MaineCourse

Turn The Page

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I followed the advice of two people, Henry for one, who suggested that I not continue to edit old stuff, but instead, write something new. I did that, following this prompt from my instructor: “ The assignment for the class to be held on November 13th: In whatever you hand in for feedback, please try to include one or more descriptive passages.”

Here is the work in progress, which I have to send off by Wednesday. I'd appreciate editing comments.

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TURN THE PAGE

“If you get a chance, I’d like you to read my book.”

His book, John thought. The guy is a resident, moonlighting in the emergency room, and he’s training to be an ophthalmologist - how could he have time to write a book?

“What’s the title?” John shouted to Dr. Benton, as he walked up the first flight of stairs, moving away from John, who had stopped at the bottom. Information had to be passed quickly.

“The life of an Intern.” The lanky physician reached into his black shoulder bag and retrieved a dog-eared copy with the price clipped from the inside of the dust jacket. He was near the top of the stairs when he tossed the book, underhanded, over the railing. It landed with back cover, Dr. Robert Benton’s face up, in John’s hands. From a distance John heard, ‘You can read my copy, but you have to give it back.”

Ambling to the cafeteria, he flipped the book over, opened the hard cover and read the introductory blurb: “Dr. Walker, in his first weeks of internship, is tired and a little afraid. He has forgotten when he last slept, but knows in the coming hours he’ll have to make life and death decisions, deal with nurses who often know more than he, cope with worried relatives, and pretend to be what he has yet to become - a qualified doctor.”

*******************
Diane, sixteen years and a few hours old, ran to keep up with her friends as they squeezed through the silver chain-link fence cut from the tarnished metal post. This fence was built to keep everyone from taking shortcuts to shops and restaurants on Somerville Ave, but enterprising teenagers had long ago cut through the diamond shaped links, creating this path across the high speed rails to the street on the other side.

Diane followed, always, but not because she was slower than her classmates. She was a track and field star with promise of State records in the quarter mile, but as the oldest in her family of five, she looked out for others. This time, though, she snagged her letter jacket on the fence and worked to free herself. She heard the clack, clack, clack of the train, the shrill of the whistle, and saw the backs of her friends as they sprinted across the tracks. She pulled away from the last link, ran down the embankment, but lost the race, the first of her sophomore year, to the west bound commuter rail.

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John was sitting at his desk in the Respiratory Therapy office, chin on one palm, gazing out the window when the ambulance arrived. It bounced off the asphalt at the bottom of the ramp, sparks flying, and screeched up the short hill to the emergency room’s automatic, buffed steel and glass, doors. Not waiting for the Stat call to his office, John hurried to the trauma room and winced when he saw a deliberate pattern of red drops crossing the black and white scrubbed linoleum. Blood, he thought, is usually confined: to the stretcher, to the trauma room. It almost never leads to the patient like bread crumbs.

He pushed through the single swinging door, walked to Diane’s side and slipped his left hand under her unblemished chin, replacing the ambulance driver’s right hand with his, on the Ambu bag.

“What happened?” John turned to Mel, the nurse dressed in pleated white pants and blue top, struggling to find a vein for the IV.

“Hit by a train.”

Dr. Benton stood at the foot of the stretcher, stethoscope around his neck, but without his proper, dust jacket pose. He was flustered and trying hard not to show it.

“We better call an Orthopod for that foot,” Mel urged.

“Okay, okay, let’s do that now,” Dr Benton responded.

“And her BP is falling, may have a flail chest, how about the Thoracic Team? I think Phillips is on call”

John has the observing position in these situations. He maintains the airway, but besides relieving whomever might be doing chest compressions, he stands, and watches. It upset him to see the physician in charge, not in charge. He had been to many failed resuscitations but this one he was desperate not to lose. Diane was so young, so pretty and other than her foot dangling off the stretcher, she didn’t look like she’d been hit by a train. But, she needed skillful care to survive and Dr. Benton, the ophthalmologist to be, knew it.

“What about blood gases?” John asked. The test was as basic as monitoring heart rate, why wasn’t Dr Benton shouting these orders?

With the exception of a piercing scream when the orthopedic surgeon snapped her foot back on her ankle, Diane was mostly unresponsive. Nothing to needle sticks, and only moans when the chest tube was inserted. Soon after her scream, her blood pressure began to fall, her pulse rate slowed and it was evident that her internal injuries might take her life.

John compressed the Ambu bag, and continued to hope Diane would recover. When Dr Phillips, the chest surgeon moved close to his side, John turned and asked.

“What do we do now?”

“Pray,” Dr. Phillips responded without hesitation, as though he knew the question in advance.

“Pray,” John looked backed quizzically.

“Pray that she doesn’t live.”

*******************************

The waiting room, long and narrow, with one wall of windows had uncomfortable, rigid chairs with metal frames. If you followed the black and white linoleum tiles that covered the trauma room you would find yourself in this room. Far in the back, huddled in a group, some holding hands, others crying, were Diane’s friends; those who made it across the tracks in front of the train, and others summoned after the ambulance whisked her away.

Bill, his full name William Jennings Brown, labored in the emergency room for almost three years, ever since his tour of duty in Vietnam ended. He stood ramrod straight, his reddish brown hair a trifle longer than he’d worn it as a medic. His training was thorough,his battlefield experiences brutal, his bedside manner, unflinching. He shouldn’t be standing here, bearer of news, this wasn’t his role. But Dr Benton was nowhere to be found.

Bill looked down at all the faces in the waiting room and asked in loud, firm voice, “Who is here for Diane Reed?”

Heads raised, hands clenched tightly, young, unlined faces turned: expectantly, hopefully, tearfully.

“She’s dead.”

And Mel walked away.

I'll pass on edits and detailed critique offline, but I do want to say I find this an extremely moving and effective piece of writing. The timeframe jumps are all plausible -- even spot-on for the leaps of fate -- the intro germaine to the main theme (though its temporal relationship ambiguous -- pros and cons), and the language unshowy but richly spare (which I hope is an original oxymoron). Bravo. Heavy reading, but well done. Assuming this is drawn from experience, are names changed to protect the arguably innocent?

Posted by impressed.

Very effective story, obviously drawn from experience I'm glad you started afresh instead of re-writing something old.

Posted by rakkity ed.

Wow. Rivetting. Well-written. And yet another dimension of your rich and empathic life revealed.

Only one literary critique:

It almost never, like bread crumbs, leads to the patient

I'd change to:

It almost never leads to the patient like bread crumbs.

Parenthetical phrase is awkward.

Posted by stunned.

Mikey, this is sooo good. In a very short piece, you told a story that sucked me in immediately and developed your characters enough to give them layers that this reader wanted to peel back. Brilliant.

One really minor editorial thing. The sentence, early on, that describes Benton tossing the book down to John could use a little deawkwarding, but just a little.

Posted by Henry.

You do a great job of introducing me to characters that I want to learn more about. Hooray for the "new" story!

Posted by shinydome.

Wow - actually have tears in my eyes.

Posted by jan queijo.

Posted by Michael at November 11, 2003 07:02 AM