chapter 2
Illustration
by Granta art
director Michael
Salu, from Granta
120: Medicine
fiction
HUFFINGTON
09.23.12
I looked up again and the
green scrubs were gone. Mr.
Mongay lay propped up in
his bed, his head in a halo.
From the side, his nose was
a hawk’s beak, the rest of his
face sunk in drugged sleep,
but his mouth still snarled as
if it remembered recent pain.
He looked like a strange, sad
bird in a very small cage.
Still later — time on that
service being marked by
missed meals and sleep, I
can say only that I was hungry, but not yet punchy — a
nurse stopped me.
“Fourteen,” she said.
She meant Mr. Mongay.
“How’s he doing?” I was
harbouring some vague
hope that he was awake and
asking to go home.
“He’s complaining of chest pain. Ten out of ten.”
“Crap,” I said. The nurse looked at me. “Get an EKG.”
My vague hope vanished entirely ten minutes later as I
watched the red graph paper emerge from the side of the
box. The squiggle on it looked better than the initial set from
the ER, but that was only because the ectopy was gone. What
was there instead — Mr. Mongay’s souvenir of the activities
of the afternoon — were T-wave inversions marching across
his precordium. This was not good. T-wave inversions generally signify heart muscle that isn’t getting oxygen. What
I was seeing here suggested that his LAD — a major artery
supplying blood to the heart’s strongest muscle — was about