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Date Posted: 13:08:04 12/13/99 Mon
Author: - Barry
Author Host/IP: zoom.lafn.org / 206.117.18.8
Subject: Here's a male tale

Oh, BTW, these are out of old files... so please pardon the wild characters and missspelllingz. This is about half shot as a 16mm short... another couple of thousand and it could be finished. If anyone knows how to get a dime out of these... there are lord a plenty of 'em laying around this old diskdrive. - Barry

© 1987 N. Barry Carver no portion may be used without permission

Into His Hands

A Fable
Without Moral

written for no apparent reason on
the 5th of November l986

I had no idea how to say it to him. Don't get me wrong, it's not the first time I had to tell someone such a thing - it's just - harder when you know them. And I'd known Cary Cutter since we attended grade school together. It was long before the scouts began to frown upon such things as becoming 'blood brothers'. I still could see the scar. Clean across my palm. Cary never did anything 'half-way'. That's why this diagnosis was so hard to give. It always hurts, it's always a shock. The only difference this time was, it hurt me as well.
I resigned myself to the task and decided I'd take myself off the case - I'm no good as a doctor where friends are involved. I walked quickly down the drab corridors moving fast enough so that no one would stop me. If I had a chance to think about what I was going to say - I'd probably lie. I popped Cutter's door open so fast that the curtains and some papers blew out the window and before Cary could sit up in the bed I blurted out, "It's not good."
His face wrenched from the wisecrack he was attempting to make to a look of undefined dread. He flopped back in his bed as if he already had guessed.
"How do you want it?" I asked, as if I were pouring him three fingers of Scotch. "I can tell you the truth or a much more pleasant lie." Oh what a glib bastard I am. Why don't we just play twenty questions?
"Tell me whatever I have to know." he said in a voice I'd never heard before. It was a rare thing when Cary allowed himself to be serious and maybe even more rare that he sounded hurt. "Just don't tell me it's Mono."
I nearly laughed. God, I needed to laugh. The last time he came to see me he was still in "art" school. He'd somehow found himself a grade A case of Mononucleosis. He just about died when I told him what it was. I had thought he'd caught it in the usual way - oral/viral infection - kissing. No such luck, he worked himself into it. He'd forget to eat. He'd forget to sleep. I finally had get him admitted to make him rest. But what did he have to show for all his long hours of labor? Nothing. Some remedial looking sculpture, a dozen or so paintings of... nothing in particular, a few interesting looking photographs but nothing that was the least bit salable. I knew he had nothing but time and I had to tell him that that was nearly up.
Trying to look as if this wouldn't hurt I said, "No, it's not Mono. Cary, have you been nauseated in the mornings?" - please, dear God, let him say 'no'
"Yes, almost everyday for the last month."
Well that was it, if I had the slightest hope that it was anything else his answer just blew it. "Cary, I have no idea how to say this to you. But we've been friends along time and I see no reason not to tell you the truth."
"Is it that bad?" he looked more like the kid in grade school now than he had in years. "Yes." I said and gave it time to sink in. "You have chronic nephritis." I felt like a boxer who sees he's killing his opponent but can't stop swinging. "I missed it five years ago when I thought it was Mono." God help me he's going to die right here, "But it wouldn't have mattered. . . there is nothing that can be done." How can I say these things, "With everything that we can do, if you stay right here and let us treat you, you can still live three to five good years."

2............
There. The hard words were out, now I just wish he would laugh or cry or punch me in my damned mouth. But he didn't. He shot me the sort looks you see in the movies, you know Christ's look when Pilate sentenced him. I was so expecting him to say 'do what thou wilst with this body' that I nearly missed it when he did ask, "And how long without?"
"Without medical treatment you'll get sicker, weaker and die ... maybe in six months." I had to convince him to stay here.
"Ok, you've been honest with me, I'll be honest with you. I'm not going to lay around here and let you guys radiate, medicate and examine me to death. I'm going back out there and at least pretend to live. Life hasn't been so peachy that I can't afford to do without it. And I don't want 'everything you can do for me' but I would appreciate something to settle my stomach down and something to ease the pain that doesn't make me stupid. That's something you can do Doctor and then you can get me my clothes."
I would have liked to argue about it but I don't know what I would have done in his position. He wasn't unreasonable, just unconventional. So I wrote half a dozen prescriptions, answered the few questions he had, told him I'd take myself off his case, and signed his release. I'm sure he thought I was wrong but shortly he'd know the truth.
The few things he agreed he'd take daily would allow him to seem well and negate most of his pain. Bodily pain. As for anything else - he wouldn't tell me.
It was nearly three months before I heard from him again. This time he burst into my office. He looked well, good color, eyes lucid and reactive. But before I could really focus in on him and put away the X-ray I'd been looking at, he hit me with a question the answer to which would surely crush whatever spirit he'd found. "Yes, this particular strain is genetically transmitted, there is an 90% chance that all offspring will have the condition and a 50% chance that any offspring will be a carrier."
He sat down hard. I knew what and why he was asking. It was like taking the cane from a blind man and saying, 'no you can't have this either'. What a fine and noble profession this is!
"Tell me, is she already pregnant?" "Maybe. . . we don't know yet."
"How are you feeling." I could think of nothing else to say. He knew as well as I did that the only sane course - if she was pregnant - was to abort the fetus, and the sooner the better.
His face turned red as the implications of my answer took hold of him. I couldn't blame him in the least when he said, "How the hell can I feel?" I would have been happier if he'd yelled that at me and stormed out of the hospital. But he didn't he said it quietly as if he were really asking me. As if I should be able to give a countdown on which of his systems would break down first. "How is your morning sickness?" I asked, demonstrating my usual stupidity.
"Better" he said.
"Better?" - did he say that, or is it just what I want to hear.
"How much better?"
"Gone."

