Todd wrinkled his nose. He knew what nail polish remover smelled like. “Will they use ether on me?”
Daddy grinned and tousled Todd’s hair, thick and jet black, like his mom’s. “No way, partner. These days they give you a little needle in your arm and bingo. You’re out like a light.”
Oh, boy. Needles.
Todd hated needles. And he wasn’t too happy about going ‘out like a light’ either. The only place he wanted to go was home. But he didn’t complain. He wanted to be brave for his dad. He’d been doing pretty well, too, until that doctor came in last night. The one who was going to put him to sleep.
“Hi, Todd,” the big man said. “My name is Doctor Fallon, and I’m going to be putting you to sleep for your operation tomorrow.”
Todd didn’t like Doctor Fallon. The feeling was immediate and instinctive, akin to a fear of snakes or of deep water. If asked, Todd would have had trouble articulating the feeling...but there was something about the man’s eyes. They looked like glass.
Like teddy bear eyes
, Todd thought.
Grizzly bear.
Huddled under his thin hospital blanket, Todd corked a thumb into his mouth. His daddy got upset when he did that, sucked his thumb like a baby, but Daddy wasn’t here right now.
A nurse came in and headed for Todd’s corner bed. She had something in her hand. It looked like a needle. Todd tried to make himself small.
“Morning, Todd,” the nurse whispered. She was pretty and had big hooters. That was what Brad in bed three called them last night. Todd told him the proper name for them was breasts and Brad called him a homo. Brad was bad—
Bad Brad
, Todd thought, and smiled a little—but he was kind of cool, too.
Todd returned his attention to the nurse.
Nurse Hooters
, he thought, and smiled again. He wished he could wake up Brad and tell him. Then he saw what the nurse was holding.
It was a needle, all right.
“I want you to turn on your side,” the nurse said. “I have to give you a little pick before you go down for your surgery. It’ll help you relax.”
Todd hesitated, then turned on his side. The nurse pulled down his jammies, adding embarrassment to his list of indignities. A wet tissue brushed his buttcheek (another term he’d picked up from Brad), and cold fingers pinched his flesh. Todd tensed.
“Relax, sweetheart,” the nurse said. “This won’t hurt a bit.”
The needle went in and Todd cried out. He couldn’t help himself. Ashamed, he buried his face in his pillow.
They lie here, too
, he thought.
That didn’t hurt a bit; it hurt a
lot.
A few minutes later a porter came in and helped the nurse bundle him onto a stretcher. The commotion woke the others and the three of them watched him go. Their silence reminded Todd of a western he’d seen in which a gang of notorious train robbers were led one by one to the gallows. Brad’s bed was nearest the exit, and as Todd coasted by he saw no playful mischief in his new friend’s eyes. Now there was only fear.
The porter wheeled Todd to a bank of elevators and pushed the call button. As the doors slid open and the porter rolled him inside, Todd felt a pure and murderous fury for his dad, for exposing him to this terror and for making him face it alone. “Sorry, kid. Can’t be there in the morning. Got an important meeting I can’t miss.” His mommy would have come no matter what, but she lived in the United States now, in Utah, with another man.
The doors closed behind them, seeming to suck the air from the enclosure. There was an old woman on board, stooped over a walker, and she turned her rheumy eyes on Todd. “I got four boys, all had nice black hair like yours when they was your age,” she said. Her bent fingers brushed Todd’s hair and a trembling sadness glazed her eyes. “The oldest one’s dead now. The cancer got him. The rest is all bald.”
A bell tinged and the elevator came to a stop.
“This is it,” the porter said.
Todd closed his eyes. And surprisingly, he began to drowse.
* * *
Jack stood in the ENT suite with his back to the door and removed an unmarked vial from his lab coat pocket. He drew up ten cc’s of the amber fluid it contained and squirted it into the Pentothal dispenser on his table. Then he filled four syringes from the dispenser and arrayed them on the anesthetic machine.
At five minutes to eight he asked the circulating nurse to bring in his first patient. It was the first day of elective surgery since the closure and everyone was eager to get underway.
The patient was a six-year-old boy named Todd Brubaker, booked for a tonsillectomy. The nurse picked up his chart at the front desk, studied it briefly, then spoke to the ward clerk.
