Part 59
"I'm looking for Dr. Hayward," Zander said.
"He's in Room 3406," the nurse said.
Zander went to the room. David and Monica were on either side of a patient's bed. It looked bad - the patient was under sedation, not talking to them, hooked up to machines. The two doctors were talking about him.
Zander didn't want to interrupt them. He stood and listened.
"I'm amazed," Monica was saying. "We treat this patient like he's a child - inhaled surfactant. Keeping him on his right side to help venous drainage of the left lung. I can't believe it. The pa02 is 180. The peak inspiratory pressure dropped from 40 to 27."
"Start dropping the Fi02?" David asked.
"Yeah. We can do that." Monica sounded like she thought that it was pretty cool they could do that, Zander though.
"Then we'll see what the CXR says," David said.
"If that shows improvement, I'll buy you a drink," Monica answered.
She looked up and noticed Zander.
"Hi," she said. "Come in."
"Is it OK?" Zander asked. "This looks serious."
"It's OK." David said.
Zander walked into the room. "What's going on?" he asked.
"Bad heart, compromised lungs," David said. "The heart exists to pump the blood back and forth from your body to the lungs. Blood takes oxygen out to the cells to keep them going, and flows back to the heart depleted of the oxygen and full of carbon dioxide. The heart takes it and pumps it to the lungs through the pulmonary artery. The blood goes through the lungs, where it loses the carbon dioxide and gets recharged with oxygen. It goes through the pulmonary vein back to the heart, which pumps it out again now full of oxygen to take back out to the cells. If one part doesn't work, the others suffer, in the end, not enough oxygen. Try to fix a part not working and you may be messing with another part."
"You look so solid standing there." Zander said. "It freaks me out to think of all those complex procedures going on in there under that expensive suit. It's so complicated. All those parts. All the chemistry and electricity. And somebody figuring out how to measure it. Like who figured out how to make an EKG and why does it work? Who even figured out it would tell you anything you could use? It's really amazing. You've got to be brilliant to understand it."
"How are you feeling?" Monica asked Zander, smiling. For some reason, she liked him a lot more on account of the little speech he had just said.
"I'm OK," he replied, looking down at the patient.
"You won't end up like this," David said. "This is something different."
"Poor guy," Zander said.
Zander and David walked from the hospital to the Brownstone.
"I met with the lawyer," Zander said. "Now I've got one and Dad's got one. We're supposed to talk through them."
"Maybe it'll help."
"It's worth a try."
When they got to the brownstone, Zander said, "Come over in the morning. Ginny'll be there."
David had knocked on Donna's door the night before, but she hadn't been there.
Brenda let him in at the brownstone.
"Be quiet," she said, "Donna's asleep in the couch. We were talking, and it got so late." She went out. David sat down and looked at Donna.
Donna stirred a little. She opened her eyes. She sat up.
"My dream did come true," she said, smiling lazily. "I opened my eyes this morning, and the first thing I saw was you."
"This hardly qualifies," he said. He felt his throat constrict. He couldn't speak. Memories crowded his mind, and he could feel her getting up, moving out of his arms.
"I'd forgotten to put conditions on it," she said, standing up.
They could hear the baby crying, then Zander talking to her.
"Our little girl," Donna said. She went back to the bedroom, and soon he could hear her talking to the baby too.
Donna came back in with Ginny. "OK, Granddad," she said. "Look what I can do." She put Ginny down on the floor. Ginny sat on the floor.
"She can sit up now," he said.
"Next she crawls," Donna said. "That's the next big milestone."
"I know."
"But only academically. This you get to see."
He smiled, watching Ginny. He took a toy from the coffee table and set it down in front of her. Instead of touching it, she looked at David and smiled, flapping her arms up and down excitedly.
"She knows you," Donna said.
"I doubt that!"
"You're wrong."
He looked at Ginny again. "It's like they know to be as cute as possible. They need somebody to take care of them. So they get you to want to by being adorable."
"That doesn't necessarily stop because a person has grown up."
"Like Zander?"
"That's an example," she said.