Goldblatt's Descent by Michael Honig

Author:Michael Honig [Honig, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857897022
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd
Published: 2014-07-03T04:00:00+00:00

Thursday mornings, when Goldblatt was in clinic, were Ludo’s big chance to have her own round and play the starring supervisory role for which she had fought so hard and lied so shamelessly. In theory, Goldblatt would then come up in the afternoon after his clinic and run quickly through the names with the HO in the doctors’ office to make sure everything was all right. But many perfectly sound theories break down in practice, and Ludo, for reasons of her own that she rarely saw fit to disclose, often missed her round. As she did on that particular Thursday morning.

The HO was therefore going happily around by herself, chatting with the patients, failing to recognize various warning signs and abnormalities, or recognizing normalities and thinking that they were warning signs, which is the way of HOs. Mr Lister’s temperature had started its morning rise, and the HO stopped by just in time to see it top thirty-nine degrees and remind herself to add the day’s attainment to the running charts she had started making of his fevers. On Dr Morris’s suggestion, she was plotting the spikes of fever on a grid against the investigation results that were now regularly flooding back from the hospital’s laboratories, in the straw-clutching hope that this cabbalistic exercise would reveal a hitherto hidden pattern and unpick the lock to Mr Lister’s mystical illness. Then the HO moved on to the next bed, which housed Mr Sprczrensky.

No one on the ward could pronounce Mr Sprczrensky’s name properly and they all called him Mr Sprensky. He didn’t mind. Everyone called him Mr Sprensky, he said. He had white hair, pale blue eyes, a quiet, reserved manner, and he had fought at Monte Cassino. Apart from having a name unpronounceable by Anglo-Saxons – which can be either a handicap or an advantage, depending on your point of view – Mr Sprczrensky had only one problem, a case of moderate Fuertler’s that manifested as skin lesions on his back and occasional pain in his hands and feet. He was an elective admission for the six-monthly work-up that was routine in every way, including the two cancellations that had preceded it and the fact that eleven months had passed since the last sixth-monthly admission. It went without saying that he was getting a Sorain infusion. Mr Sprczrensky had been very polite and considered when asked whether he thought Sorain had helped in the past. He couldn’t say for sure that it had, but he couldn’t say for sure that it hadn’t. Except when he had seen the Prof on her round the previous day, when it had.

When the HO arrived to see him, Mr Sprczrensky was sitting in the chair beside his bed and a nurse had just connected the infusion pump to the cannula in his arm.

The fluid was stinging. The drip was in his right wrist. He held out his right arm, rolled back his sleeve, and rested his wrist on the edge of his bed so the HO could look at it.

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