Fireflies: A Father's Classic Tale of Love and Loss

1

David struggled against his dizziness as he rushed from the Pediatrics Ward. The corridor, the rooms, the administration area, the blond nurse he’d spoken to-they unnerved him, as if he’d seen them only recently and yet remembered them from long ago.

My God, what’s wrong with me?

The tingling that had started in his hands and feet had now spread up his arms and legs, rushing toward his heart.

He felt so off-balance he almost leaned against a wall. The humming behind his ears so disoriented him he wanted to sink to the floor. But he had to keep moving.

Hurry!

Matthew! He couldn’t explain his fear that tomorrow afternoon his son would contract septic shock and eight days later die from its effects. Whatever had happened to him while he’d fainted, David knew what was going to occur. He could see it, as if each terrifying instant had been seared into his memory.

Lurching around a corner, he found an open door to an elevator and rushed inside. Vision blurry, he fumbled to press the button marked 7.

The doors hissed shut. The elevator surged upward. Again the pressure in David’s skull swelled, making him grab his temples. He stifled the urge to vomit.

Abruptly the elevator stopped. Its doors opened. He staggered into a corridor, not sure which direction to choose (but wasn’t I here just this morning?), then suddenly realized he had to turn right.

Down another corridor. A man and a woman stared at his unsteady movements. He fought not to waver.

Passing elevator F.

Passing elevator E.

Through a gradually clearing haze of memory, he regained his bearings.

Turn right!

He found a door, pushed through it, and hurried down still another corridor, this one lined with rooms in which elderly patients blinked listlessly at game shows on television.

“Now you’ve got to try to eat, Mr. Standish.” A nurse raised a spoon of what looked like pea soup to the lips of an aged bone-thin man.

David hurried farther, passed a nurses’ station, pushed through another door, and at last he was here, at the source of his nightmare, the Bone Marrow Ward.

2

Its safety procedures were meticulous. Because of the danger of infection, the air inside this ward was filtered, purified, and recirculated every two hours. The nurses took off their gowns each time they left a patient’s room and put on fresh gowns whenever they entered another patient’s room. If a patient wanted to watch a videotape, the VCR was scrubbed with disinfectant before it was taken inside the patient’s room. Every precaution (short of total isolation) was maintained.

And yet…

And yet…

David knew that tomorrow afternoon his son would…

He hurried toward the bin in which the fresh gowns were stored. Putting one on, tying its strings, he noticed a worried mother carrying a tray of barely eaten food from her daughter’s room. This woman (like the nurse in the Pediatrics Ward) he remembered vividly and yet as if from a great gap in time.

He tried to smile, though his dizziness made the ward seem to swirl, and managed to walk a straight line toward Matthew’s room.

But when he peered through the open door, the bed was empty.

In David’s nightmare, Matt had been helped down the hall and was having a bath right now. If that turned out to be true, would everything else in the nightmare also come true?

Panic rising, David turned…

And saw the most lovely vision he ever hoped to appreciate.

Not Matthew, though he would have been vision enough.

But Donna, who came around a corner, adjusting the ties on her hospital gown, and paused as David smiled at her.

David’s smile was broad enough to hurt his cheeks, deep enough to squeeze his heart.

Donna, who had died in his nightmare at the age of seventy-nine, and who even then had seemed as beautiful as the day he had married her.

On his wedding day, he’d been so afraid to give up what he thought of as his freedom, even though he’d made the commitment to combine his destiny with hers, that he’d almost fled from the church.

But he’d abided by his commitment, and when he’d turned from the altar to witness his soon-to-be wife proceeding with such pride and dignity down the aisle, her white gown so magnificent, her brown eyes, auburn hair, and dark oval face so lovely, his heart had rejoiced.

Just as it rejoiced now as he stared at her with wonder-her experience-wearied features midway between the glowing smoothness he’d witnessed on his wedding day and the ashen wrinkles he’d seen on the day she died.

Despite the swirling in his brain, David walked toward her, put his hands on her shoulders, and kissed her tenderly on the lips. “I haven’t seen you in a while.”

She studied him with welcoming eyes. He swore they glowed. And he swore something else. As eerie as it seemed, he felt that she felt, she knew, that they were gazing at each other, with wonder, as if a miracle had occurred, from a perspective forward of another half-lifetime, of almost forty years.

