Part 7

"He still won't take the pain medication," the licensed practical nurse was saying.

"I have 30 patients on this hall," Quinn was fuming. "Twenty-nine of them give me ten percent of my work! What now? Let him be in pain. Nobody does a thing like that!"

"Let me try," Joanna said helpfully.

But Joanna, good natured as she was, came back to the station looking ticked off. "You ought to have your case load reduced," Joanna said, plopping the tray down on the counter. "All patients are never equal and there's not much you can do about it when you draw a high maintenance one. Other days you'll draw the easy ones. But you have a real case for a reduction, here."

"See, and you didn't believe me, did you?"

Joanna recovered soon though, and went with Quinn to the head nurse's office.

Nurse Spencer was always a help. Her long experience with both nursing and just life in general made her an ideal supervisor. She more than made up for the sometimes negative job conditions that the hospital administration brought about.

"Sometimes, when you have gunshot wounds, and where the origin is unknown - you don't have a clear domestic dispute here - the patient will, subconsciously, fear the idea of being out of it and try to avoid it as much as possible - the shooter could still come after him, and he's really vulnerable now. One easy thing to do is to reassure him that we won't allow any visitor that we haven't seen before and haven't cleared with him, and explain that if he is out of consciousness for any reason, we don't allow anyone in, and that we're checking on him constantly."

"Get him to realize he's perfectly safe," Quinn said.

"That's right. Talk to patients, just about yourself a little, even. They get that they aren't ever going to fall under the radar when there is a real person they can picture rather than just an intellectual description. For example, with any gunshot wound, rather than just remind them that there is a midnight shift, you can complain about having to be on it! Really, that's a good thing. Gets it much clearer to them that you or somebody is always around."

"Did you ever feel irregular heartbeats?" Monica asked Zander, who was sitting up now, and looked otherwise his usual smart-aleck self, she thought. The picture of health unless injured. He got injured a lot. She couldn't picture him as sick. Still, that was nothing to go on.

"No."

"Ever fainted?"

"Once or twice. But I was a little kid."

"That's an odd thing to happen to a little kid. I need the details."

"But if I weren't shot, I wouldn't have been here, and you would never have noticed this. So how can it be bad?"

"Look, sometimes good comes out of bad; we discover something in time that we wouldn't have otherwise. I'm sure you feel healthy. But some things sneak up on people. You could, and I'm only saying could, have something called Long Q-T syndrome. If you do we need to know. You might need another surgery from this very gunshot wound. We have to know as much as we can; if we do, we can adjust the anesthesia to make it right for your condition. There is medication we can prescribe. But not something that would be a good idea for you to take if you don't have this condition. It can also show up now when it didn't before, and is thought to be genetic, enough so that the precise family history is absolutely necessary. Records and all - that is standard protocol."

"Does anybody get hurt besides me?"

"No."

"Then, what of it? Don't tell me it matters to you if I die."

"I'm a doctor. I'm a professional. Don't be ridiculous, Zander. I don't want you to die. I know Emily doesn't want you to die. Then why would I? So I have to talk to your parents directly. They may not have told you everything. How do you know their entire medical history, and that of their parents, and their siblings? And your siblings? And you, for that matter?"

"It's genetic?"

"Yes. And it can occur in otherwise healthy people. It is suspected in cases like that basketball player, I can't remember his name, but it was in the news, remember that? One day he just died. Just like that. Athletes, perfectly healthy, or so they seem, but the stress they put on their heart one day kills them. There was figure skater, too, a few years back, a Russian. Dropped his wife, his partner, right onto the ice and died. It shows up in children and young adults that way sometimes. You're not an athlete, I know. But you can't say your life is without stress."

"So if I get killed this way, would it be any worse?"

"No! I mean yes! I mean, what do you mean? This is a way that can be avoided! Honestly Zander!"

She paced around the room. He just stared at her. "It may not kill you," she said, regaining her composure, "but could cause you to faint say, within seconds, due to lack of oxygen to the brain. Even just an intense emotion or a startling noise can do it - just because it hasn't happened before doesn't mean it can't now."

"Can't you tell from your tests and all that stuff? Examine me. I'm all yours."

"Yes, but people don't have the irregular heartbeat all the time when they have this. You can have normal tests. I'll do all those, and examine you, and there are other things I can look for, but this one's the most serious, which, as a doctor, I want to eliminate, even if there's not much chance you actually have it. At least tell me this. Any sudden deaths of anybody; siblings, parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents, or first cousins?"

"Of the ones I know of, and know, none. None that I know."

"So you see why I need to talk to them. What about fainting?"

"Women. They had other reasons to faint, though."

Yeah, your mother would have a lot of reasons to faint, she thought to herself.

"Just give the nurse on duty the names and as much information for contacting them as you can," she said, as she marched out of the room.