chapter 2
fiction
HUFFINGTON
09.23.12
ity of walking into Mr. Mongay’s room on Tuesday and
Wednesday morning to find him unhaloed, and making
apologies for it.
It would have been unpleasant, at least, but for Mrs.
Mongay and her children. There were four in all. The
son, John Jr., was a very pleasant fellow in his late thirties, intelligent, well educated, unusually sophisticated
about medical matters. The three daughters were hard
to tell apart — I never did learn their names — but they
accepted my apologies with a sympathetic understanding. Like their mother, with their quiet grace and gentle
good humor they put me in mind of faces I’d seen in old
oil paintings, glowing against a warm chiaroscuro. All
of which only made the situation even more intolerable,
driving me to want to do something for them — and the
only thing I had to offer lay in the gift of the inaccessible
ortho resident.
Wednesday I was on call again and had pledged myself,
in the brief moments between admissions, to track down
the ortho team and make them come up and put that halo
on. Unfortunately, this was the day we admitted fifteen
patients, as the failure clinic opened its floodgates and the
Cath Lab pumped out case after case. The sheer volume of
histories to take, physicals to perform, notes and orders
to compose was overwhelming. The phone call — with its
necessary sequel of waiting for the paged resident to call
back — never happened.
Sometime in the late afternoon, however, I looked up
from the counter where I had been leaning, trying to absorb
the salient features of yet another failure patient’s complex
history, and saw through the open door of Mr. Mongay’s
room a strange tableau: two tall men in green scrubs wielding socket wrenches around the patient’s head, a tangle of
chrome, and the patient’s hands quivering in the air, fingers spread as if calling on the seas to part. Sometime later