3...........
No. That can't be true. Even if he's over-dosing the pills I gave him he still should be queasy all day.
"And your swelling?"
"Gone."
I groped for his file to make sure I hadn't lost my senses altogether. Yes, Cutter's file showed him terminal. The blood test and the liver biopsy were infallible. Yet here he was looking better than the day I checked him in, and with apparently no symptoms.
True, the scan wasn't a text book example and people had been known to experience temporary remissions without medication but... "Cary, I know you won't like this idea much but I want you to spend two days here for some tests.
"Are you kidding? I can't even pay on that last two days here. Besides if you think I'm going to be checking out any earlier I don't want to know."
"That's not it at all." I said before I thought. How can I say
'you might not be dying' when the evidence I'm have in my hand proves that he is? How can I get him to submit to the same battery of tests without letting him know I'm unsure of my diagnosis? In short, how can I hope for the impossible without letting him do the same thing?
"It's just a chance that your data might help find the answer for someone else. . . I'll get the hospital to absorb the cost." - fat chance. But I'd be happy to invest the money if there was a chance to prove these finding false.
"Ok, but no more surgery." Thank God he agreed. I could get all the information I needed without cutting into him and maybe - if things went well. . . well, I'll wait to say.
I waited outside the lab door until the slides were prepared, pretending to read a chart on a patient I'd already released.
When the tech called my name I nearly beat him in the door. I asked for color enhancement and pushed the machine to its best magnification. There it was. Clearly the condition was no nephritis at all! But a parasitic infection. He never said he was out of the country!
I traced the pattern and headed for infectious diseases. There a wizened old crone pulled out an exact double for the tracing I'd made. A blood worm of sorts found mostly in Egypt. Tenacious, deadly if untreated, but fully treatable. Full recovery in cases when treated a simple combination of multi-vitamins and antibiotics. Just like those I'd prescribed for Cary to help him seem better. He'd been taking those pills and waiting to die. . . and seeing no future, began to slow down.
If only he knew. The crazy bastard, he - in spite of me - was curing himself. I mean, he couldn't do the whole job with what little medicine I'd given him but I could send him home with such a load of antibiotics he'd be healthier than me in ten days. I was so happy to have been proven wrong I forgot about my professional ethics (and covering my own ass) and ran right down to tell him.
The minute I swung into his room this time my heart stopped. I'd put him in a semi-private room with Fred Johnston, an elderly victim of too much bad advice, a patient of mine. He was on a pulse monitor and alarm but I'd been too involved to notice them paging me. I nearly knocked him off the gurney in my grand entrance.
4..........
It was bad enough that my first thought was that it might be Cary with his face beneath that sheet, what was worse was that I was relieved that it was Johnston. The look of the self-righteous intern and his, "we can handle it from here" didn't help me feel any better.
I pulled open the curtain to Cary's area to see him staring blankly at the cross on the opposing wall. Apparently Johnston hadn't had the courtesy to die easily and quietly. "Cary," I said softly, "I have good news."
"Will it be like that?" he asked, from a million miles away. Good God what did he see? What did he hear? Why the bloody hell couldn't I have been here? It's hard enough on anyone when somebody dies right in front of them, but Cary, taped to a half a dozen tubes - unable to help or leave - and all the intern had had time to do was pull the curtain, which left him alone with the sounds and his imagination - what horrible death does he imagine for himself?
"No, no, Johnston was an old man, a smoker, his lungs were shot. Plus there were other things wrong with him. But forget about that, please, I do have really good news for you." I filled him in on the results but they seemed to have an odd effect on him. Where I'd expected joy, he simply frowned. What should have been relief was concern. It seemed almost as if, being prepared to die, continuing to live was in some way a sort of disappointment.
I really didn't know how to handle this. Had the strain of these tests and their findings taken their toll on his sanity?
"Cary, did you hear what I said? You'll be well again before thanksgiving"
"Yes, I heard you," he said emotionlessly, "What am I to do now?" Apparently I'd given him more of a dilemma than I had cured. Seems for one reason or another everyone he'd known either wanted or expected him dead. Not to mention he'd exhausted his savings and long ago voided any chance of normal employability. Indeed life hadn't been very friendly as far as Cutter was concerned. But what could I do? At least he wasn't dying of my incompetence.
We did a completely routine bone marrow implant which went well and I released him that Friday. I called down to the pharmacy to find out if he picked up the prescriptions I'd made out for him and was more than a little surprised to find that he had. That was the last I heard of him until the phone woke me before sunrise on the 28th of December.
It was that same intern that I'd been trying to avoid since that day in Cary's room. He sounded more angry than urgent but he made it clear that I needed to get to the ICU as fast as I could.
It was just six by the time I pulled into the parking lot and I could see office lights just starting their day through a thin snow.
Downtown's busyness and vitality seemed an entire world away. The snow that was falling had thawed and refrozen, making it hard little shards, before it gave its life away by stabbing my freshly shaved cheek. I was beginning to feel that I hadn't caught all my mistakes and, for an MD, that feeling was something that just wasn't allowed. The walk from the lot to the ER must have been ten miles long and the normally short hallway into the ICU would just never end. I knew how important it was for Cary, and for me, to see what must be waiting behind those automatic doors.

