Authors: Katherine Stone
“Six hours ago? It’s still bleeding?”
Eric didn’t answer. He was staring at the huge gash on the palm of his hand and at the blood that flowed freely from the gaping wound. He put a cloth over it as he had repeatedly for the past six hours and clenched his fist. He could make the bleeding slow but it wouldn’t stop.
“Eric?”
“I’m here.”
“It sounds like you need to go to the hospital.”
“It will stop.”
“I know you don’t want to go,” Charlie said. It made her sad to think of him having to walk into a hospital. “But you may have to. I’ll come over. If the bleeding hasn’t stopped, we’ll go. I’ll go with you.”
“That isn’t necessary.”
“I want to.”
They arrived at the triage area of University Hospital emergency room at eight. The triage nurse examined Eric’s hand and took him immediately into one of the acute trauma rooms. Charlie sat in the waiting area. For a while she stared at the prototypic emergency room posters on the gray-yellow walls. One was a compelling call for blood from the American Red Cross, another, the A,B,C’s of basic life support from the American Heart Association and a third, a message about smoking from the American Cancer Society.
Some enlightened soul, probably in defiance of hospital policy, had hung a poster of two puppies curled in a wicker basket with a small fluffy kitten.
Charlie studied the posters for a while. Then she thumbed through the women’s and sports magazines that lay on the tables, idly turning page after page, absorbing nothing. Finally, she put down the magazines, closed her eyes and succumbed to the memories.
She needed to remember because she knew that Eric was remembering. They were his horrible, painful memories, but she had to be there, then, to help him. She was here to help him now. The memories flooded her with thoughts of that interminable, senseless nightmare. Memories that started with a late-night phone call from Robert ten years before.
“Charlie, it’s Robert.”
“Robert!”
“Eric needs you, Charlie. Please come to him.”
“Robert, what is it?”
“It’s Bobby,” he began, then was forced to stop because of the emotion in his throat. In a few moments he said the rest, hating the words, almost unable to speak them. “Bobby is dead.”
“No, Robert.
No.”
“Please come, Charlie.”
It started as a simple case of chicken pox. Bobby wasn’t even very ill, his charming pleasant personality only slightly dampened by the common childhood virus. He stayed in bed, coloring and playing games with Victoria and Eric, while he watched TV, drank Seven-Up and took the children’s aspirin Victoria gave him for his fever.
It all seemed like a very routine case of chicken pox. Then Bobby started vomiting, becoming a bit confused and irritable. Quickly, almost in front of their eyes, he became comatose.
“It’s called Reye Syndrome,” the pediatrician said, the graveness in his voice giving them their first clue to Bobby’s prognosis.
They stood outside the pediatric intensive care unit. Inside, a team of specialists hovered over their precious five year old boy. The team had already learned from laboratory studies that Bobby had liver failure, a low serum glucose and cerebral edema. They learned from his parents that he had had chicken pox and that he had been given aspirin.
“Reye Syndrome?” Eric asked.
“It’s a newly recognized syndrome. It usually follows influenza or chicken pox. We don’t know what causes it. It affects the liver and the brain.”
“What about the aspirin? Why did they ask us about aspirin?” Victoria interjected. The doctor was about to tell them Bobby’s prognosis. She didn’t want to hear it. She knew. They both knew.
“There has been an anecdotal association made between aspirin and chicken pox and Reye Syndrome. It’s just an observation at this point. It needs to be looked at scientifically,” he said.
Still, as Eric and Victoria tried to deal with the senseless but inevitable death of their child, they searched for a reason, for something to blame. They blamed the aspirin. And, even though they had always given aspirin to Bobby when he had a fever, Victoria blamed herself for giving it to him this time. He hadn’t been
that
sick. His fever hadn’t been
that
high. She knew it, and Eric knew it, and she believed that Eric blamed her, too. She saw his helpless anger, his desperate fury, as they watched their baby die. And she knew the emotional distance he was keeping from her.
The marriage ended the day they buried Bobby. Eric and Victoria left the funeral in separate cars with their own parents. They couldn’t grieve together. They didn’t have enough love to help each other. All their love had been for their child. He was the only reason they had been together.
Without Bobby they had nothing.
Charlie arrived at Eric’s family home three hours after the funeral. She hadn’t seen Eric since the day she was accepted to law school, two days after his marriage to five and a half years before. She hardly recognized the thin, sad man with the dark circles surrounding his lifeless blue eyes, the light brown hair that should have been cut a month before and the hopelessness carved, deep, in his handsome face. Bobby had lived for five weeks. Eric had been with him every minute.
