continue to improve now.” He paused. “Do you have any questions, Dr. Laidlaw?”

“My baby?” Jill croaked.

Dhillon glanced at Tyler with a quick frown and then turned back to Jill. “I have asked the obstetrical team for an opinion,” he said. “They will be here very soon.” He turned for the curtain. “I will return shortly. I need to place the orders now.”

“Of course,” Tyler said as he watched him leave.

Dhillon’s comment about the “exact microorganism” resonated with Tyler. His concerns suddenly crystallized into a new theory. Worry coursed through his veins. He could not believe he had not thought of it earlier. He grabbed hold of Jill’s shoulder and shook it gently. “Jill, are you awake? Can you hear me?”

Her eyes opened a little wider than before.

“This isn’t Norwalk, is it?” he asked.

She just stared at him.

“It has to be
C. diff
,” he said. “Christ, Jill! The senator exposed you to the superbug, didn’t he?”

“Tyler . . .,” she breathed.

“That’s what you meant by the harmful drugs. You’re worried about those drugs they’re using to treat
C. diff
, right?”

“Tyler, our baby,” she croaked.

“Damn it, Jill!” he snapped. “You’re so sick. We don’t even know if the fetus is still alive! Besides, there is no baby without a live mother!” He regretted the words as soon as they left his lips.

Jill rolled her head away. Her shoulders began to undulate, and she made a raspy grunting noise through her mask.

Tyler reached out and caressed her cheek with his glove. “Babe, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I’m just so worried about you.”

Jill looked back to Tyler. “I should have told you . . .”

A mechanical rattling noise broke the moment. Tyler looked over his shoulder to see a skinny young man with prominent cheekbones rolling a machine toward them that looked like a large laptop computer secured to a trolley. Tyler was relieved to see that the man was already wearing a gown and gloves and had a mask dangling loosely around his neck.

“I’m Darren, one of the ultrasound technologists,” the man announced in a nasal tone. “The ob-gyn team sent me down. Okay if I perform an obstetrical ultrasound now?”

Jill glanced nervously at Tyler. He nodded to her. “Sure, Darren,” he said. “Go ahead, please. But you should put your mask on. She’s got a GI bug.”

Darren nodded and pulled the mask over his mouth. As he set up his equipment on the other side of the stretcher, Tyler reached for Jill’s free hand and squeezed it tenderly. “Whatever happens, Jill, it’s going to be okay. You understand me?”

Her eyes reddened, but they were still too dry to produce tears.

Darren positioned the machine on the other side of the bed, giving Tyler and Jill a clear view of the flipped-open ultrasound screen. He lifted back the sheet and gown covering Jill below mid-belly. With a noisy squirt, he squeezed a large blob of jelly onto a long thin ultrasound probe. “Let me know if this hurts,” he said as he lowered the probe between Jill’s legs and gently slid it inside her vagina.

The screen filled with varying degrees of gray ultrasonographic shadows as Darren expertly slid, rotated, and tilted the probe inside Jill. Finally, he brought it to rest in one position. He reached his free hand out and adjusted a few dials on the machine.

Suddenly, the screen zoomed in on the shadowy shape of Jill’s uterus. Inside, Tyler saw a round sac that was about the size of a dime. Despite the magnification, he could not make out much more detail of its shape. As his eyes adjusted to the grayscale image, he thought he saw movement near the center of the dime. Something was definitely flickering inside it.

Darren tapped a few buttons and the object of Tyler’s attention began to strobe in a fluctuating blue and red pattern.

Tyler flushed with excitement at the sight.

Jill raised her head off the stretcher. Her eyes went wide and her scaly lips cracked into a trace of a smile. “Ty! That’s her heartbeat, isn’t it?”

“George did come back from World War One, didn’t he?” Lorna asked, though she already knew the answer.

They had been sitting in the same spot since finishing dinner hours before. She had never seen Dot go so long without having a drink, but Lorna wasn’t complaining. She had a critical meeting in the morning in Portland, which meant leaving the Alfredson mansion before dawn.

“Yes, he did,” Dot said. “Or at least part of him did, darling.”

“Oh?”

“George lost his right arm and most of his leg when the Germans shelled his trench. Liv was right, of course. Her brother was no soldier. He lasted less than twenty-four hours on the front. He was back at the Alfredson by January of 1918.”

“As a patient?”

“Hardly.” Dot chuckled. “You have to give the boy
oodles
of credit for his pluck, darling. With only one arm and a leg and a half, he resumed his medical training as though he had been on nothing more than a European sojourn. When the time came, he stepped—or perhaps hopped would be more apt”—she tapped her own leg for effect—“straight into his father’s role as the medical administrator. Of course, his wounds had a
huge
impact on his father and therefore on the Alfredson.”

Lorna knew the Alfredson had become one of the leading world centers in prosthetics and limb reconstruction. “The prosthetics program?”

“Exactly, darling. Being a turn-of-the-century surgeon, Evan had created more than a few amputees in his day. That alone had stoked his interest in their rehabilitation. When his son and numerous other veterans returned
from the Great War missing limbs, Evan was terribly dissatisfied with their primitive prosthetics. He recruited one of the leading designers in the country, Oliver Goodman, to improve the field. And George, being George, threw himself
wholeheartedly
into championing the cause.”

Lorna nodded. “How about Liv and Junior? What became of their attraction?”

Without looking over her shoulder, Dot pointed at a painting on the wall behind her. It wasn’t particularly large compared to the others, but Lorna had spotted it earlier. Vietnamese or perhaps Thai, Lorna guessed, the picture depicted three naked Asian girls frolicking under a waterfall, their hands exploring each other’s bodies. “Ah, the forbidden fruit is always the
most
appealing, isn’t it?”

“But Junior and Liv were half siblings!”

“Yes, but they didn’t know that, darling. All they had heard was their fathers constantly warning them to stay away from one another. And of course that made the attraction between them
absolutely
irresistible.”

“It’s still incest.”

Dot rolled her eyes. “Don’t get your bourgeoisie sensibilities twisted in a knot, darling. It was all terribly innocent. A few furtive meetings with a kiss here and there, at most.”

“Did they get caught?”

Dot smiled enigmatically. “In October of 1918, they had larger worries than being caught by their fathers for a stolen kiss.”

Lorna knew what Dot was alluding to but, as before, she didn’t want to give the appearance of knowing any more than she needed to. “What other worries? I thought World War One ended that autumn.”

“The war was winding down, all right, but the decommissioned soldiers were bringing home something more than just wounds and battle stories.” She nodded to herself. “Something far deadlier.”