Feels like my whole body is turning to lead.
Houser felt his nose run for the hundredth time that day and wiped at it with back of his hand. He blinked his eyes a couple of times as they began to itch.
Dr Clark re-entered the room with a prescription in her hand.
“Take this to the pharmacy on the ground floor and-” Her words trailed off. She gawped at him.
“What?” Houser said. “What is it?”
“Your nose!” She hurried over to the corner desk and pulled some tissues from a box in the drawer. She handed several to him in a clump.
Houser took the tissues from her and noticed the blood which covered the back of his hand. It was almost black it was so dark. “Wh-what the hell?”
A wracking cough exploded in his chest and blood spurted from his mouth, covering Dr Clark from her face all the way down the front of her jacket. She seemed shocked by it, but wasted no time in leaning him forward and placing the stethoscope against his back.
Houser continued to hack and splutter and more blood leaked from his mouth and nose. Through the sounds of his own agonised heaving, he heard the doctor’s panicked voice.
“You’re lungs are filling with blood,” she said frantically. “We need to get you into surgery.”
Houser tried to catch his breath and make sense of the situation, but his mind was a raging blur. Surgery? But I just have the flu.
Then he collapsed off the table and landed on the floor.
DOCTORS AND NURSES
Dr Clark sat in her office and examined the patient’s preliminary test results. Daniel Houser was currently in surgery where efforts were being made to control his internal bleeding. She couldn’t deny that she was worried. The blood coming from the patient’s mouth had been thick and arterial. Most of it still stained her coat.
From some sort of internal injury or…
I don’t know. Something crazy, like Ebola or Lassa?
That’s insane. If the patient had just gotten back from third-world Africa, perhaps there could be the remotest chance of him having haemorrhagic fever, but he said he’d just gotten back from the Mediterranean. The worst he should have been exposed to there is sunstroke and dysentery.
She had a growing desire to contact the disease control unit which covered her district, but she forced herself to hold off until the blood results came back. Medicine had to be practised on a factual basis. She wasn’t about to make assumptions with so little information at her fingertips.
He could be a nut, for all I know. Swallowed a bunch of nails as a way to kill himself. God knows it’s more likely than someone bringing Ebola into the hospital.
There was a knock at the door and she immediately said, “Come in.”
It was one of the nurses from diagnostics. She was carrying a folder.
“Do you have the haematology reports?” Dr Clark asked the woman.
The nurse handed over the folder. “Just partial results so far. The blood tests seemed to be contaminated by a foreign substance. We’ve compared the markers we could find against the database of diseases, but nothing came up. Dr Besser is getting more samples now and will be working on them as a priority.”
Dr Clark looked over the blood report that was inside the folder. She scanned the page quickly and located what she was looking for. “It’s not Ebola.”
“No,” said the nurse. “Nor Lassa, or anything similar.”
Dr Clark sighed. “Then, if not for this foreign body you mentioned, I would assume internal injuries. Maybe the first blood sample was compromised. Maybe Dr Besser will find the new tests to be normal.”
“Maybe so,” said the nurse. “I will let you know if anything changes, Doctor.”
“Thank you, nurse.”
The nurse departed. Dr Clark continued looking through the blood reports.
Foreign substance? What on earth could that be? Did he poison himself with something?
She let her eyes scan the numerous lines of data, looking for anything out of the ordinary. Nothing seemed to jump out at her, until…