“In case I haven’t told you often enough,” David said, “I love you.”

Donna’s grin was as winsome as when she’d been twenty-one or seventy-nine. And her humor was as endearing as ever.

“Oh, hell,” she said and kept grinning. “Don’t bore me.”

“Deeply,” David said. “Always. You don’t know how much I mean ‘always.’”

“Don’t I? I do know. Yes!”

Inches away, they surveyed each other’s eyes, and David was suddenly sure that he saw behind her eyes the same desperate knowledge he had, as if they had both returned, both been given a second chance. A reprieve. A miraculous opportunity. To reverse the greatest loss of their earthly existence.

To save their son’s life.

“Yes, always,” David said. “Deeply and forever, I love you.”

Donna’s grin changed to solemnness and, more, the epitome of determination. “I understand. Believe me, yes. Deeply. Forever. We’ve got a job to do, the greatest job of our lives.”

David’s festering question burst from him. “Where’s Matt?”

“He went for a bath.”

Just as in my nightmare! David thought.

“Dad.”

Turning, David saw him.

3

The interval between extensive surgery and the bone-marrow transplant had permitted sufficient time for Matthew’s hair to begin to grow again. Matthew’s scalp was fuzzy with hair. He even had the shadow of a mustache.

But as Matt returned from his bath, holding his robe together with one hand while he gripped a portable radio in the other, he looked flushed. His eyes looked dull. And he was staggering.

“Jesus,” David murmured.

He and Donna rushed to him. Matt wobbled, about to fall as they caught him.

“Almost lost my balance in the… almost cracked my head getting out of…”

“The tub,” a nurse said behind him. “I kept a close watch. I held him tight, but…”

“Slipped. Dizzy,” Matthew said. “Could hardly get out of the… nearly hit my head on the sink.” He gasped. “Need oxygen. Can’t breathe.”

While the nurse took off her gown and put on a fresh one, David and Donna helped Matthew into his room. His knees kept buckling. They eased him onto his bed, then quickly used the sink in the room to wash their hands with disinfectant.

By then the nurse had joined them, washing her hands as well.

“Can’t breathe,” Matt repeated.

“What’s wrong with him?” Donna asked.

David fought to control his dizziness.

“The effects of the chemotherapy. His low blood factors.” The nurse’s tone was reassuring. Nonetheless she frowned, checking Matthew’s pulse.

“David, he’s been like this since you left this morning,” Donna said. “I’m worried-more than usual.”

She had good reason to worry, David knew with inexplicable certainty. His arms and legs tingled in cold, then hot rushes.

“His heartbeat’s slightly higher than normal for him. Eighty-five instead of seventy,” the nurse said. “That’s probably from the exertion of taking a bath and coming back to his room.”

But her frown persisted as she wrapped a cuff around Matthew’s arm and pumped it full of air to monitor his blood pressure.

“Need oxygen,” Matthew repeated.

“Give it to him,” David said.

“He probably doesn’t need it. Most likely he’s just short of breath from walking back to”-the nurse interrupted herself, putting a stethoscope to her ears, then watching a blood-pressure monitor on the wall behind the bed. “Slightly higher than normal for him.”

Normal for Matt was one hundred and ten over seventy-five.

“What are the numbers?” David’s voice was strained with urgency.

“One hundred and twenty over eighty. Well within an acceptable range.”

“But look at him. He’s sick.”

“It’s to be expected. After all the treatment he’s had. When his blood counts start to rise, he’ll feel a lot better.”

“My stomach hurts,” Matt said.

“As if you might vomit?” The nurse grabbed for a plastic basin.

“No.” Matt gasped. “It burns.”

“You might have ulcers from the chemotherapy,” the nurse explained.

“But he’s had six months of chemotherapy,” Donna said, “and he never had ulcers before.”

“Because he never had treatment in such large doses.”

“Oxygen.” Matt’s chest heaved.

“Give it to him,” David said.

“But I can’t!”

“Why?”

“Here.” The nurse handed David a sheet of paper. “Before he went for his bath, I took a sample of his blood-to have it analyzed for its oxygen content. The computer just printed out the results of the test. His blood gases are just what they should be. The lab test shows he doesn’t need oxygen. If I give it to him, I’d hurt him more than help him. Oxygen’s toxic to a patient’s lungs if it’s administered when he doesn’t need it.”

