Beat the Reaper: A Novel by Josh Bazell Page A

Surgically Altered Digestive Tract.
    I keep searching until I find a picture that confirms these people are really talking about the guy I met earlier, since it’s been that kind of morning. Along the way I find more happy articles. Apparently Friendly just did the colostomy on the guy who played the dad on Virtual Dad .
    Like that guy must have said: what a fucking relief.
    I try to figure out just how much of a relief. Does this mean Squillante actually has a seventy-five percent chance of surviving the operation? If so, what are the odds he keeps his word and doesn’t rat me out if he lives? I get a page from a room where I don’t currently have any patients.
    I stare at the number on my pager screen and wonder if it’s the new patient Akfal said something about to me three hours earlier. Then I realize it’s the room with Osteosarcoma Girl in it, and run to take the fire stairs.
    The first thing I realize when I see her again is that, although she’s beautiful, her eyes really don’t look like those of my lost Magdalena at all. Then I feel embarrassed to be so disappointed.
    “What’s up?” I say.
    “What do you mean?”
    “I got paged.”
    She stops biting her thumbnail to point toward the side of the room where the door is. “I think it was the new girl,” she says.
    Oh right. That curtain’s now drawn, and there are voices coming through. I pat Osteosarcoma Girl on her nondiseased leg, then knock on the wall and pull the curtain aside.
    Three nurses are still setting up a new patient in the bed that was empty before.
    It’s another young woman, though it’s hard to tell her age precisely because her head is shaved and bandaged, and the front left quarter of it is missing. Where it should be, there’s just an indentation in gauze.
    Below it she looks at me with wild blue eyes.
    “Who’s this?” I ask.
    “New patient, Dr. Brown,” the senior nurse says. “She’s in from Neurosurgery.”
    “Hi,” I say to the patient. “I’m Dr. Brown.”
    “Ay a ly ly ly,” she says.
    Naturally. In all right-handed people, and most left-handed ones, the front left lobe is where the personality is. Or was. The bandage over the missing part of her head starts pulsating from the effort of speaking.
    “Just relax. I’ll go read your chart,” I tell her, and leave before she can answer.
    Or respond to stimulus, or whatever you want to call it.
    Head Girl’s chart is brief: it says she’s “ s/p craniectomy for septic meningeal abscess s/p lingual abscess s/p elective cosmetic procedure + s/p laparotomy for calvarium placement. ”
    In other words, she got her tongue pierced and the infection ran to her brain. Then they cut her head open to get to it, and afterwards took the chunk of skull they’d removed and implanted it under the skin of her abdomen to keep it alive while they waited to see if the infection came back.
    Calling a tongue piercing “cosmetic” is a bit of a stretch, since you don’t get one because it makes you look better. You get one because you’re so desperate for affection that you’re willing to gruesomely harm yourself to advertise how well you suck dick.
    Christ, I think: I am in one bad mood.
    Just to complete my research into the house of mirth that is Room 808W, I call up Osteosarcoma Girl’s chart.
    Not much to learn there: a lot of “atypical” this and “high likelihood of” that. Her right femur sometimes bleeds, just above the knee. Other times it doesn’t. And she’s due to get the whole thing removed at the hip in a few hours.
    The weirdest, worst shit happens to people.
    I do Head Girl’s admission paperwork without looking at it, but before I’m done I get another page, this one to the room shared by Duke Mosby and Assman.
    The deal, by the way, is this: Akfal and I are required to admit thirty new patients to the ward each week. How long we keep these people in the hospital is up to us. Obviously we have an incentive to get them out fast, so we don’t have