The Woman

Part 1

The lights were dimmed in the corridors as they always were at night in San Francisco Memorial Hospital and even though he was going to see a patient whom Dr. Roush had described as unusual, Dr. John McIntyre felt a sense of calm as he strolled down the halls in his white coat; he decided he may as well look the part of a doctor to the new patient so he had shrugged on a clean lab coat, pinned on his badge and even hung a stethoscope about his neck. Besides he might need it.

As young intern, Trapper John had never minded the night shift, had even volunteered upon occasion because the whole hospital had a sense of calm but tonight he had been sleeping when the phone rang. He had turned off his cell phone as he wasn't on-call but even on, it rarely woke him no matter how high he turned the volume. There was just something about the jangling of an ordinary phone that jarred a person familiar with the association of bad news with late-night calls that woke a person from a deep sleep—something his cell phone never did so he kept his landline.

Without turning on the light, Trapper fumbled for the phone, hit the on button, and put it to his ear.

"Hello."

"John, it's me, Brooks Roush from Emergency? I need some advice on a female."

"What time is it?"

"Uh…2:16."

Trapper sighed and threw an arm over his forehead as he lay back, his head sinking into his pillow again. "Ask Grace Meadows; she's on duty. She knows how women think. God knows I don't."

"No, John, it's about a patient. I don't need advice about my love life. Well, actually I do but that's another matter."

Trapper smiled. Having gone through a divorce himself seven years earlier, he sympathized but now wasn't the time. "Can't it wait until morning?"

"Well, hear me out first."

"Okay. Talk."

"A woman was brought into emergency. She has no ID, no purse, says she doesn't know her name, where she lives—any of that—very confused. She was highly excitable and it was all the medics could do just to start an IV—said they had to strap her down. I had her blood checked for drugs—came back clean so I gave her IV valium and she tried to fight us on it—said she didn't want to be drugged. All she wants is to leave but she doesn't seem to know where she'd go if she did leave—not that I'm even close to discharging her."

"So why call me? Call the police—it's not my purview."

"The police arrived seconds after she did—they tried to question her but she was…like I said, confused. Uncooperative. Looks like someone might have slapped her around and according to a police report from another driver who saw what happened, she was pushed from a moving car—or she jumped out herself."

"Jumped out? Of a moving car?" Trapper sat up.

"Yeah. The police couldn't get anything out of her. They can't send out for fingerprints because she's not a suspect in any crime—yet. They said that if she can't remember who she is after 48 hours, we can have a fingerprint search conducted and hope there's a match on file. They think it might be a domestic dispute and if that's it, she'll have to press charges."

He sighed deeply; he hated drama. "Take a CAT scan, send it to neurology and let me sleep."

"I did that already and here's why I called you. She has a concussion and her BP is high. It's a slight concussion but that's not what's so worrisome-she needs exploratory surgery; she might have a lacerated liver or something going on with her spleen that doesn't show on an ultrasound-something's going on because when I palpated, she had pain. I hate to do an exploratory, even with a laparoscope, if I don't have to. I don't want to do too much if it's not necessary and then there's the concussion and the high BP…"

"How high?"

"Last look, 170 over 95."

Trapper made an appreciative whistle.

"Yeah, high. You know, she really is a nice-looking woman. You can tell that even though the left side of her face is a mess—bruised, and she also has a sprained right wrist. She must have put out her hand to stop her fall. Anyway, we found—well, when the nurses dressed her in a gown, they found a flash drive hidden in her bra."

Trapper sat up, grinning. "What? In her bra?"

"Yeah. She had a pretty good impression of it too. I asked her about it but she seemed not to know what I was talking about."

"Did you hand it over to the police?"

"They were gone by then so the nurse put it with her clothes. But she kept asking where she was, how she came to be injured and such. She kept trying to get off the gurney and saying she wanted to leave. We finally had to strap her down like the paramedics had. I wanted to give her a sedative but with the concussion…"

"What do you want me to do? Trust me—I don't handle women any better than the next man. Matbe even worse."

