Fireflies (11 page)

“Antibiotics. Matt needs them. Give them to him.
Now
,” David told the nurse.

“But I told you”—the nurse stepped farther back—“he doesn’t have a temperature. His other statistics are somewhat high but well within normal ranges. There’s no
reason
to give him antibiotics. Even if he had an infection, which he doesn’t, we’d need to do lab cultures on his blood, to learn what kind of infection it was, so we could decide what kind of antibiotics would be best to fight the—”

“Who’s the doctor on duty?”

The nurse veered quickly past David, her eyes no longer nervous but apprehensive. “I’ll hurry and get him.”

“No, I’ll go with you. Donna, in the next ten minutes, Matt’ll be so weak he won’t take phone calls. He’ll send away visitors, the friends he’s been anxious to hear from. He’ll ask you to turn off his music. Understand? He’ll start rejecting everything that’s important to him.”

“Yes,” Donna said, that same unsettling knowledge behind her eyes. “I understand. Do it. Whatever you think is right. I’m so afraid.”

“Twice is too many times.”

Donna nodded, as if she sensed exactly what he meant.

With a frightened look, the nurse left the room.

David followed.

In the corridor, the nurse whispered to the head physician, her remarks attracting a second physician. They turned, eyes narrowed, as David approached.

The first physician straightened. “We gather you’re having some reservations about your son’s treatment.”

“Fears.”

“That’s understandable.” The second physician cleared his throat, obviously hoping to avoid an awkward conversation in public.

“You’re following the procedure you explained to me. I understood the logic of that treatment. I agreed,” David said.

“Well, good,” the first physician said. “Then we don’t have a problem.”

“No,” David said. “Everything’s changed now.”

“Changed? Because he feels weak? But we told you that would happen.”

David’s heart kept pounding. “Yes, but something else is going to happen. All the early symptoms are there, but you don’t know it yet … because you’re not expecting it, so you’re not”—his lungs heaved—“you’re not interpreting the symptoms—”

“I beg your pardon?” The second physician narrowed his eyes. “I’m not interpreting … ?”

“The symptoms the way you would if you knew what was going to happen.”

“Going to happen?” The first physician frowned at his colleague.

The parents of other patients had begun to gather and listen.

“Can we go somewhere else to have this talk?” the second physician said.

“As long as we get this settled.”

“There’s a conference room down the hall.”

They shut the door to the narrow room that had a black-board upon which doctors customarily drew diagrams for parents confused about the treatment their child would receive. Both physicians studied David as if they wished they weren’t alone with him.

“Now we realize you’re under stress,” the first physician said. “You’re worried about your son. All perfectly natural. But what exactly do you think is—?”

“Going to happen?” David’s legs felt weak. He gripped a chair. “Septic shock.”

The second physician narrowed his eyes. “Where’d you hear that term? Something you read? You’ve been doing, let’s call it, well-intended but uninformed research, and it makes you nervous?”

“Never mind how I know. I’m absolutely certain—”

“Now listen carefully,” the first physician said. “Whatever books you’ve been reading, whatever outdated texts have made you afraid, yes, it’s true there’s always a danger of septic shock. We’ve already warned you. When a patient’s blood counts are low, there’s a risk of infection. That’s why we take extreme precautions to prevent—”

“No,
you
listen carefully.” Though the room stayed perfectly still, David’s mind revolved. “Your precautions are fine. There’s nothing wrong with the treatment you’re giving him. But Matthew
will
get septic shock. I can’t explain why, but tomorrow afternoon, he’ll become infected. His blood pressure will drop and …”

“What makes you so sure?”

“You wouldn’t believe me! Just give him antibiotics
now!
”

The first physician edged toward the phone.

The second physician raised his hands in a placating gesture. “‘Antibiotics’ is a general description of a wide variety of treatment.”

“I understand that. Different antibiotics have applications to different infections.”

The first physician picked up the phone.

David’s chest felt squeezed. “Stop. Give me a chance.”

The first physician touched numbers on the phone.

“Please!”

The first physician hesitated.