“I don’t see a hemoglobin on the chart,” she said. It was a hospital by-law that a surgical case could not commence without a hemoglobin measurement on the chart.
The clerk picked up the phone and dialed the lab. “Busy,” she said. “I’ll try again in a minute.”
But the minute stretched into five, the clerk answering a dozen other calls in the interim, and when she tried again the line was still busy.
The nurse said, “Can’t you bring it up on the computer?”
The clerk pointed at her station’s blank screen. “Still down.”
“All right. I’ll take the kid into the room and get him set up. Call me when you get the result.”
* * *
A cool hand touched Todd’s forehead, stirring him from his drowse. “Time to go, sweetheart,” a nurse said. “Is your mommy or daddy here?”
Todd shook his head, resisting the urge to pop a thumb into his mouth. Tears sheened his eyes, but somehow he kept them from leaking out. “Do I have to get another needle?”
The nurse started pushing his stretcher down the hall. “Well, we have two ways we can put you to sleep. There’s the needle—and it’s a pretty small one, not as bad as your pre-op needle—and the mask. If you take the mask, it’s like blowing up a balloon.”
“Is it ether?”
The nurse laughed. “No. We haven’t used ether in years.”
“Is it stinky?”
“A little. No worse than your socks after you’ve worn them a couple days.”
Todd gave a small chuckle. “That’s pretty bad, but I think I’ll try that. I hate needles.”
“Okay, sweetie.”
The nurse rolled him into the operating room and Todd propped himself up on his elbows. There were shiny tools on stainless steel carts, bug-eyed lights floating over an operating table, and a scary looking anesthetic machine that made Todd think of the
Star Wars
movies he’d seen.
He said, “Is all this stuff for me?”
But no one seemed to hear him. They were all business now, shifting him onto the table, attaching stickers to his chest and a blood pressure cuff to his arm.
He heard someone call for Dr. Fallon. He wanted to ask if there was someone else they could call, some other way he could get his tonsils out without that glassy-eyed man putting him to sleep.
Then Jack came into the room, and in this clean, well-lit enclosure his eyes looked normal, his smile warm and confident, and Todd wondered why he’d been so afraid of the man.
“Okay, young fellow,” Jack said. He snugged a tourniquet around Todd’s arm. “Have you ever been bitten by a mosquito?”
Todd tried to protest but his mouth refused to work.
“Oh, Dr. Fallon,” the nurse said, and Todd wanted to hug her. “Todd and I discussed it and he’s decided he’d rather have the mask. I told him you wouldn’t mind.”
“Well, I guess you lied to him then.”
He began flicking a vein on the back of Todd’s hand. Todd looked at the nurse and saw her face flash red with embarrassment.
This time Todd didn’t cry out, but it hurt. It was no mosquito bite.
The doctor hooked up the intravenous tubing and taped it into place. Todd saw a syringe in the doctor’s hand that looked like it was filled with pee.
Is he going to squirt that stuff into me?
Jack poked the needle through the rubber injection port nearest Todd’s hand. “Okay, big fella. You’re gonna go off for a little snooze.”
Todd thought,
Daddy, I’m afraid...
The desk clerk’s voice squelched over the intercom. “Dr. Fallon?”
“What is it? I’m about to induce a patient.”
“I was just on the phone with the lab. Apparently there was no blood drawn for a hemoglobin on your patient, Todd Brubaker.”
“Oh, cripes, I forgot,” the nurse said. “Sorry, Dr. Fallon, I forgot to mention...”
She looked at Jack and her words trailed off. He was clearly furious, but there was something else, a flash of petulance that made her think of her eight-year-old son when she told him it was time to go to bed, and for a second she was certain he was going to go ahead with the anesthetic anyway.
She said, “Dr. Fallon? Shouldn’t we wait?”
Jack removed the needle from the injection port, capped it and replaced the syringe on his table. Then he started for the exit. “I’ll be in the lounge,” he said as he brushed past the nurse. “See if you can find me a patient who is ready.”
* * *
“Todd? Wake up, sweetheart. I have to take a blood sample.”
They’d returned him to the waiting area and he’d drifted off again, slipping into a pleasant dream about his mom. He looked up at the girl with heavy lids, two thoughts floating in his mind at the same time:
Great, another needle
, and,
Around here I’m everybody’s sweetheart.
