Fiction
Granta 114: Aliens
Design by Michael Salu
Granta 115: The F Word
Design by Michael Salu
HUFFINGTON
09.23.12
the question we usually ask it:
Is this patient having a heart attack? Of course, the bundle itself is not a reassuring sign and,
if new, it merits an investigation,
but plenty of people in their seventies have them and it’s pretty
much a so what. But the ectopy on
today’s strips was impressive — if
you didn’t know what you were
looking at you might think he
was suffering some catastrophic
event. I read between the lines of
the consult note the orthopaedic
surgeons had left, and it was clear
they regarded John Mongay as a
time bomb and didn’t want him
on their service.
Which I couldn’t help noting
was exactly how I felt about having a patient with a broken neck
on my service. But I didn’t get to
make decisions like that. Instead
I wadded the stack of papers back
into their cubby and took a brief
glance through the curtains of
Bay 12. From my somewhat distorted perspective, most of what
I saw of the patient was his feet,
which were large, bare and protruding from the lower end of his
ER blankets in a way that suggested he would be tall if I could
stand him up. At his side sat a
small, iron-haired woman who