The tingling rushed from David’s arms and legs toward his chest. His heart beat faster.

“But you said you took the blood-gas test before Matt went for his bath. Maybe he didn’t need oxygen then, but what if his condition changed in the meantime? What if he needs the oxygen now?”

“His condition couldn’t change that fast,” the nurse said. “Not without something to indicate the change. I just took his temperature. It’s normal.”

David’s lungs pumped. The swirling in his brain intensified. A peculiar kind of swirling. Not the sort in which the room seemed to spin. Instead the room remained still while his mind spun.

Again he saw fireflies. Again he floated down a brilliant corridor. Again he heard power chords.

But the fireflies could have been glinting specks behind his eyes.

And the power chords? David suddenly realized that Matthew’s portable radio had been playing heavy-metal rock all along.

My God, is this really just a delusion?

And yet he knew, he was sure that Matthew’s weakness and stomach pains were warnings of the septic shock that soon would kill him.

No!

He liked this nurse. She knew her job. She did it well. She was sympathetic, talented, motivated, and totally wrong.

I can’t waste time. I can’t let my son die.

His pulse thumped faster, increasing the humming behind his ears. He’d hoped to intervene subtly in Matthew’s treatment, to point out this or that minimal change in Matt’s condition, to maneuver Matt’s physicians into humoring David’s increasing concern and taking precautions that they saw no need for, given Matt’s presently acceptable vital statistics.

But now he realized that if he did believe in his premonitions, he couldn’t keep following the indirect tactic he’d chosen. He had to insist, to do and not just make suggestions, to act against the system instead of within it.

“Antibiotics,” David told the nurse. “He needs them right now. Give them.”

The nurse stepped backward. “What are you talking about?”

“Donna, do you understand?”

“Yes. Believe me.”

Again David saw her in triplicate-as a vibrant bride in her early twenties, as a dying elderly woman, as the middle-aged desperate mother she was at present-all equally beautiful, each the object of the various lifelong, profoundly increasing stages of his love.

But at the moment, he thought he’d never loved her more. And again he was struck by something behind her eyes, a frightened conviction, a terrified certainty, as if she truly did understand what he was warning about.

“Antibiotics. Matt needs them. Give them to him. Now,” David told the nurse.

“But I told you”-the nurse stepped farther back-“he doesn’t have a temperature. His other statistics are somewhat high but well within normal ranges. There’s no reason to give him antibiotics. Even if he had an infection, which he doesn’t, we’d need to do lab cultures on his blood, to learn what kind of infection it was, so we could decide what kind of antibiotics would be best to fight the-”

“Who’s the doctor on duty?”

The nurse veered quickly past David, her eyes no longer nervous but apprehensive. “I’ll hurry and get him.”

“No, I’ll go with you. Donna, in the next ten minutes, Matt’ll be so weak he won’t take phone calls. He’ll send away visitors, the friends he’s been anxious to hear from. He’ll ask you to turn off his music. Understand? He’ll start rejecting everything that’s important to him.”

“Yes,” Donna said, that same unsettling knowledge behind her eyes. “I understand. Do it. Whatever you think is right. I’m so afraid.”

“Twice is too many times.”

Donna nodded, as if she sensed exactly what he meant.

With a frightened look, the nurse left the room.

David followed.

4

In the corridor, the nurse whispered to the head physician, her remarks attracting a second physician. They turned, eyes narrowed, as David approached.

The first physician straightened. “We gather you’re having some reservations about your son’s treatment.”

“Fears.”

“That’s understandable.” The second physician cleared his throat, obviously hoping to avoid an awkward conversation in public.

“You’re following the procedure you explained to me. I understood the logic of that treatment. I agreed,” David said.

“Well, good,” the first physician said. “Then we don’t have a problem.”

“No,” David said. “Everything’s changed now.”

“Changed? Because he feels weak? But we told you that would happen.”

David’s heart kept pounding. “Yes, but something else is going to happen. All the early symptoms are there, but you don’t know it yet… because you’re not expecting it, so you’re not”-his lungs heaved-“you’re not interpreting the symptoms-”

“I beg your pardon?” The second physician narrowed his eyes. “I’m not interpreting…?”

“The symptoms the way you would if you knew what was going to happen.”

“Going to happen?” The first physician frowned at his colleague.

The parents of other patients had begun to gather and listen.