Without a word, Charlie walked past Robert and Florence and June. She put her arms around Eric and held him as he cried.
No one else had been able to touch him, to even begin to console him. Not even Robert.
In all those weeks, Eric hadn’t cried, not until Charlie held him.
Charlie took a leave of absence from her law firm. Over the ensuing weeks, she listened to Eric’s stories about his little boy. She learned to love the little boy that she had never known. She grieved for Eric, and she grieved with him.
They took long walks. They held each other. They spent entire days together without speaking and sometimes stayed up talking until dawn. They stayed in Robert’s and Florence’s home in separate bedrooms. Robert and Florence left them alone.
At the end of two months Eric said, “Charlie, you have a life to live.”
“So do you,” she observed gently. Then she asked, wondering if he knew, “What are you going to do?”
“Move InterLand to San Francisco,” Eric said. He had just decided. “We have a corporate office there. I’m going to turn it into our headquarters. Want a job?”
“No, thank you,” she said, hesitating a moment. Then she added firmly, “I have a job in Boston.”
“Still?” he asked. He held her hand and gazed into her eyes. “I would never have made it through this without you. I haven’t made it yet. But I’m healing. I will make it.”
“I know you will, Eric.”
I hope you will
.
Two years later, succumbing to pressure from Eric and ready for a change in job and geography, Charlie moved to San Francisco. She became InterLand’s principal attorney, indispensable to the company and to its president.
Charlie and Eric made love to each other for the first time six months after she moved to San Francisco. Charlie finally experienced the ultimate closeness with the man she had loved so desperately years before. Their lovemaking was sensitive and intense, pleasurable and emotional, careful and caring.
But it was not the eager limitless passion of a man and a woman in love and full of hope for their love. Eric and Charlie weren’t in love anymore. Too much had happened.
They weren’t in love, but they loved each other. Deeply. The love grew even stronger as the years passed, as she worked beside him every day, as they laughed and talked and argued and teased. They made love often and traveled together whenever they could. They knew each other so well. They cared about each other so much.
Sometimes, sparked by a smile or a touch or a kiss, the magic of their past love would reappear, suddenly, in a warm, surprising, breathtaking rush, and they would be reminded, for a moment, of the wonder of that love and of the great joy they had once shared.
Charlie sighed, opening her eyes to the too bright lights of the emergency room waiting area.
She hoped this wouldn’t be too hard for him. Her best friend. Her wonderful lover. Her beloved Eric.
But she knew it would be.
“The fellow in room One has a bad hand lac, Leslie,” the triage nurse said, emerging from the room after obtaining Eric’s vital signs. “I’ve got a tourniquet around his forearm. He’s got an arterial pumper.”
“Think it’s an ortho case?”
“At least to stop the bleeding. He says the sensation in his fingers is fine.”
“Good. I’ll go take a look. Would you order an X-ray and page orthopedics? By the time they call back, I’ll know if I need them. It sounds like I will. What’s his name?”
“Lansdale, I think. His chart’s still being made up. I just brought him right back.”
Leslie walked into room One and looked at the man lying on the stretcher. He wasn’t aware of her presence at first. He lay very still with his eyes closed.
In pain? Leslie wondered. In shock? No, his vital signs were fine. His cheeks looked pink, not white, under his tan.
“Mr. Lansdale?”
The eyes opened. Light blue eyes, startled eyes.
“I’m sorry if I startled you. I’m Leslie Adams, the resident on call. What happened?”
“Crystal highball glass. I was washing it.”
“Oh. Let me take a look,” Leslie said as she sat on the stool next to him and carefully removed the sterile saline-soaked gauze dressing that the nurse had placed over his palm.
The wound was long, straight and deep. It looked almost surgical, as if cut with a sharp precise blade. Glass could do that. He had probably grabbed the already broken glass, forcing the razor-sharp edge into his palm.
It wasn’t bleeding now. The tourniquet on his forearm occluded the arterial flow. Watching the wound, Leslie reached for the tourniquet and slowly released it. The white hand turned pink. Blood oozed into the wound and spilled, overflowing onto his hand. At one end of the wound, Leslie saw a rhythmic movement beneath the blood, causing a turbulence in the surface, like water just about to boil. He had a small arterial pumper. It would have to be clamped and tied, after his hand was anesthetized and after the wound was cleaned.
Leslie tightened the tourniquet again. The bleeding stopped.
“How long ago did this happen?”
“At one.”
“Seven and a half hours ago?” As she had been examining the wound, she had been observing him, too. Despite his reserve, he seemed very much in control, in charge, even though his hand was bleeding without control. He was impeccably dressed, polite, handsome.
