Hopeless
Beep! Beep! Beep!
The shrill high-pitched tone of the infusion pump was intended to let everyone know that the unit needed attention. In reality, its main function was to yet again awaken Dean Evans from another endless night of restless semi-sleep, as he awaited his demise.
His very severe case of Crohn’s Disease had already cost him everything: his meager fortunes and all his worldly possessions were consumed paying off Abbott Labs, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and other Big Pharma drug lords—all for the privilege of remaining barely alive and not fully functional. As he’d always known, government health insurance was a sad joke, unable to cover much beyond the expensive core of his hospitalization. He was beyond bankrupt: he was destitute.
His disease had no cure in “western” orthodox medicine. “Eastern”/alternative medicines threw up their hands and gave up on him the moment urgent necessity forced him into western orthodox surgery for removal of a significant percentage of his small intestine. All western medicine could do for him was keep cutting out more and more of his intestines, pump him full of insanely expensive, side-effect-laden drugs (now at taxpayer expense as he no longer had any money/valuables/net worth), and let him continue to suffer and die slowly. He was at the point where surgeons agreed that further surgery would be extremely risky, full of complications, and in no way any long-term solution. What remained of his small intestine was highly restricted—nearly totally blocked—such that liquids were all he could have, when he was relatively well. Presently, his situation remained so dire that his digestive system needed a long rest: total disuse. He was being fed solely via intravenously delivered liquid food.
No family was nearby nor able to help from a distance. His love left several years prior, no longer able to take the stress of being with her dying man in his agonizingly slow death spiral.
Dean wasn’t thriving… he had no reason to live. In a sane world, he might have been in the comfort of a hospice setting, or sped to his end in peace and reverie via voluntary euthanasia. This, however, was anything but a sane world: it was the county hospital system.
Up until a few days ago, he’d been in the famous, huge, art deco monolith of a hospital building: the core of the county system. A beautiful, imposing building built for medicine of a bygone era and barely able to function in modern times in its hastily-retrofitted form. Like every other patient, he’d been forced to endure an endless string of nurses from skilled and compassionate to barely functional/barely literate, definitely weighted towards the lower end. Many seemed fresh off the boat from obscure African nations, and for some reason lacked patience for patients. Even with the fresh imports, there were nowhere near enough RNs nor CNAs: everyone was overworked, underpaid, and expected to be perfect all the time.
Dean had given up long ago… now the system had given up on him too. He’d been shunted to a small 20 bed facility. At least as old as the 1930s monolith, it was once a nice small community hospital. Decades after being swallowed up into the county system, it had evolved into basically a holding tank for patients the county system did not know what to do with, and could no longer really help: the Hell version of hospice, in a sense. It did have the advantages of smallness: fewer people coming and going, less noise, a small, finite number of doctors and nurses, even private rooms for each of the few patients!
“Good morning, Mr. Evans!” Nurse Jones screeched as she entered his room. A shrill-voiced, falsely cheery, not very bright young 20s woman with long, straight brown hair, she never failed to set Dean’s teeth on edge with her paint-peeling intonations. Competent was the most positive accolade he could give her, and barely even that one.
“OhhKayy… IV bag first, so we can stop the beeping…. More delicious, nutritious food for ya!”
{Oh yeah, it’s delicious alright…} he thought to himself, {going straight into my veins, bypassing my taste buds}. He could no longer remember the last time he’d been allowed anything via mouth beyond sips of water.
“Let’s get you chaaaannnnged….” She pulled off his gown, with difficulty on account of all the tubing and electrodes hooked up to him. “Then we’ll get your sheets changed and you’ll be all ready for another sunny day!”
{Die. Die. Die. Die.} he thought to himself, about himself. Though he’d accept her dying as the next-best option.
“Ooh!, your vitals don’t look so good today. I’ll call Dr. Farnsworth.”
Eventually the pain that was Nurse Jones completed her work and left him in blessed peace and relative quiet.
Lovely… more time to lie in bed and think. Dreams—sleeping or daydreams—were his only refuge from reality, and more or less the only thing to do, given that he hated television and his attempts to watch enough of it to depress him to the point of death had so far failed. Internet for patients wasn’t a thing in this system, and thanks to abject poverty he no longer had viable functional hospital-usable tech in any case. The doctors merely pumped more life-sustaining crap into him to keep him breathing and brain-alive, so they and the rest of the system could tick off another day of successfully saving a life and getting someone, somewhere paid handsomely for so doing.
With no future and no reality worth contemplating, his still-fully-functional mind turned to fantasy. Often, it would be some near-magic cure from some unknown new medical person who suddenly appeared. Perhaps because he was dying and some innate mammalian genetic preservation algorithm kept kicking in to somehow get him to pass his genes along—which under no circumstances had he ever done nor was he going to start doing now—frequently the dreams were sexual in nature. Being fantasy, he or his dream proxy could be healthy and magically hooking up with the type of women he’d always loved: plush, soft, fat women… the fatter the better. And of course with it being his fantasy, they always loved being fat and in some cases getting fatter, and there were no downsides for them nor him to any of this.
He used to be shy about touching himself when first admitted to the big hospital many months ago. But once he realized he wasn’t going to make it out and that this was the end days of his life, he didn’t hold back. One or two of the many nurses at the big hospital had been taken by surprise and sought reassignment for the day, yet others ignored his penile tumescence or found it cute or even promising for his will to live. At least he could still use a pee bottle and didn’t need a catheter!
“You OK Mr. Evans?” Nurse Jones screeched on her way past his room.
“Fine” he replied softly. “Just dreaming.”
“Great day for that!” she chirped, “Nice sunny daydreams!”
{I’d like to “sunny” your daydreams!} he kept locked in the privacy of his mind. At least neither she nor anyone like her was never in his dreams, given that in addition to being more strident than the average car alarm, she was stick thin and curve-free. His average-sized midlife moobs/pecs were about the same size as what for her passed as breasts. She didn’t look like she could feed a baby fly, much less a baby human. {Ooh! Cannot go there!} he chided himself when he momentarily imagined her reproducing.
“Hi Dr. Farnsworth. It’s Denish Jones over in Angel 20. Mr. Evan’s red blood count is way down… Pressure? Um, 125 over 85… Pulse was 95 and weak, though I think something’s with the monitor because it keeps going up as I take it.… Do we need to make preparations?… You will?… Great. Thanks Dr. Farnsworth!”
That afternoon, Dr. Farnsworth checked in on Dean. True, he wasn’t thriving, but 97/70 and a strong, regular pulse of 65 were a lot better. He put in a requisition for calibration of the monitor.
The good news was this facility was too small to justify paying CNAs as well as RNs, so the RNs did everything and thus there were fewer people to miscommunicate and have to greet and remember their names each day. The bad news was that it meant seeing Nurse Jones (and others like her on other days) more often.