5...........
But that fact didn't make going in there any easier. I gathered up what little of my wits and courage remained, crossed the path of the electric eye, and went in. Several glass boxes displayed the wares that technology at purchased for us.
For the first time in my life I understood why doctors brought rich patrons down here before asking for donations. At first I thought it was to play on their sympathy but now I saw that it was to demonstrate what we could do with remarkable amounts of money and hardware.
In display case number one we have the infant with no brain, yes, ladies and gentlemen, alive without any purpose but to show we can do it. And in number three we have the Viet Nam vet, what's that you say? - you'd like to donate right this minute - well go right ahead sir while we see the rest of the show... Yes, alive since he
was Med - Evac'ed from the DMZ, he has no idea he's even alive
and no hope he'll ever recover but, with your kind aid, we can keep him on display here permanently.
What a great load of ghoulish freaks we are. All of us, doctors, patients, everyone.
I'd finally reached the termination of my quest and stopped just beyond seeing into number five but I was close enough to read the chart name on its door: Cary Cutter. Admitted 28 December 2:30 am.
I wanted to scream, and to cry, but if I started now I might never stop again. I buckled down my wild feelings and strode in as if I was well informed and in control. I didn't even make it a full step into the room when my eyes met hers.
She stood opposite me on the far side of the machine infested bed. Her dark hair and large brown eyes shifted uneasily as she auditioned competing insults with which to great me. Tears welled up in her eyes as she couldn't find voice or words awful enough for such as me. When it finally seemed she would release me from her hot stare and throw me out, an emaciated white hand landed flat upon the one she rested on the rail. In that instant she became calm. All her anger and frustration and fear just dissolved into love for Cary. How I wished that he might reach over and do the same for me.
He was lost. He had held himself at home as long as he could and I'm sure he had intended to die there. The leukemia I had twice misdiagnosed, had eaten away everything that had been the body of my friend and had done so so quickly and completely because I had been consistently wrong. I couldn't tell if he thought I'd lied to him about getting well or if he knew of my deteriorating competence.
He turned toward me and, barely audible over the purring of half a dozen chromed leeches, he said something. He wasn't angry or, it seemed, even sad. Inside the husk of what had once been his body he was still the same useless poet.
He said, "Fooled you." and couldn't even accompany it with a smile.
I wanted to tell him how stupid I'd been. I wanted to tell him how much he'd meant to me over the years. I wanted to hold what was left of him and thank him for that silly little joke. But, again, and now for the last time, I was too late. As I stood, still only half way into the room - Cary died. Like some sort of automaton I crossed the room and reached for the Code Blue alert button that was standard over each bed down here. But before I could reach it she froze me again. She looked at me as if to say, 'you've done enough' and I wasn't sure how she meant it, but I did know how to take it.
6...........
When Cary's breathing had been done for four or five minutes she allowed me to move again.
When I did, I could think of nowhere to go except home, and, as if everything else this young day had brought me wasn't enough, as I reached the door another wave of dread crashed into me. Cary's lover, or wife - I would never know which, moved to pick up her coat and as she did it was clear she was late in her third trimester. She would shortly give birth to the child I assured Cary would be perfectly fine.
My car sat forlornly in the doctors' lot. When time came to start the engine and go on with today, I just didn't know how. I sat and looked at the wheel for what seemed like days but now the tears would not come. Then I heard the bells.
The church (I don't even know what denomination) that sat across the park from the hospital had taken this morning to play some unrecognized melody which brought me back to the present. It was clear then that what I knew I must do - I must do today. I would give up my practice, not just for Cary or his child to be, but also for me. Perhaps I'd spend the rest of my life doing the useless things he used to do. Not out of some morbidity but for no
other reason but that it was clear that he had enjoyed them. Even in his dying he seemed somehow content with the, by my standards, failure of his life. If I could just learn that one secret, perhaps I could forgive myself for all the hurt I've done.
There were so many aspects of life that were undetectable or indecipherable by me, so much meaning, in even this story, that I miss, that it was time I started to search those answers out. Because I want to have those answers ready. You see, my dear reader, I've been sick in the mornings these past few months and the tests say it isn't mono.

© 1987 N. Barry Carver
no portion may be used without permission

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