“You need to know the specific infection so you can choose the specific antibiotic to use to attack it. So now I’m telling you.”

As David spoke the words that to anyone but a doctor would have been gibberish … as he recalled the words he’d memorized from the microbiology report in his dream … words that in his present timestream would have been impossible for him to know, let alone pronounce … he realized that he
wasn’t
crazy. His dying vision was fact. He had indeed come back.

For what he told the physicians, the words like gravel in his mouth, was …

“What’ll give Matthew septic shock?
Streptococcus mitis. Staphylococcus epidermidis.”

David couldn’t believe he’d spewed those chunks out.

The physicians couldn’t believe it either.

“Where the hell did you … ?” The first physician almost dropped the phone.

The second physician drew his head back. “But naturally adapted strep and staph are almost never …”

“Fatal?” David shuddered. “This time they will be.”

His legs buckled. The room spun along with his brain. He lost his grip on the chair.

“My God, he’s …”

Falling.

“Having a …”

Drifting.

Toppling.

“Heart attack.”

When David struck the floor, he couldn’t move; he felt disoriented, helpless. His fall, which seemed to have lasted forever, contrasted sickeningly with the sense he had of floating above his aged dying body. He seemed to drop and rise simultaneously—conflicting sensations that produced such vertigo he could barely muster the strength to blink.

Making these reactions more intense was the added element of fear, as if to move, to try to stand, would kill him.

Through a haze, he saw the first physician lunge from the room. The second physician knelt beside David, checking his pulse. After an interval—ten seconds? a minute?—the first physician rushed back, accompanied by Donna and a nurse.

“His pulse is strong.” The first physician’s voice was an echo. “No fibrillation. Ninety.”

“Acceptable,” the second physician said.

“No … normal for me is …” David’s chest heaved.

“Don’t try to talk.”

The nurse wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around David’s arm. Donna knelt beside him, touching his cheek, as the nurse inflated the cuff. David saw the fear in Donna’s eyes.

The nurse deflated the cuff, watching a dial as she listened to a stethoscope pressed to David’s arm. “A hundred and forty over ninety.”

“Tolerable. A little high, but not unusual. Not critical,” the second physician said.

“No. Listen. Normal for me is …”

“Don’t try to talk. Relax.”

Sure, easy for
you
to say, David thought, the room and his mind aswirl.

“What I told you a minute ago might not be true. Try not to worry. Our initial examination isn’t conclusive, but you might not be having a heart attack.”

“Then
what
… ?”

“We don’t know. We’ve alerted Emergency. We’re sending you down there. If it
is
a heart attack, we’re not equipped to deal with—”

“Stop the spinning.
Stop the damned room from spinning
.”

“David, I’m here. I’ll be with you,” Donna said. “I’ll stay right beside you.”

“No, stay with
Matthew
.” The effort to emphasize his words was excruciating.

David felt his body being lifted. He suddenly found himself in a wheelchair. He closed his eyes. But the tingling—and worse, the swirling—persisted.

Feeling the wheelchair being pushed, he groaned from increasing dizziness. Pressure accumulated behind his ears. He dared to open his eyes and discovered …

He was in an elevator. The doors hissed shut. The elevator dropped.

“No!”

At last he moved of his own accord, shoving his hands to his ears to stifle the pressure.

“No!”

The elevator jerked to a stop. The top of his head seemed about to explode. If someone hadn’t been holding him, he’d have toppled from the wheelchair.

Blinding lights. A swirling corridor.

But not the soothing gleam of the corridor in his nightmare. This was the hospital’s first floor. Rear section. The part that patients and visitors almost never saw and prayed they would never
have
to see. Through a spinning maze of twists and turns, he was rushed in his wheelchair toward the Emergency Ward. Outside, a wailing ambulance arrived. David concentrated to focus on glass doors that led to a curve in a driveway where attendants unloaded a patient onto a gurney. Through a blur, he saw a nurses’ station directly across from where the glass doors now slid open, the attendants hurrying the patient through.

David’s wheelchair stopped abruptly in front of the nurses’ station. His head tilted forward, making him groan.