“Can we go somewhere else to have this talk?” the second physician said.

“As long as we get this settled.”

“There’s a conference room down the hall.”

5

They shut the door to the narrow room that had a black-board upon which doctors customarily drew diagrams for parents confused about the treatment their child would receive. Both physicians studied David as if they wished they weren’t alone with him.

“Now we realize you’re under stress,” the first physician said. “You’re worried about your son. All perfectly natural. But what exactly do you think is-?”

“Going to happen?” David’s legs felt weak. He gripped a chair. “Septic shock.”

The second physician narrowed his eyes. “Where’d you hear that term? Something you read? You’ve been doing, let’s call it, well-intended but uninformed research, and it makes you nervous?”

“Never mind how I know. I’m absolutely certain-”

“Now listen carefully,” the first physician said. “Whatever books you’ve been reading, whatever outdated texts have made you afraid, yes, it’s true there’s always a danger of septic shock. We’ve already warned you. When a patient’s blood counts are low, there’s a risk of infection. That’s why we take extreme precautions to prevent-”

“No, you listen carefully.” Though the room stayed perfectly still, David’s mind revolved. “Your precautions are fine. There’s nothing wrong with the treatment you’re giving him. But Matthew will get septic shock. I can’t explain why, but tomorrow afternoon, he’ll become infected. His blood pressure will drop and…”

“What makes you so sure?”

“You wouldn’t believe me! Just give him antibiotics now!”

The first physician edged toward the phone.

The second physician raised his hands in a placating gesture. “‘Antibiotics’ is a general description of a wide variety of treatment.”

“I understand that. Different antibiotics have applications to different infections.”

The first physician picked up the phone.

David’s chest felt squeezed. “Stop. Give me a chance.”

The first physician touched numbers on the phone.

“Please!”

The first physician hesitated.

“You need to know the specific infection so you can choose the specific antibiotic to use to attack it. So now I’m telling you.”

As David spoke the words that to anyone but a doctor would have been gibberish… as he recalled the words he’d memorized from the microbiology report in his dream… words that in his present timestream would have been impossible for him to know, let alone pronounce… he realized that he wasn’t crazy. His dying vision was fact. He had indeed come back.

For what he told the physicians, the words like gravel in his mouth, was…

“What’ll give Matthew septic shock? Streptococcus mitis. Staphylococcus epidermidis.”

David couldn’t believe he’d spewed those chunks out.

The physicians couldn’t believe it either.

“Where the hell did you…?” The first physician almost dropped the phone.

The second physician drew his head back. “But naturally adapted strep and staph are almost never…”

“Fatal?” David shuddered. “This time they will be.”

His legs buckled. The room spun along with his brain. He lost his grip on the chair.

“My God, he’s…”

Falling.

“Having a…”

Drifting.

Toppling.

“Heart attack.”

6

When David struck the floor, he couldn’t move; he felt disoriented, helpless. His fall, which seemed to have lasted forever, contrasted sickeningly with the sense he had of floating above his aged dying body. He seemed to drop and rise simultaneously-conflicting sensations that produced such vertigo he could barely muster the strength to blink.

Making these reactions more intense was the added element of fear, as if to move, to try to stand, would kill him.

Through a haze, he saw the first physician lunge from the room. The second physician knelt beside David, checking his pulse. After an interval-ten seconds? a minute?-the first physician rushed back, accompanied by Donna and a nurse.

“His pulse is strong.” The first physician’s voice was an echo. “No fibrillation. Ninety.”

“Acceptable,” the second physician said.

“No… normal for me is…” David’s chest heaved.

“Don’t try to talk.”

The nurse wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around David’s arm. Donna knelt beside him, touching his cheek, as the nurse inflated the cuff. David saw the fear in Donna’s eyes.

The nurse deflated the cuff, watching a dial as she listened to a stethoscope pressed to David’s arm. “A hundred and forty over ninety.”

“Tolerable. A little high, but not unusual. Not critical,” the second physician said.

“No. Listen. Normal for me is…”

“Don’t try to talk. Relax.”

Sure, easy for you to say, David thought, the room and his mind aswirl.

“What I told you a minute ago might not be true. Try not to worry. Our initial examination isn’t conclusive, but you might not be having a heart attack.”

“Then what…?”

