AT THE WINDOW by Miriam Daum

“What makes you think you know anything about amputees?”

That was my first introduction to Dr. Black, my new patient, just arrived speeding towards me in his electric wheelchair. The right leg of his green scrub suit was pinned up above the knee.

Dr. Black, an anesthesiologist at the hospital where we both worked, turned out to be a tough customer. Almost each of my instructions or advice was countered with a contradictory response.

“Stress test?  That’s poppycock…Why should I exercise my stump?  It’s just going into a prosthesis anyway... I don’t want to use a ‘safer’ walker; I want crutches.”

When it was time for me to make him a temporary artificial leg, he wanted it in green, not the standard plain plaster-white.

“I’m the consumer…I get to choose,” he said. (He got his green leg; a few drops of food coloring in the plaster water…it matched his scrub suit.)

“I hope you step in a meadow muffin,” was Dr. Black’s standard sendoff to me when leaving at the end of a day or meeting me in the hospital hallway. You had to look twice to see the mischievous grin, the laughter in his piercing blue eyes.

One Monday morning I arrived at the usual early hour for our session. Very early, before 7 a.m. when Dr. Black had to be in the operating room for his day’s work. He did not appear. I called the hospital page operator. 

“Not signed in yet,” she said.

Probably he was delayed in traffic returning from his farm, I thought; he had told me of his planned weekend there. But later that morning one of my colleagues pointed to Dr. Black’s name on the hospital admission list. He was in Cardiac ICU.

I raced up to his room. There he was presiding, sitting up in bed, blue eyes beaming. His audience, fellow physicians, a nurse or two and his wife, arrayed around him.

“So there I was with all the EKG electrodes glued to my chest. I stood up to watch the monitor. Saw myself going into v. tach…said ‘Oh, oh – I better lie down. So I lay down and arrested.”

Shock and disbelief on all our faces…

“But,” he continued with his booming laugh, “the nice girls and boys there brought me back…and then the whole thing happened again…”

Mrs. Black was not laughing as she filled in the saga details. Dr. B had not felt well, she told us, driving down to the farm. 

“Let’s go to the emergency room,” Mrs. Black had said. 

“No” was the characteristic reply.

Returning home, Dr. B was pale and flushed.

“We’re going to the E.R.,” Mrs. B. proclaimed.

“No,” her husband said. At which point Mrs. B gave him two choices: E.R.or divorce. He went.

“Please stay out of trouble for awhile,” I begged, turning to leave. Patients were waiting for me downstairs. 

“I hope you step in a meadow muffin,” Dr. Black called after me.

Not funny, I mumbled to myself, appalled at his nonchalance in the face of almost-death. Not funny at all.

Later that day after work, I went back up to visit. There was no more audience now. Even Mrs. Black had gone home. I paused at the half-closed door, wondering if I should go in or let him rest. Quietly I pushed the door a little wider. There was Dr. Black sitting in his wheelchair, head turned towards the window. Tears were trickling slowly down his cheeks.