A woman peered over a computer screen toward him. “Name?” She poised her fingers above a keyboard.

David managed to tell her.

“Two ‘r’s, two ‘I’s?”

David gasped for breath and nodded.

The woman tapped the keyboard. “Address?”

“It’s all”—David sweated, even though his skin felt cold—“on file. I hurt my shoulder … in March.” He breathed faster. “I came here then for treatment. I’m in … the computer file.”

“Just a minute.” The woman tapped the keyboard again. She read an address from the screen. “That’s where you live?”

David nodded.

The woman read the name of an insurance company.

“Yes,” David breathed.

“Okay, you can take him in.”

The wheelchair hurried forward. David’s dizziness increased. He closed his eyes once more, felt the wheelchair turn sharply left, and the next time he looked, he was speeding toward an examination room—a bed, a sink, a metal cabinet, its shelves stacked with medical supplies.

The nurse who had wheeled him down from the Bone Marrow Ward stopped and tapped his shoulder. “They’ll take care of you now, Mr. Morrell. Good luck. I’ve got to get back on duty upstairs.”

At once, another nurse replaced her. “Can you stand?”

“Don’t know.”

“Try. I have to get you onto the table.”

She gripped his arms and helped him to his feet. Wobbling, he leaned his hips against the table and settled backward. She raised a metal bar on each side of the table to keep him from rolling off.

A male resident came in, closing a curtain.

“Pulse is ninety,” the nurse said.

“Not critical.”

“No, listen to me.” David felt as if a ten-pound rock had been set on his chest. “I tried to explain upstairs.” He squirmed from the humming pain behind his ears. “I’m a runner. My heart rate’s low. It’s normally sixty.”

“Blood pressure—one hundred and forty over ninety.”

The resident shrugged as if to say “not critical” again.

“You don’t understand.” David shivered. “It should be a hundred and fifteen over seventy-five. It’s
never
… God, that curtain.”

The resident frowned and turned toward the privacy curtain. “What’s wrong with—?”

The curtain was decorated with blue wavy lines. David’s mind not only spun now but wavered in imitation of those lines. Sickened, he closed his eyes again but still saw the wavy lines. His breath was so rapid he felt he’d just run several miles. The top of his head seemed to bulge.

“I’m going to …”

Faint?

Die?

Toppling toward his kitchen floor.

Floating toward the radiant doorway.

Fireflies gleaming.

(Behind his eyes?)

Power chords throbbing.

(In his head?)

Then?

Now?

Later?

“What’s
happening
to me?”

“That’s what we want to find out.”

The nurse unbuttoned David’s shirt. The resident pressed pads against David’s chest. Squinting, David saw that the pads were attached to wires that led to an EKG machine on a cart.

The resident flipped a switch on the EKG. Needles wavered, making inky marks on paper.

The paper rolled from the machine. The resident tore off a sheet and studied it.

“Yes, I found the problem. Here. And another one.
Here
. And
here
. Extra blips. Your heart. There’s something wrong with—”

“Let me see it,” David gasped.

“What?”

“Let me see it.”

David reached for the printout. The effort to focus his eyes was agonizing. “No, that’s … not what’s wrong with me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Those blips … normal for me.”

“Normal?”

“My EKG …”

“Relax.”

“Always looks like this.”

The resident frowned. “Have you had medical training?”

“No.”

“In that case …”

“But I’ve always had a”—David grabbed the sides of the table as it started swirling—“right …”

“I don’t understand.”

“Right … bundle.” David struggled to complete his statement. “Right bundle branch block.”

The nurse and the resident stared at each other.

“Right bundle branch block?” The resident seemed astonished, as if he’d never expected a patient to speak to him in technical medical phrases.

In contrast with David’s certainty about the septic shock that would soon kill his son—
have to save him!
—there was nothing mysterious about his present medical knowledge. The phenomenon in his heart had been explained to him years before. The heart is a pump, and like any other pump, it needs an energy source, “electricity” produced by the body. Nerves, like wires, control the flow of energy, and under normal circumstances, this energy flows smoothly from chamber to chamber, stimulating the heart to take in and push out blood.