“We don’t know. We’ve alerted Emergency. We’re sending you down there. If it is a heart attack, we’re not equipped to deal with-”

“Stop the spinning. Stop the damned room from spinning.”

“David, I’m here. I’ll be with you,” Donna said. “I’ll stay right beside you.”

“No, stay with Matthew.” The effort to emphasize his words was excruciating.

David felt his body being lifted. He suddenly found himself in a wheelchair. He closed his eyes. But the tingling-and worse, the swirling-persisted.

Feeling the wheelchair being pushed, he groaned from increasing dizziness. Pressure accumulated behind his ears. He dared to open his eyes and discovered…

He was in an elevator. The doors hissed shut. The elevator dropped.

“No!”

At last he moved of his own accord, shoving his hands to his ears to stifle the pressure.

“No!”

The elevator jerked to a stop. The top of his head seemed about to explode. If someone hadn’t been holding him, he’d have toppled from the wheelchair.

Blinding lights. A swirling corridor.

But not the soothing gleam of the corridor in his nightmare. This was the hospital’s first floor. Rear section. The part that patients and visitors almost never saw and prayed they would never have to see. Through a spinning maze of twists and turns, he was rushed in his wheelchair toward the Emergency Ward. Outside, a wailing ambulance arrived. David concentrated to focus on glass doors that led to a curve in a driveway where attendants unloaded a patient onto a gurney. Through a blur, he saw a nurses’ station directly across from where the glass doors now slid open, the attendants hurrying the patient through.

David’s wheelchair stopped abruptly in front of the nurses’ station. His head tilted forward, making him groan.

A woman peered over a computer screen toward him. “Name?” She poised her fingers above a keyboard.

David managed to tell her.

“Two ‘r’s, two ‘I’s?”

David gasped for breath and nodded.

The woman tapped the keyboard. “Address?”

“It’s all”-David sweated, even though his skin felt cold-“on file. I hurt my shoulder… in March.” He breathed faster. “I came here then for treatment. I’m in… the computer file.”

“Just a minute.” The woman tapped the keyboard again. She read an address from the screen. “That’s where you live?”

David nodded.

The woman read the name of an insurance company.

“Yes,” David breathed.

“Okay, you can take him in.”

The wheelchair hurried forward. David’s dizziness increased. He closed his eyes once more, felt the wheelchair turn sharply left, and the next time he looked, he was speeding toward an examination room-a bed, a sink, a metal cabinet, its shelves stacked with medical supplies.

The nurse who had wheeled him down from the Bone Marrow Ward stopped and tapped his shoulder. “They’ll take care of you now, Mr. Morrell. Good luck. I’ve got to get back on duty upstairs.”

At once, another nurse replaced her. “Can you stand?”

“Don’t know.”

“Try. I have to get you onto the table.”

She gripped his arms and helped him to his feet. Wobbling, he leaned his hips against the table and settled backward. She raised a metal bar on each side of the table to keep him from rolling off.

A male resident came in, closing a curtain.

“Pulse is ninety,” the nurse said.

“Not critical.”

“No, listen to me.” David felt as if a ten-pound rock had been set on his chest. “I tried to explain upstairs.” He squirmed from the humming pain behind his ears. “I’m a runner. My heart rate’s low. It’s normally sixty.”

“Blood pressure-one hundred and forty over ninety.”

The resident shrugged as if to say “not critical” again.

“You don’t understand.” David shivered. “It should be a hundred and fifteen over seventy-five. It’s never… God, that curtain.”

The resident frowned and turned toward the privacy curtain. “What’s wrong with-?”

The curtain was decorated with blue wavy lines. David’s mind not only spun now but wavered in imitation of those lines. Sickened, he closed his eyes again but still saw the wavy lines. His breath was so rapid he felt he’d just run several miles. The top of his head seemed to bulge.

“I’m going to…”

Faint?

Die?

Toppling toward his kitchen floor.

Floating toward the radiant doorway.

Fireflies gleaming.

(Behind his eyes?)

Power chords throbbing.

(In his head?)

Then?

Now?

Later?

“What’s happening to me?”

“That’s what we want to find out.”

The nurse unbuttoned David’s shirt. The resident pressed pads against David’s chest. Squinting, David saw that the pads were attached to wires that led to an EKG machine on a cart.

The resident flipped a switch on the EKG. Needles wavered, making inky marks on paper.

