Chapter 13.2
Glory
Glory pads down the hallways of St. Jude's Hospital in her wrinkled pink medical scrubs, peering in the doors to glimpse those undiagnosed patients hacking their way to death without hope.
For the hundredth time she wonders why she stays with this job. She gets to walk into work every day and watch people suffer, poor, innocent, scared people, who call out to her and ask her if everything will be all right. And she watches flocks of doctors hover over their beds like angels of death, muttering and stroking their chins and professing their ignorance of the problem.
When they ask Glory if they'll be alright, she can't lie to them. She just squeezes their hand, something stuck in her throat, and they'll stare at her for a minute before releasing their grip on her hand and falling asleep. In a week's time she'll watch from the hospital windows as their bodies are loaded into hearses.
And all the children look like Rebecca. All the children look like her little daughter.
"My back hurts, Mommy," she'd said, looking so small and lost curled up in the hospital bed.
"Shhh," Glory had said. "It'll be alright. The doctors are going to fix it. Everything's gonna be alright."
"A bright, happy young girl…" The funeral had been in the summer, and Glory was in her best dress and wide-brimmed straw hat. The plastic flowers on the hat's edge had felt like sacrilege, spitting on her daughter's memory, so she had torn them off and thrown them on the grave.
"I'm…" The sound is coming from the next room down the hall. A new patient is tossing in the cot there, muttering in his sleep. Mousy brown hair sticking out in a halo. Glory catches her breath despite herself. That brown...that was the color of her Rebecca's chubby arm as she nestled in Glory's lap. The glow of her face as she ran in from the backyard with a "Mommy, I'm back!"
Her little girl…
"Prio...no...stop...fire...It's burning me. It's burning me." The boy is mumbling again, kicking out in his sleep. A thin trail of drool stretches from the corner of his mouth to the pillow.
"No...back...embrace the posi….wings...why…" His IV drip is almost out. Glory goes back out into the hall to fetch him a fresh one. Silently she creeps to his bedside as he sighed and tossed his head from side to side. The last few drops come out of the IV bag as she removes it and sets the fresh one on the pole. Drops the bag in the trash and fiddles with the new one. The boy is awake, watching her.
"You wakin' up?" she asks, careful to hide the tears in her voice.
"Yeah." The boy doesn't look good. His already-pale skin has turned the color of rotting snow, and purplish circles are forming under his eyes.
"Good," says Glory. "I need to get your vitals." She puts the blood pressure cuff around his arm and waits as it pumps up. How much has his family decided to tell him about his disease? she wonders. Is he still scared of dying? Has he gotten over it? Does he not care?
"Um," says the boy, "I think the cuff's done."
Glory tears it off in a cacophony of Velcro noises. "One twenty over seventy. Good. Little bit of fever. I'll tell the doctor, see if we can get you somet'in for it." She pauses. "You in pain?"
Something in the boy's expression changes. "Yes," he gasps. "A lot of pain."
He's one of those patients, then. Glory purses her lips. "I'll put in an order for some aspirin."
The kid's playing his terminal illness up for all it's worth. "I think I need more than that," he rasps.
Mmhmm. "I'll tell the doctor." He knows Glory'll never tell him, but doesn't try to bring it up again. Smart kid. Glory walks out of the room. "Your breakfast will be here soon," she calls over her shoulder.
Summer blends into autumn, and the boy is still there. Glory takes two days off from the hospital with a cold, shuffling around the house and through mementos of her past. There were closets full of Rebecca's kindergarten artwork and letters from her husband, the private who had stepped on a landmine in one of the wars in the Middle East and annihilated his platoon. There'd been a small two-minute bulletin on it in the six-o-clock news that day. Glory had sat there alone and wept.
There were boxes stuffed with letters from when her and Samuel had first begun dating. She read them sitting on the attic floor, lost in the flow of time. Spent hours poring over her medical school yearbook, all the people she'd been meaning to keep in touch with but had never found the time to. By the end of those two days, there were four large clear plastic bags sitting out on the curb, filled with her past life. A photograph of her husband smiled at her from inside a bag, young and healthy and strong, just days before he left to fight the war. She kicked the bag over with her foot and went to bed. In the morning her past life was gone.
The boy's getting worse. He just stares vacantly at his wall now until someone tells him better. His eyes are getting glassier and glassier.
"Time for your meds," Glory says.
"Okay," he says blankly, struggling to swallow them down.
Glory takes his weakening vital signs. "Okay," she says. "You need anything else?"
"No," he says, then sits up a bit. "Yes."
Glory waits, hoping he won't ask for more medication.
"Am...am I going to get better?"
The hundreds of patients that have asked her that swim past Glory's eyes, pleading, hopeful. She gives a long, sad sigh. "You've got to ask your doctor that, Cameron."
"It's just...nobody tells me anything, you know?"
"That's cause nobody knows not'ing about how it all works or why. Why God takes the good or the young or why we suffer." Real tears are finally beading at the corners of her eyes. "I don't know why he took my little girl with the cancer when she was only five. ...I don't know and I guess I never will."
The boy doesn't try to condole Glory. She's grateful to him for that.
"Just push the button if you need something," she says, wheeling her cart back into the hall.
Night shift. Glory pads down the same halls in darkness, eyes wide and adjusted to the mix of heavy shadow and filtered streetlight.
Commotion outside of the boy's room. An older man runs out into the dark of the hall, glasses askew. He rushes to Glory, practically sobbing.
"Help! Help!" he screams, tugging on her arm.