Roush laughed. "Just come out and see what information you can get from her? Use that Irish gift of blarney. She says she doesn't know of any allergies, any medicines she's taking—nothing. We don't have anything to go on. Like I said, I ordered an IV valium before I knew she had a concussion and then had to watch her for interactions but she seemed to tolerate it."

Trapper sighed. He was weary from having performed a six-hour surgical procedure that afternoon. It always amazed him that no matter how long a surgery took, he was alert to the end, but as soon as his part was over, he crashed more quickly than he used to. It often took all his energy just to buckle on his watch. He was getting too old, he considered.

"C'mon, John. You have a good bedside manner. You might be able to get her to talk to you and see if she's lying about not remembering anything. It might be she's afraid to go home but…well, why would she want to leave then? And I forgot to mention—she has some very expensive jewelry. I had the nurse write up a receipt before we took it off and had her stow it securely. No wedding band though."

"Look, we have psychiatrists on staff—even a few psychologists. Ask one of them to talk to her. They can decide if her amnesia is real."

"You know how damn easy they are to fool. Hell, they buy everything a patient says. But I also need permission to operate and she can't give it because, one—she doesn't know who the hell she is and two, she's confused. And since she has a concussion and high BP, anesthesia is risky. As chief of surgery, if you tell us to go ahead and operate, well, then we can. It needs to be an administrative decision."

"Oh, so you throw me under the bus. This is the last thing I need-but all right. Give me about an hour and I'll be there. What room?"

"354. I admitted her as The Woman."

"The woman?"

"Well, I didn't want to call her 'Jane Doe'. That makes her sound like an unidentified corpse. And there's no doubt she's a woman—like I said, quite the beauty even with the contusions and road rash. "

So Trapper strolled down the hall of the 3rd floor of the hospital. He stopped at the nurses' station and the ones on duty looked up from their laptops and he nodded to them.

"I need the record of the patient in 354—the female patient."

"Oh, the woman. She just came up from emergency about an two housr ago," one nurse said as she rolled back the door to the records cabinet. She looked for a few seconds and then pulled out the thin file and handed it to him. "Dr. Roush admitted her."

"Who's the hospitalist?" Trapper asked as he pulled out his glasses to peruse the sheets of paper before him. He couldn't help but think that when he was an intern, patients' charts used to be so much easier to access when they were attached to the end of a patient's bed but now, due to privacy issues, everything had changed. He considered that at least he didn't have to sit at a computer-it seemed the nurses were always on the computers inputting records—to read about the unknown woman.

"Looks like it'll be Dr. Farragut."

"Well, I'm going to look in on…the Woman."

Trapper found her room a few doors down and pushing open the half-closed door, he quietly walked in. Even in the dim light he could discern the woman's swollen lip and bruised left cheek; a right handed person had struck her. Her right arm was in a sling strapped across her chest, her wrist wrapped. He expected it since she had fallen—or jumped—out of a car from the passenger side. Trapper looked at her chart again and saw that she had severe abrasions on her hands and knees. Dr. Roush had written that the injuries were compatible with falling or jumping from a moving car and landing on her right side.

He walked closer to the bed, glancing at the monitors. He trusted the machines but he still gently raised her left arm by its narrow wrist to take her pulse. Then he placed her arm back on the bed and bent over slightly to see the other side of her face. He sucked in his breath.

It couldn't be her, he told himself. No, it couldn't be and yet…Trapper walked around the foot of the bed to the other side and opened the blinds slightly to let in the light of street lamps. It was her—he was sure of it. His heart thumped violently and suddenly, memories of that weekend almost a year ago, flooded him. He remembered the taste of her mouth and the feel of her breasts in his hands, the smoothness of her belly and thighs, the firmness of her buttocks, as well as the moist valley between her legs. It was her—he had found her again.

And he still didn't know who she was.