The Four Fingers of Death Read Online Free PDF Page B

drinking champagne from unbreakable stemware. I would never see her with her (as yet imaginary) children’s children, or in Rome, or getting ready to go hang gliding. She would never collect a pension. But on the day of the double lung transplant, I was thinking only that another couple of weeks would be great , and six months would be amazing, three years: like from the heavens.
They gurneyed in my wife, Tara. At the ready was the heart-lung machine and various other pieces of advanced robotic and nanotechnological complexities intended to prevent unforeseen happenstance. A moment hovered, expectant, as the systems went through their scanning protocol. Then my unconscious wife had the inferior of her two diseased lungs disconnected. I can’t really imagine which of the two was the worse, since both were full of pus and fluid and dead carbon-based gunk, stuff that Tara could no longer eliminate from her bronchi, stuff the color of turned mayonnaise. They began pulling George’s left lung out of the beer cooler, and they trimmed away a little bit of it so it would fit into Tara’s body. This after a guy with an expensive saw had opened up the whole of her, underneath her breastplate. They opened her up straight across, from latitude to latitude. And they began the arduous connection of George’s left lung to Tara’s pulmonary artery, the pulmonary vein, the bronchus, while the other nearly worthless lung pumped away haphazardly, keeping her just this side of peat moss. When the left of George’s lungs was attached, it took a few breaths, began doing its job, and they moved on to the right.
In the waiting room, the better to try not to think about the direst of circumstances, I looked at the worried faces of other people. I got up and paced, as one will, because the molded plastic chairs abraded my posterior. (There should have been a therapeutic ward in the university medical center that was devoted to nothing but the skeletal problems caused by the molded plastic chairs of hospital waiting rooms. The Montese Crandall Wing for Abnormalities of the Softened Posterior.) The other thing I did was to call again on Noel Stroop, to ask if I could have a reading at Arachnids, Inc. “Noel,” I remarked, “it’s Montese Crandall, yeah, yeah, baseball cards. Right. Look, Noel, I’m here in the hospital, where my wife is… well… never mind.… Right. That’s kind of you. Noel, let me be frank. I would like to be able to tell my wife, when she comes around, that I have accomplished something in the area of my writing. It doesn’t have to be much. I would like to tell her something good , you know, to cheer her up, while she’s realizing how many stitches she has in her chest, and how big the scar is, and how many stents and shunts there are in her. Noel, I’m wondering if you would consider giving me a chance to read there at the store, yeah, from my collected stories, such as they are, so that I can tell my wife, when she awakes.”
As I may have indicated earlier, Tara didn’t come out of her coma on any accelerated schedule. In the days after the completion of her double lung transplant, I was permitted to observe my wife’s slumbering form, first in the ICU and then in the general hospital population, and this is when the word ischemia suddenly became a part of daily conversation. The doctors would ask, “Are you Mr. Crandall?” though we’d been multiply introduced, and I would say, yet again, “Why do you think I’m hanging around her bed day and night, looking as though I’m a homeless person, mumbling to myself and breaking out into, well, spontaneous heaving sobs?” They would ignore my comments. “In the coming days, it’s possible that we might see the following… ,” and then the word ischemia was always slipped into the monologue. Other bits of medical argot were also deployed, diabetes mellitus, further “clubbing” of the fingertips and toes, progressive deafness due to long-term consumption