This time he barely felt the needle.
When the girl left, Todd saw Brad go by on a stretcher. This morning Brad wasn’t so cool. Brad was crying—screaming, more like—and he looked exactly like what he was, a very frightened six-year-old boy.
Good luck, Brad
, Todd thought, and went back to the dream about his mom.
* * *
Brad West was logged into the recovery room at 0855. His color was good, he was breathing normally through an oral airway and his pulse was a smooth one hundred and six beats a minute. The recovery room nurse turned him on his side and gave him oxygen by mask. Once she was satisfied he was stable, she turned her attention to the patient Dr. Yao had just brought in, a thirty-year-old woman who’d had an arthroscopy. She checked on Brad every few minutes and was mildly surprised, though not alarmed, to find him still asleep a half-hour after his admission. Some kids reacted that way to anesthetics, though most were at least half awake and bitterly complaining before ten minutes had passed.
At 0945 the second tonsillectomy of a scheduled nine was parked next to Brad, who still slept soundly and still had his airway in place. The nurse had become concerned about Brad, and asked Dr. Fallon to have a look at him. Jack examined him briefly and reassured her that all was well. He explained that he was trying a new technique involving the nebulization of local anesthetic into the raw tonsil beds. This, he told her, provided enough analgesia to account for the child’s prolonged restful state. Relieved, the nurse turned her attention to Timmy McNamara, the five-year-old whose bed had been across from Todd’s.
The next patient, a six-year-old girl named Jessie Nolan, came in at 1015. She’d had an adenoidectomy, a much quicker procedure, and should have come around almost immediately. Of even greater concern was the fact that Brad was still out cold, and Timmy, who’d been there thirty minutes, was still also unconscious. Though reluctant to bother Dr. Fallon again, the attending nurse mentioned it to him as he left the unit and he gave her the same explanation, verbatim.
After another ten minutes had passed and not one of her pediatric patients showed even a hint of waking up, the nurse took her concerns to her supervisor.
* * *
“Todd? Todd, honey, we’re going to move you onto the operating table now.”
“What, Mom?” Todd said, opening his eyes.
“You’ll see your mommy later,” the nurse said.
No I won’t
, Todd thought miserably, the dream fading.
They lifted him onto the OR table and paged Dr. Fallon to the room.
* * *
The nursing supervisor examined Brad first. She started by speaking his name, first in a normal voice, then more loudly and directly into his ear. When there was no response she grasped the trapezius muscle at the base of his neck and squeezed, gradually increasing the pressure until she could squeeze no harder. Brad didn’t even flinch.
“How long has he been in the unit?” she asked the nurse.
“An hour and a half.”
“Did you report his condition to Dr. Fallon?”
“Twice.”
The supervisor examined the other two children in the same fashion, obtaining the same result.
“Dear, God,” she said as she looked into Jessie Nolan’s pale blue eye. The pupil was a huge black drowning pool, unresponsive to the light. “Have they started another case?”
“Yes, I think so.” The nurse consulted her list. “They’re doing Todd Brubaker now. The boy who was delayed this morning. They just brought him in.”
The supervisor bolted out of the unit.
* * *
That look was back in the doctor’s eyes. He didn’t speak to Todd this time, just picked up the syringe and stuck the needle into the injection port.
Mommy
, Todd thought, tears shimmering in his eyes.
Daddy. I love you...
The door behind Todd crashed open and the supervisor bounded in. She saw Jack’s thumb on the syringe and grabbed the IV tubing, yanking with all her might. The tape came away from Todd’s skin with a wrench that made him cry out in surprise.
Jack turned on the nurse in a rage. “Are you out of your mind?”
The supervisor hunched over Todd, taking his face in her hands. “Todd, honey, are you all right? Are you all right, son?”
“Yeah,” Todd said, a little dazed. “I’m fine. Does this mean I don’t have to get my tonsils out?”
The supervisor chuckled nervously and started to answer, but Jack grabbed her by the arm and pulled her away.
“What has gotten into you?”
“Your patients,” the supervisor said. “In recovery. Something’s very wrong.”
“What are you talking about?”
She noticed Todd’s eyes on her and lowered her voice to a whisper. “I think they’re brain dead,” she said.