“No need,” said Susan, exiting. “We already discussed it at length.” Thanks a million.”
“You’re welcome,” said Schwartz, but Susan had already left.
“Susan, you are too much, really too much,” said Bellows between spoonfuls of custard he had taken from the tray of a patient who was too nauseated to eat. “You skip the lecture, afternoon rounds, and avoid your patients, and now you’re hanging around here until eight P.M. The only consistency about your performance so far is constant variation.” Bellows laughed as he scraped the bottom of the custard cup.
Susan and Bellows were sitting in the lounge on Beard 5 where the hospital day had begun for Susan. She was sitting in the same seat she had occupied that morning. Spilling over onto the floor was the IBM printout sheet she had obtained. She was running down the list of names and marking appropriate ones with a yellow felt-tip pen.
Bellows took a drink from his coffee.
“Well, that proves it,” said Susan, putting the cap on the pen.
“Proves what?” asked Bellows.
“Proves that there haven’t been six cases of unexplained coma, excluding Berman, here at the Memorial this last year.”
“Hurray,” cheered Bellows, toasting with his coffee mug. “Now I can stop worrying about anesthesia and have my hemorrhoids fixed.”
“I would recommend that you stick to your suppositories,” said Susan, counting the names she’d marked. “There haven’t been six because there’ve been eleven. And if Berman continues on his present course, then there will have been twelve.”
“Are you sure?” Bellows’s tone changed abruptly and he showed interest in the IBM printout sheet for the first time.
“That’s all that came out on this printout,” said Susan. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a few more if I had been able to call up the information straight away.”
“You really think so? God, eleven cases!” Bellows leaned over toward Susan, his tongue working at the empty spoon. “How’d you manage to get this IBM printout?”
“Henry Schwartz was nice enough to help me,” said Susan nonchalantly.
“Who the hell is Henry Schwartz?” asked Bellows.
“Damned if I know.”
“Spare me,” said Bellows covering his eyes with his hand, “I’m too tired for mental games.”
“Is that a chronic ailment or an acute affliction?”
“Cut the crap. How’d you get this data? Something like this has to be cleared through the department.”
“I went upstairs this afternoon, filled out one of those M804 forms, gave it to the nice man at the desk, and then went back tonight and picked it up.”
“I’m sorry I asked,” said Bellows getting up and waving his spoon to suggest he would let the issue ride. “But eleven cases. Did they all happen during surgery?”
“No,” said Susan, going back to the printout. “Harris was on the level when he said six. The other five were from inpatients on the medical service. Their diagnosis was idiosyncratic reaction. Doesn’t that strike you as pretty odd?”
“No.”
“Oh, come on,” said Susan impatiently. “The word idiosyncratic sounds great but it really means that they had no idea what the diagnosis was.”
“That might be true, but Susan, dear, this happens to be a major hospital, not a country club. It serves as a referral base for the whole New England area. Do you know how many deaths we have here on an average in a single day?”
“Deaths have causes … these cases of coma do not … at least not as yet.”
“Well, deaths don’t always have apparent causes. That’s the purpose of autopsy.”
“There, you hit the nail on the head,” said Susan. “When someone dies, then you do an autopsy and you find out what was the cause of death so that you can possibly add to your fund of knowledge. Well, in the coma cases you can’t do an autopsy because the patients are somewhere hovering between life and death. That makes it even more important that you do another kind of ‘opsy,’ a live-opsy, if you will. You study all the clues you have available, short of dismembering the victim. The diagnosis is just as important, maybe even more important than the autopsy diagnosis. If we could find out what was wrong with these people, maybe we could bring them out of their comas. Or better still, avoid the coma in the first place.”