 Her
gnarled feet were crossed en pointe as I lifted the hospital blanket.
"Why
did you have the toe amputations?" I asked my patient, also noting how
unusually muscular her calves were for an eighty-something year old. "I
was a dancer. All those years of putting
my weight on only one metatarsal, I guess.
Who knew?" she smiled broadly like a reformed Cruella Deville. I liked
her, but she talked too much. Her
stories never stopped. I listened to her stories about the Boston Dance Theatre,
how she was married seventy years to a doctor and recently widowed, how she
still does choreography, and how renowned she is in the dance world. By the second day, I would politely interrupt
and say, “Oh yeah, you mentioned that yesterday.” By the third day, my beeper would
conveniently go off once her Dance of a Thousand Tangents commenced: “Oh no, my ICU patient’s CODING … again.” "I
haven't been able to walk the past three days," she says almost
melodically, "You can imagine how that would make a dancer feel." She had a
urinary tract infection. Even a mild
infection can make an elder diffusely weak, and often confused. Then again, getting old or just being in the
hospital can do that too. It's all in
the time frame. Her
friend had brought in some black and white photos of her earlier days. I couldn't take my eyes off of one with her
in mid leap like a gazelle in freeze frame, with her ecstatic smile, 1950s
innocence, and that old-school power-packed
musculature that neither today's steroid juicers nor Hollywood trainers can achieve.
"I
was a jumper," she said as I pull my eyes away from the picture, "I didn't even get a running start for
that photo, but it looks like I'm leaping over the trees, doesn't it?" Wow, I
thought, if you still looked like that, I could listen to you all day. One
morning, her hemoglobin had dropped more than expected. She had a little back pain. She was still weak. I was worried about an internal bleed. Sometimes in medicine 1 + 1 = 3. The missing factor is part intuition,
experience, and paranoia. Or sometimes
just luck. Her C.T. scan
didn't show a bleed. In fact, her
hemoglobin was normal the next morning, without a blood transfusion. The lower count was a lab error, or more
likely, the blood was taken from a vein downstream from her IV site,
artificially diluting the test tube sample. The C.T. scan
did show something, though. "Most
likely malignant cancer,” the ob/gyn consultant wrote in the chart. She
didn't want treatment at her age, and her daughter agreed with realistic
expectations. Her daughter also told me
that her mother had fired every doctor she'd ever had, even the good ones,
usually over some imagined slight or demented disagreement that most of them
didn't even know about. Apparently the
only doctor she really liked became her husband. Or vice versa. On the
day of discharge, all the nurses had gotten roses from my geriatric jumper. I hadn't.
Maybe my name would be the last on her "bad doctor list."
"I'm
choreographing a dance number for my funeral," she said brightly wearing a
large green hat, "It will be just like my wedding. Except I won't be dancing of course. Oh, you must come. Will you?" It's funny to be invited to a funeral by the person whom the funeral is for. I just
smiled, "It has been a pleasure, but I don't think you need to be worrying
about that for awhile." That shut
her up. For a few seconds anyway. Shortly
after I left, I got a page from the floor saying, "You forgot your flowers
from Mrs.D." I gave
them to my wife, but if she had given me her picture, I would have kept it all
to myself. 
EMAIL: scott_to_trot[at]msn[dot]com |
