chapter 2
fiction
HUFFINGTON
09.23.12
all shouting at once, so that I had to bellow over them to
be heard as I requested, repeatedly, the proper catheter
kit, something big enough to pour in fluid as fast as he
was losing it. The patient was alive when I saw him last,
a scared and tousled surgery intern kneeling right on top
of him to hold pressure as the entire ungainly assemblage — patient, intern, and tree of IV bags — wheeled
out the door to the OR. Back to normal life, I said to Sasha as we trudged back to the cardiology ward. Whether
she knew what I was talking about I couldn’t say, and
didn’t really care. I was still warmed by a vague sense of
something right having happened. Mr. Mongay had coded, coded beautifully, and he had survived. We had done
everything right.
The next morning on rounds, we were congratulated
for our management of Mr. Mongay’s arrest, although
there was an ominous pH value from a blood gas obtained early on in the event that occasioned some shaking of heads. He had not responded since the code, being
content to lie there unconscious in his halo, his chest
rising and falling in response to the ventilator’s efforts.
But his vital signs were stable, his labs from the 4 a.m.
draw were looking good, and I had my hopes. No longer
for an early discharge, but I was hopeful, all the same.
I shared these hopes with Mrs. Mongay and the family when they arrived at seven. She stood at the bedside
looking down, and her eyes were wet, her mouth unstably mobile. She reached out almost to touch the bars
supporting the halo, down one of the threaded rods that
pierced her husband’s skin above the temple, almost
touched there, then withdrew her hand. “Is this the . . .
thing? What do they call it?”
I was silent a moment.
“A halo,” I said finally. “They call it a halo.” “Ah,”
she said.