He did not look like the kind of man who would allow his hand to bleed uncontrollably for seven and a half hours. He did not appear to be intoxicated or drugged. He just seemed a little remote and preoccupied.
“Has it been bleeding like this for seven and a half hours?” Leslie asked the question again.
“Off and on.”
“We’d better check your blood count. You may have lost a lot of blood.”
“Is that necessary?”
“Yes,” she said firmly. She had to be in control. “Let me first test the sensation in your hand and fingers. If that’s OK, I’ll put in a nerve block at the wrist to anesthetize your hand. Then we can clean it well—it needs extra cleaning because it’s been open for so many hours—and sew it up.”
“No anesthetic,” Eric interjected. He wasn’t specifically thinking, No one gave Bobby an anesthetic before they stuck needles and tubes in his small sick body. He wasn’t thinking at all. He was just feeling. The aching, empty feeling from deep inside him made him say, again, more forcefully, “No anesthetic.”
“Oh! Are you allergic?”
“No.”
Leslie looked at his eyes and decided not to press the point. Patients with minor lacerations, patients who prided themselves on being impervious to pain and patients who dabbled in self-hypnosis occasionally opted for no anesthetic.
But this wound was not minor. It had to be extremely painful. The wound cleaning and repair that she had to do would cause even more pain. It would make her task more difficult, even if he didn’t let her know how much it hurt, because she would know she was hurting him.
Leslie didn’t argue. She knew, from his eyes, that she wouldn’t win.
A woman dressed in surgical scrubs covered by a white coat entered the room.
“What have you got, Les?” she asked, nodding curtly, pleasantly at Eric.
“Sue, hi. I didn’t realize I’d get the chief. Mr. Lansdale, this is Dr. Sharon Miller, the chief resident in orthopedic surgery. I want her to look at the wound as well since it’s such a deep cut to the hand.”
Eric nodded silently. A specialist. He had met a lot of specialists. None of them had been able to help his son.
“It’s a glass—crystal—cut. Seven and a half hours old. Sensory and motor are intact. He has an arterial pumper that needs to be ligated and a small tendon lac that’s not through and through but may be suturable.”
Together, Sharon and Leslie cleaned and examined the wound. Sharon had no idea that Eric’s hand had not been anesthetized. She probed deep in the wound, looking for glass, for tendon lacerations, for foreign material. The careful exploration was necessary. Eric never flinched.
Sharon tied off the small severed artery and put two sutures into the tendon. Then she left to join the rest of her team in the operating room to put a steel pin in the hip of a patient with an intertrochanteric hip fracture.
“I’d give him prophylactic antibiotics, Les. No data, of course, but a hand wound that deep and that old is an infection waiting to happen,” she said as she took off her mask and blood-covered gloves before she left.
“I agree. A cephalosporin?”
“Sounds good. Take care, Mr. Lansdale. Bye, Leslie.”
“Thanks, Sharon,” Leslie said, settling onto the stool that Sharon had vacated. Leslie put on a new pair of sterile gloves before suturing the wound closed. It would take a while to pull the edges of skin back together, stitch by stitch. As she selected the appropriate gauge suture material, a needle holder and a pair of smooth forceps, Leslie said to Eric, “She’s a very good orthopedic surgeon.”
Eric nodded.
“Would you like me to inject some local anesthetic before I close the wound?”
“No,” Eric answered swiftly. Then he added, looking at the concerned blue eyes staring at him over the aquamarine surgical mask, “Thank you.”
It took Leslie thirty minutes to close the wound. The skin came together well. If it healed without infection, the scar would, in time, be simply a thin white line.
During the thirty minutes, neither spoke. Leslie concentrated on her suturing, and he, she noticed when she looked away from the wound to get more suture or reach for a sterile saline-soaked cloth to clean the field, was concentrating, too. Not on her, or his wound, or the pain but on something else. Somewhere else.
Usually patients were garrulous while their lacerations were being sutured. Usually the fear that entered the emergency room with them abated once the anesthetic took hold. The fear subsided and the relief pulsed through them making them euphoric, ebullient, talkative.
The light banter that normally accompanied suturing a laceration made the experience enjoyable for Leslie and her patients. It eased the tension and distracted them both away from the intimacy of what was really happening. The intimacy of touching. The
invasive
intimacy of forcing needle and thread into another person’s flesh.
With Mr. Lansdale there was no light banter. Leslie knew he felt every touch. She knew that he felt the touch of her warm hands and the sharpness of the needle as she pushed it through his skin and the pull of the thread as she brought the raw edges together.
