Doldrums
“Let’s put Mandy in with Mr. Evans” said Dr. Jameson.
“Didn’t he request Becky?” Head Nurse Melissa asked.
“Allegedly. Though she herself reported that he was running a fever. He was probably confusing her with someone else.”
Mandy wasn’t shrill. She was, however, yet another stick-like young thing who did nothing for Dean’s will to live. Especially her acting like she didn’t want to touch him, even through examination gloves. His numbers ran low rather than high: low as in body nearly shutting down low.
“Dr. Jameson!” Mandy called out as she trotted down the hall.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Evans is 60 over 40 with a weak pulse!”
Becky overheard this and charged up the hall to his room.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Evans” she said as she poked through a storage closet, her back to him. “How’s it going today?”
“Better now!” Seeing her delicious fat butt and side outlines of one or the other of her breasts as she turned when going through the closet raised his blood pressure right up to a nice, healthy level. “Are you taking over for Mandy?”
“No. Just getting some spare linen out.”
He slumped back down deeper into the bed. The pulse monitor alarm tripped. She headed over to investigate.
“Am I dead yet?” he asked out of his stupor.
“No, silly… you knocked the sensor off.” She replaced it and reset the alarm. Once again, his numbers trended towards healthy and stable, especially as she held and caressed his hand with hers once the sensor was back in place. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you actually like me.”
“You don’t know better. I do actually like you—quite a bit!”
“Mr. Evans!” Dr. Jameson called out as he entered the room, “How’re we doing today?”
Becky wanted to stay but knew she had to get back to her assigned rooms forthwith.
The afterglow of her presence kept him stable and communicative during Dr. Jameson’s brief visit.
“What’s all this?” Dean asked Nurse Melissa, whom he’d met briefly one other time.
“Your monitoring equipment doesn’t seem to be working correctly and they’re too deeply backlogged to fix it any time soon, so we’re switching it out with Room 5.”
“That’s the one where Mr. Crupson died yesterday, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” She was both surprised and somewhat pleased that he apparently was aware about the goings-on in the hospital, though she wished he could focus on his own healing and living. “All sterilized and checked, and ready to help keep you alive.”
“Who’s my nurse today?”
“Me.”
“Oh OK. Thanks.” He again dropped back down into the refuge of the bed. Nurse Melissa was his distant second choice behind Nurse Becky. Her voice was OK, though not the mellifluous wonderfulness of Becky’s. If not middle age she was at least close, and definitely knew what she was doing as well as having a reasonable bedside manner. Still, she was bony and hard… not what he wanted touching and poking him in his final days on earth.
“This makes no sense!” Dr. Jameson exclaimed, staring at Mr. Evans’s chart in his office. “His numbers are up, then down, then over here, then over there… don’t any of our monitors work any more?”
A week had passed since Dean first met Nurse Becky. She’d been his nurse one other day, but other than that, others had attended him. He wasn’t doing well.
Going over the chart with Dr. Jameson, Head Nurse Melissa barely shook her head. “We’ve tried two other units in his room—from 5 and 9—same result. Both the one from 5 and from 9 worked fine before we moved them.”
“Sensors?” Dr. Jameson was not ready to let another person die on his watch, despite the apparent intent and reputation of Angel 20.
“Tried that: new ones, as well as ones from 5 and 9 which went with each unit. No change.”
“Something is wrong! Let’s go get Denish and Becky and figure out what it is.”
“Let’s look at the historical data” Dr. Jameson said to the impromptu gathering of the 3 day shift nurses for that day. “Morning of the 17th., he’s elevated… who had him then?”
“Denish” replied Melissa, reviewing the schedule.
“Anything unusual that you recall?” Dr. Jameson asked Denish.
“No sir.”
“You followed all protocols?”
“Yes sir. I could see the numbers going up, so I verified the sensors and re-checked: they kept going up until they hit a high plateau, which are the second set of data points.” She pointed to them on the sheet.
Day by day, they went over the readings and who took them. A clear pattern emerged.
“So every day you took them”–he looked at Denish–“his numbers ran high and unstable. When Mandy took them, they tended to run dangerously low, other than last Friday when they were high as with Denish. And yours are all over the map, Melissa. Any idea why?”
“None whatsoever. I tried everything I could think of!”
“Maybe we all have to ask Becky. The days she was in there, his readings were stable and in quite a good range… almost like he was getting better.” He turned to her, “Is there something we’ve all forgotten about taking vitals that you remember?”
“No, not that. I think it may be SNS.”
The others burst out laughing. SNS stood for Sexy Nurse Syndrome, the observed phenomenon whereby a patient improves when attended by someone they find attractive.
“Seriously! He says nice things about me every time I’m in there. Assign me to him for a week and let’s see what happens.”
“You sure you’re not doing something differently?”
“Not unless you’ve all forgotten how to take vitals, which I truly doubt! Especially since we’re not seeing this issue with any of the rest.”
The IV infusion pump in Room 7 had been going off for awhile, and now the foot and calf circulation unit in Room 1 joined in.
“Very good. Thank you all. Let’s get back to it!” He touched Becky’s forearm and indicated she should stay a moment.
“Your theory’s logical and the only one so far which makes any sense, but I don’t see it.”
“Are you trying to tell me that no one could find me sexy? I find that rather offensive.” Her nostrils flared.
“I didn’t mean it that way. It would just be…… unusual. Others have complained about having you as their nurse, after all.”
“Alright, try this:” Very much like Dean’s vitals with Denish as his nurse, Becky’s rage was ramping up, not down. “Tell him I’ve been reassigned to General and that Denish will be his nurse every day going forward and I guarantee you’ll have a dead man by morning. Is that what you want? She’s his closer… not me.”
She nearly stomped away.
Whatever other faults he may have, Dr. Jameson was a man of science. Being also a compassionate human being, he chose to test the theory by assigning Becky to Dean’s Room 8 for a full week, rather than the possibly more destructive and final test she proposed in anger.