The Blood of Strangers by Frank Huyler

Author:Frank Huyler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2012-01-22T16:00:00+00:00

THE BLEEDING GIRL

MARIA WOULD NOT STOP BLEEDING. It defined her now. She lay there, and it just went on, it wouldn’t even slow down. Nothing we did, nothing we could think of, had any effect. She was a leaking vessel, day and night, and she was alert, watching as she filled up the bed.

A ritual developed. Every few hours I called the blood bank, and, expecting my call, they approved another transfusion for Maria. By the end of the week none of her own blood was left in her body. She was full of the blood of strangers.

The distance between Maria’s room in the pediatric intensive care unit and the linen closet was only about thirty feet. An older man mopped the hall. He had gray hair, thick black glasses, and he wore a brown janitor’s shirt with his name, José, embroidered on the shoulder. During normal times we rarely saw him, but over the past few days we had called him often.

Every three hours or so a nurse wearing a heavy cloth gown and gloves carried an armload of sheets from Maria’s room to the linen closet, and every three hours José appeared, picked up the mop by the door, and carefully followed the nurse down the hall, mopping up the drops of blood that fell like dimes on the floor. After a while he left his mop and pail next to Maria’s room because he was tired of carrying them up the stairs.

Maria’s mother, a young, heavyset woman, initially so tearful and tentative, was no longer afraid. Her manner toward us had hardened; she barely acknowledged me when we met in the hall. By now she wanted the vigil over, wanted her daughter to die. She stood in the doorway and watched José as he painstakingly followed the nurse. When he had finished he put the bucket and mop back by the door and nodded to her. None of us knew what to say.

The girl had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, and a few days earlier I had saved her life. It was the single best thing I had done in my residency.

It had begun with her bones, the joints of her fingers and toes, her elbows and knees and spine, fused, frozen beyond function. She could barely lift her arms, she could not turn her head or look up. Years of pills: prednisone, Cytoxan. Eighteen years old. She did not menstruate or walk. Her skin was as delicate as paper, with a fine tracery of blue veins which burst at the slightest touch of a needle.

It ended with her kidneys. Every two days we plugged her in, attached the dialysis machine to the plastic tube that emerged from her chest. Last year she had passed up the opportunity for a kidney transplant against the urging of her doctors and mother. She wanted to go to the prom.

On the second day of her hospitalization they paged me overhead to her room. She lay gasping, frothing at the mouth, black-eyed, desperate, her lungs full of fluid.

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