I’m sorry, Leslie thought, with each thrust of the needle. I’m sorry that I’m hurting you.
Finally it was over. Gratefully Leslie replaced the instruments and removed her gloves and mask.
“All done,” she said, startling him.
“Great,” he said absently, not even looking at the wound. Not asking, as most patients asked so they could tell their friends, how many sutures she had placed. Not teasing her, as most did, about what a great seamstress she was.
He should look, Leslie thought. It’s one of my best suturing jobs.
“The nurse will come in and bandage it while I go write your instructions and get your antibiotics,” she said, leaving the room.
When Leslie returned five minutes later, Eric was sitting in a chair, calmly resting his bandaged hand on his lap. He smiled politely when Leslie entered.
It always amazed her how different people looked when they were sitting up than they looked lying down on stretchers. Leslie had decided, as she observed his profile on the stretcher, that he was a handsome man. Now she saw the full measure of his looks, the light blue eyes in the aristocratic face and the controlled body that sent a message of strength and power.
“Here are the wound care instructions,” she said, suddenly feeling uncomfortable, remembering that she had touched this man, put needles and thread in his skin, questioned him about his delay in coming to the hospital. She continued with effort, “Someone should look at the wound in four days—sooner if there is any problem—just to make certain it’s healing well. Your own physician can do that.”
“I don’t have a physician.”
“You’re welcome to come back here. Just stop by at your convenience. Any of the doctors can look at it.”
“Wouldn’t it be best to come when you’re here?” Eric asked.
Of course it would. Leslie always tried to schedule the patients she sutured to come back for wound checks while she was on duty. It was best for them. It gave her feedback. Why was she treating him differently? Why was she encouraging him to see another doctor?
“Yes,” she breathed.
“So, what shift will you be doing in four days?”
“This shift. Six in the evening until eight in the morning.”
“What would be the best time to come?”
“It’s unpredictable. If we get busy, if someone comes in who is critically ill, it could be a wait,” she said, looking at him, thinking he was not a man who was used to waiting.
He didn’t look disturbed at the possibility of a wait, but Leslie had already learned something about his politeness and his control.
“Would five-forty-five Wednesday evening be convenient for you?” she asked.
“Sure. But you won’t be here,” Eric said pleasantly.
“I’ll be here. I always get here early. I’ll see you right before my shift starts.”
So you won’t have to wait. So I won’t have to worry about your waiting.
“That’s very nice of you.”
“No problem.”
Leslie didn’t watch him walk down the corridor toward the waiting room. She didn’t see the beautiful woman with the long blond hair and concerned expression touch his face tenderly, thoughtfully. Leslie didn’t see them hold each other, tightly, for a few moments before leaving the emergency room.
Leslie didn’t see any of it because she was already in another room talking to a young woman with a urinary tract infection.
Four hours later, at one-thirty Sunday morning, the emergency room was finally quiet. Leslie had seen all the patients. They had all gone home—their throats cultured, their fractures set, their infections treated, their corneal abrasions patched and their lacerations closed—or been admitted.
Leslie sat in the triage area at the entrance of the emergency room beside a stack of patient charts that awaited her record of the patient’s visit to the emergency room.
Leslie sat at the triage desk so that she would know immediately if any new patients arrived.
The red trauma phone rang. It was a direct line used only by ambulances and medic units. The triage nurse answered the phone and listened a moment while Leslie watched, curious. Then she shook her head at Leslie and wrote on a pad of paper L and D.
Labor and Delivery. It wasn’t for the emergency room. They received calls from all ambulances coming to the hospital even if the patient was being directly admitted to a specific patient care floor. The ambulances all came to the emergency room entrance no matter where the patient was going.
After the triage nurse forwarded the call to labor and delivery, she said, “A little Gemini about to be born.”
“Gemini? Is that good or bad?” Leslie asked idly.
“Neither. It’s just what he, or she, is. It may begin to matter when he or she begins to socialize.”
“Do you really believe that?” she asked, a little curious.
“I don’t live by it, but I think it’s interesting. We talk about
chemistry
between people. That’s about as mystical as astrology!”
Leslie laughed. “I’m a Virgo, what does that mean?”
“It means you’re strong and perfectionistic. Critical of others to some extent, but mostly you place demands on yourself.”
“Sounds awful,” Leslie said seriously. It sounds accurate, she thought. It sounds like what Mark said that night at the Cliff House. “Who am I supposed to be compatible with? If anyone!”
“Someone even stronger. A Scorpio, for example. They are very strong. Powerful,” she said. “You need someone like that.”
Mark had said that, too, Leslie mused, returning to the stack of unfinished charts.