The paper rolled from the machine. The resident tore off a sheet and studied it.

“Yes, I found the problem. Here. And another one. Here. And here. Extra blips. Your heart. There’s something wrong with-”

“Let me see it,” David gasped.

“What?”

“Let me see it.”

David reached for the printout. The effort to focus his eyes was agonizing. “No, that’s… not what’s wrong with me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Those blips… normal for me.”

“Normal?”

“My EKG…”

“Relax.”

“Always looks like this.”

The resident frowned. “Have you had medical training?”

“No.”

“In that case…”

“But I’ve always had a”-David grabbed the sides of the table as it started swirling-“right…”

“I don’t understand.”

“Right… bundle.” David struggled to complete his statement. “Right bundle branch block.”

The nurse and the resident stared at each other.

“Right bundle branch block?” The resident seemed astonished, as if he’d never expected a patient to speak to him in technical medical phrases.

In contrast with David’s certainty about the septic shock that would soon kill his son-have to save him!-there was nothing mysterious about his present medical knowledge. The phenomenon in his heart had been explained to him years before. The heart is a pump, and like any other pump, it needs an energy source, “electricity” produced by the body. Nerves, like wires, control the flow of energy, and under normal circumstances, this energy flows smoothly from chamber to chamber, stimulating the heart to take in and push out blood.

But in David’s case, a cluster of nerves, a “bundle branch,” on the right side of his heart had deteriorated. Energy impulses, which usually flowed in an orderly fashion, had been interrupted and forced to redirect themselves along another branch of nerves, taking longer to reach the right side of his heart. On a printout from an EKG machine, this redirection of energy produced an extra blip within an otherwise normal heart wave pattern.

The blip was not alarming, as long as you knew what it meant, and David’s condition wasn’t considered lethal. For twenty years, he’d run an average of four miles every day, and even though he was foolishly a smoker, he could finish that run and never be out of breath. So whatever was wrong with him, he was sure that the bundle branch block hadn’t caused it.

But something was wrong. Without a doubt. Pausing often to gasp for air, he described his symptoms.

Tingling.

Shivering.

Sweating.

Rapid heartbeat.

Rapid breathing.

Pressure on his chest.

Humming behind his ears.

Swelling in his head.

And swirling.

Terrible swirling.

David thought, If you had these symptoms, what would you guess was going wrong? A heart attack? You bet that’s what you’d guess. No, never mind guess. We’re talking fear.

“Okay, the extra blips match what you’re telling me,” the resident said. “A right bundle branch block.”

“Then what”-David’s chest heaved, both his lungs and heart-“is wrong with…?”

“We’ll do more tests. Hang on. We’re trying, Mr. Morrell. We’ll do everything we can to find out.”

The nurse inspected David’s right arm. “His central vein’s good and thick.” She stuck an intravenous needle into the vein and extracted blood.

David felt too disoriented to feel the prick of the needle.

“Get lab tests as soon as possible,” the resident said.

The nurse rushed away.

7

And just then Sarie walked in.

Beautiful wonderful Sarie.

As when David had seen-too weak a word-witnessed Donna in the Bone Marrow Ward (after three hours of having been away or else half a lifetime), David’s soul swelled with love. Again, as when he’d seen Donna upstairs, he had the eerie sense of a triple image: of Sarie as a smooth-faced infant, of the glowing twenty-one-year-old she now was, of the haggard woman who wept beside his deathbed.

I’m going crazy, David thought. That’s what’s wrong. I’m not sick. I’m nuts.

And yet…

And yet…

Why am I so sure of when and how Matt’ll die?

Sarie’s blue-eyed, blond glow of young adulthood was dimmed with shock. “I just got out of class. I went up to visit Matt. Mom told me…”

“Yeah.” Despite his rushing heart, David did his best to grin. “Mom told you… I’ve got a few problems.”

Sarie clutched his hand. “She said you wanted her to stay with Matt, so I came down to see…”

“I’m glad you did.” The pressure in his head swelled, making him grimace. “It’s good to have you with me.”

Someone brushed past the curtain, entering the room. A woman. Not a nurse. She didn’t wear a gown but slacks and a blazer. “… neurologist,” she finished explaining. “I understand you collapsed an hour ago.”

An hour ago? David would have sworn he’d been in the Emergency Ward for less than ten minutes.

“What are your symptoms?” the neurologist asked.