Glory rushes with the man to the boy's room. The patient's lying rigid in bed, choking and hyperventilating. She runs into the hall and activates the call machine. "Someone t' Room 324 now!" She won't let this boy die. Not just yet. Not like her daughter.
Glory paces feverishly for an eternal minute as the boy's gasps become raggeder and quicker and his sobbing parents try to restrain him. A man in green with a cart runs down the hall. "He's in here?"
Glory nods. The man pushes past her and begins unloading plastic tubing.
The boy's eyes are like a small animal's in the seconds before it becomes roadkill. Glory grabs a pair of gloves. "Okay, baby, hold real still for me. You'll be alright."
The boy is shuddering. His parents, still sobbing, clutch him on either side. Glory moves them out of the way. "Gotta get him tubed," she shouts. "Give him that shot, now."
The man in green rolls the boy on his side and sticks the needle into his hip. He starts rocking from side to side. "Hold him good!" yells Glory, grabbing the tube. The man in green holds the boy's mouth open and Glory feeds it in. The boy's eyes widen as he chokes on the plastic, then the tube resettles. His muscles tense and his head thrashes from side to side.
"Easy, easy," says Glory, "it's okay, baby, don't fight it, just a minute and it'll all be over."
The boy struggles weakly a second longer. His tossings eventually slow and cease. The boy falls back on the bed, deep in an uneasy sleep.
"Cameron? Can you hear me?" It is the morning after the attack. Glory stands by as a doctor shines a penlight into the boy's eye. The pupil dilates with no other response.
"I'm sorry," says the other doctor, straightening up and cleaning the penlight on his outfit. "This is the patient with Creutzfeldt's-Jakob's, right?"
The boy's parents can only nod.
"I'm afraid there's nothing we can do at this point," the other doctor sighs. "He's already comatose."
"Will...will he ever come out of it?" Mrs. Smith asks.
The other doctor swallows. "Um...well, with the normal treatment the patient goes into a coma for about two weeks and then, um, dies. But we're still going ahead with this experimental procedure..everything indicates it might have a greater..."
The doctors don't know what they're doing. They're lost, blindly guessing and crossing their fingers that it will work. They don't know how to fix the boy.
Just like they couldn't fix her little girl.
Weeks slowly pass. Glory putters in and out of the room, replacing IV drips and wiping saliva off the boy's cheek. The man in green comes in twice a week to test the boy's reflexes, shining more lights in his eyes and snapping his fingers next to the boy's ears. The patient's senses are failing him by degrees. His pupils dilate less rapidly. He may as well be a statue when the specialist runs a brush over the soles of his feet.
"...special counter-measures are still in place..." the specialist is saying to the parents. "There's still a chance that he might make a full recovery. We've come up with some further measures that we think will be more effective...if you'll just sign here..."
Their counter-measures haven't worked. Glory knows it, and so does the specialist. The boy is dying.
"He spoke to me once," the father says. "He spoke to me, and I was sure he was coming out of the coma. And then he just smiled, and his eyes went blank again..."
He grips his wife's hand tightly. They lean against each other for support, trying to keep each other steady in this unstable, unjust world.
"..despite our best efforts, it looks like the counter-measures may not have worked. Um, there's a chance that we may have to, ah, put him under."
"Put...him...under?" The father speaks slowly. It's been two more weeks. The boy's been in a coma for a month.
"Um, euthanize him." The specialist is polishing his glasses with murderous vigor. "It's just, you know, an option. To consider."
"We find that cases such as this, leaving the patient to slowly fade away to nothing is rather...inhumane," the other specialist interjects. "Your son will have been experiencing a constant nightmare for four weeks now," he continues, rubbing his small grey beard. "He's alone and terrified. And added to his, ah, deteriorating mental state, he must be..." He scratches his cheek. "I'm not sure I can find words to describe it."
Mrs. Smith looks at her husband. "Alright," she says.
"Well, if you do decide to go, um, forth with that option," the first specialist stammers, "you will have to, ah, decide which of you will...be the one to do it."
Mrs. Smith looks from the twitching specialists to her eldest son comatose in a hospital bed to her crushed husband beside her. She gives his hand a reassuring squeeze. "Okay," she says to the specialists. "I'll do it."
They're all gathered there around the hospital bed on that last day, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, his sister Jenna, the specialists bustling about and generally getting in everyone's way, and Glory.
She stands at the back, unnoticed by the crowd around the bed. There are other rooms and patients in the hospital that she should be getting to, but she needs to see this. This is more important.
Mr. Smith notices her at the back. "Would you like to-er-"
Glory smiles and joins the crowd around the bed. Mrs. Smith steps up to the life support and flicks the respirator off. The EKG is next, then the heart monitor. The machine goes blank.
The boy stirs ever so slightly. He turns his head. His mother and father sit on either side of him, holding his hands.
The blank eyes gradually focus. Glory swears that the boy is looking around the room. He gives the barest hint of a smile.
And then his eyes darken. Glory reaches out and closes Cameron's eyes.
The hearse comes the next day. Glory watches it pull away from St. Jude's from her usual top-floor window. She wonders if this is the end of her career at the hospital. Maybe enough is enough. She knows all the patients will be like this.
Someone has to stay with them, though. Someone who can understand them.
Glory puts the decision off for now. She will go to the funeral and try to mend the broken family. She is returning to the room now to clear out any memories of Cameron Smith, to leave his story behind for the next one and the next one after that.
Glory pads away down the hall in her wrinkled pink medical scrubs as a hearse pulls away behind her and a new morning begins.