The Hospital by Brian Alexander

The Hospital by Brian Alexander

Author:Brian Alexander [Alexander, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub


* * *

Finance, lobbying, and corporate consolidation mattered a lot to the lives of people in Bryan, Ohio, though few realized just how and how much. Their concerns were far more immediate and pedestrian.

About ninety minutes after Zuver and Dean had dropped nursing home resident Sheila Carpentar off at the CHWC ER, EMS chief Jim Hicks and Zuver approached a residence in Bryan. Once a single-family house, the structure had been turned into three small, sagging apartments unified by what had been a front porch.

Inside one of the units, fading color photos of a smiling family rested on a crowded table: brothers in turtlenecks, checked flared trousers, and belts as wide as their sideburns, their hair just over their ears; Father in his suit, his sideburns a little bushy, too; Mother in a dress, her hair lacquered into sculpture. In a corner of the tiny living room, a TV set tuned to a nostalgia station displayed Lee J. Cobb standing stern and honorable as the Judge on an old episode of The Virginian.

One of the brothers from the photos lay on the floor, on his side. He was about seventy, and obese; he was weak, his breathing was labored, and he was a little disoriented. He’d rolled out of his bed by accident and couldn’t get up. The bed was in the living room. He lived in the bed most of the time. A plastic tube ran from his nose to an oxygen generator.

Mail—bills and notices, mostly—was spread on the bed. There were piles of them on the floor, too, on a corner of the kitchen counter, on the seat of a chair. Mounds of clothing slumped on the floor. An aluminum-frame walker stood ready to help him, but he couldn’t pull himself up on the rocking chair he’d tried to use as a brace.

Hicks and Zuver wrestled the man into a sitting position, the first step toward wrangling him into a chair Hicks had cleaned off. But before they tried to maneuver him into the chair, Hicks asked some questions.

“What year is it?”

“Uh, 2016.” The wrong year, but close.

“Who’s the president?”

He thought for a beat. “Trump.” Then he corrected himself about the year. “No, 2019.”

Hicks asked if he wanted to go to the hospital. “No,” the man said. “I go there about every week.”

Hicks and Zuver levered the man into the chair and then placed his walker before him. Hicks moved furniture out of a doorway. “How’d you expect to get to the bathroom with these chairs?” The man shrugged.

In Hicks’s judgment, the man was okay to be left alone. The apartment was in disarray, but it wasn’t filthy. The man was a little confused, but he came around all right. Hicks had seen a lot worse. In a couple of weeks, Williams County EMS would send a bill for $100—the response fee. Because the man hadn’t been taken anyplace, Medicare wouldn’t pay anything for the run, and so the hundred bucks would be the man’s responsibility to pay. Hicks wasn’t under any illusion he’d pay it.



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