For a second time, David described them. Tingling… rapid… pressure… swelling… dizzy… humming…

The resident enumerated David’s vital statistics.

The neurologist frowned. “They’re not consistent with a heart attack.

David turned to Sarie. “Matt?”

“He can hardly move. His girlfriend called. He didn’t have the strength to talk to her.”

It’s starting, David thought. The infection’s building. I’m seven floors below him. I can barely move, but I’m the only one who can save him.

“Grip my hands,” the neurologist said.

“What?”

“Grip my hands.”

David obeyed.

“Squeeze them as hard as you can.”

David squeezed until her fingertips turned white.

“Good.” The neurologist took off his shoes and socks, then pressed the blunt end of a pen down the balls of his feet.

His toes curled inward.

“Good.” She tapped a rubber hammer against his elbows, knees, and ankles. His reflexes jerked.

“Good.”

“Stop the damned room from spinning.”

The resident checked David’s pulse. “What the-? It’s up to a hundred and ten.”

The neurologist straightened. “Blood pressure.”

“Up. A hundred and fifty over ninety-five.”

“Sarie, go back upstairs,” David blurted. “Go back to Donna. Tell her, whatever happens to me, tell her-”

“Mr. Morrell, has anything happened to you in the last few days? To change your medical-”

“I fainted this morning.”

“Fainted?”

“I went out running. I came back, started to drink a glass of water, and…”

“You ran in this heat and fainted?” the resident said. “You’re probably dehydrated.”

“No! I drank plenty of water after I woke up!”

“Electrolytes,” the neurologist said. “They must be off-balance.”

“No!” David said.

He understood about electrolytes. They were elements in a person’s blood that allowed the body’s “electricity” to flow efficiently through vital organs. But if these elements weren’t present, the “electricity” couldn’t flow, and the vital organs went into shock. The principal electrolytes were potassium and sodium.

“No!” David repeated. “I swallowed a potassium pill. I put salt on my palm and licked it.”

“Have you had medical training?”

“Sarie, get back to Donna and Matt!”

“His pulse is up again,” the resident said. “A hundred and fifty.”

“Pressure,” the neurologist said.

“A hundred and sixty over-”

David felt such swelling in his chest and head, such heaving in his lungs that-

“I’m going to die,” he said.

“Code blue?” the resident asked.

Despite his delirium, David recognized the hospital’s signal for summoning maximum help in case of imminent death.

“Code blue? Should I call it in?” the resident repeated.

The neurologist opened her mouth, her lips forming “yes.”

“Wait, his pulse is coming down,” the resident said. “A hundred and forty.”

The neurologist rubbed her forehead. “Pressure?”

“Down. A hundred and fifty. Code blue?”

“Not yet.”

“His pulse is down again,” the resident said. “A hundred and thirty.”

“Pressure?”

“Down. A hundred and forty.”

The room became silent. In David’s swirling mind, the walls seemed to narrow.

“His pulse is down to a hundred,” the resident said. “His pressure’s a hundred and thirty.”

David’s delirium began to clear. He stared at the cabinet to his right and managed to steady his vision.

“Pulse?”

“Ninety.”

“The same as when he came in here. Pressure?”

“A hundred and twenty. Almost what he says is normal for him.” The resident shook his head. “This thing’s like a roller coaster, suddenly up, then down.”

The neurologist rubbed the back of her neck. “I don’t know. Labyrinthitis maybe.” She referred to an infection of the inner ear that affected a person’s ability to balance, making the patient dizzy.

“No,” the neurologist corrected herself, “that wouldn’t explain the pressure on his chest. Mr. Morrell, apart from your fainting spell after running this morning, has anything else happened to change your medical condition?”

“The last six months have been the same.”

“I don’t understand.” She responded to a sudden thought. “When did you eat last?”

“This morning. Or maybe last night. I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember?”

“There isn’t always time. It’s been mostly hospital food, and…”

“Hospital food?”

“Dad”-Sarie clutched David’s arm-“tell them.”

“Tell us what?”

“About Matthew,” Sarie said.

“Who’s…?”

“My son.” Despite his dizziness, David told them everything.

In hesitating gasps.

All of it.

A breathless babble.

The turmoil of the last six months.

Every fear-filled instant.

“Mr. Morrell,” the neurologist said, “you’ve just had a panic attack.