"When the Sleeper Wakes" Created by Kim EM and Debra Rachel

This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between this story and any actual person, living or dead, is coincidental, except as noted here. Some real names have been used herein, but these depictions are not intended to represent the actual thoughts or behavior of the persons depicted, and are used only for dramatic purposes. Any variances from accepted medical procedure are solely the fault of the author. Don’t try this at home.

The story contains mature subject matter. It may contain adult situations and/or language. If you're not old enough to legally read this (and you know who you are), then get out of here before it's too late. You've been warned.

Permission is granted to archive or repost this story as long as the text is unaltered, and my copyright and this notice are included. Oh, and this permission is conditional upon it's being available only on free sites. No membership fee, "Adult Check", or other means of extracting money from people are allowed.

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When The Sleeper Wakes

by Kim EM
© 2002, All rights reserved

 

Part 04: Accidents

 

Chapter Four: ACCIDENTS

Bill Nelson was bored. College, medical school, internship, residency, and for what? So he could cut up bodies in the middle of the night?

He sighed as he sectioned the heart from the body before him, deftly slicing through the still tissue and lifting the sample into a small dish. Why, he wondered, had he thought pathology would be an exciting specialty?

He stood alone, rapidly working away at the post, the room silent except for the quiet whoosh of the water sluicing through the drainage channels of the steel table and his hushed mutterings into the hanging microphone. He only half paid attention to the body before him, the victim of a shooting up in Manhattan North.

Finishing up with the body, he turned and took his samples into the lab, where he rapidly mounted and stained slides, wondering as he did so why it was necessary. After all, the deceased had obviously died of his gunshot wounds, most likely from the head injury. The slides confirmed that there were no systemic problems.

As he cleaned up and rang for an attendant to return the body to its refrigerated storage, he thought for the millionth time about his job. Three-quarters of a century before, the powers-that-be had decided that many deaths occurring in any of the five boroughs of New York City required an autopsy to determine the cause of death. The mission of the office was fairly simple: "The Office of Chief Medical Examiner investigates cases of persons who die within New York City from criminal violence; by casualty or by suicide; suddenly, when in apparent good health; when unattended by a physician; in a correctional facility; or in any suspicious or unusual manner. The Office also investigates when an application is made pursuant to law for a permit to cremate the body of a person." Be it disease, mischance, or murder, the bodies of the city’s deceased, whether of the Four Hundred or the newest of immigrants, were transferred to this dumpy brick building on First Avenue for testing. The practice made sense -- during the seventy-seven years the law had been in place, innumerable murders that looked like something else had been discovered, victims of hitherto unsuspected contagious diseases were identified, and the doctors had even broken some new ground in the field of immunology. Many of the greatest names in pathology had practiced here – Charles Norris, Milton Helpern, Michael Baden, Charles Hirsch, Beryl Austin.

Bill Nelson, though, was just a peon. As the newest and youngest pathologist on the Chief Medical Examiners staff, he regularly drew the overnight duty. Too many of the cases he handled had been gunshot victims. Part of the price for practicing in New York, he supposed. Still, it was a great place to live and work, far better than his hometown in Wisconsin.

Still pondering the events that made his job necessary, he picked up a tray to clean up – the instruments to a ‘soiled’ container to be sent off for cleaning and sterilization, the sharps to their plastic container for their eventual safe disposal. Still woolgathering about the reasons his job was necessary, he stumbled in turning, the tray sliding from his grasp. As he recovered his balance and tried to keep the tray from falling, a syringe he’d used to draw blood slid toward him and pricked his left forearm.

"Shit."

The tray, suddenly forgotten, crashed to the floor as he reflexively pulled back his arm. The offending syringe fell into the mess as he stared helplessly at his arm, a drop of blood at the site of the puncture.

The nearby double doors crashed open as the attendant double-timed into the morgue. "What happened?"

"I just stuck myself. Dirty."

"Aww, crap." The attendant stared at him through her eternally sorrowful eyes. "Now what?"

"I’ve got to run over to Bellevue and get this tested. At the least, it means I’ve got a mountain of paperwork waiting for me. At worst, well..."

"Yeah. You might as well head over now, Doctor Nelson. I’ll get this cleaned up."

As the attendant bent to start gathering up the debris, Nelson turned towards the door, then swiveled and said, "Can you call Doctor A. and let her know what happened? She’s going to have to call someone in to cover."

"Sure, no problem."

Bill Nelson wasted no time. Without even pausing at his locker he headed towards the lobby. He swerved to the security station and told the guard, "I need to run over to the Bellevue emergency room for a bit, Gene. If Doctor A. calls you might tell her where I am."

"Sure thing, Doctor."

Nelson usually came and went through a side door that was reserved to doctors and staff, but the main lobby was closer to his destination. Fortunately, the medical examiners’ building was right at the Bellevue campus, and it was a fairly short, if energetic, walk to the ER. After passing through the automatic doors, Bill bypassed the triage nurse and made a beeline for the nursing station. Sitting at a small table dictating into a micro-cassette recorder was the chief resident on duty, Sheryl Mendelez. She finished her dictation and looked up at the expectantly waiting (and somewhat handsome) doctor. "What’s up?"

He gave her a half smile, embarrassed, and told her of his mishap.

"Okay, no need to panic. Let’s get some blood drawn, then you can start with the paperwork."

Bill groaned. "Let’s get on with it. The sooner we get this done, the sooner I can start dealing with the bureaucrats."

She deftly swabbed his arm and tightened the rubber strap. With a sure motion she found the vein on the first try and drew a sample. "You know this isn’t likely to show anything. You’re going to need to be tested regularly for the next six months."

He smiled. "That’ll teach me to watch where I walk."

She finished labeling the specimen and turned back to him. What can you tell me about the source of the blood?"

"Let’s see. Black male, age twenty-six. Killed in a shootout on Hundred-and-Seventeenth. Proximate cause was head trauma. No obvious signs of drug use."

"That’s a good sign."

"Yep. I’d say he appeared normal in every way except..."

"A hole in the head?"

"That, and three others. The odd thing is he had perfect teeth, no scars or calluses, either. Plus..." He trailed off into a thoughtful silence.

"What?"

"No plaque."

"You said he had perfect teeth."

Bill looked distracted, then said, "Not his teeth. His arteries. Clean as the day he was born."

She looked at him bemusedly. "You said he was only twenty-six."

"True, but even at twenty-six there should be SOME plaque."

"Healthy lifestyle?"

He shook his head. "Not that clean. I tell you, from the condition of his body he might as well have sprung full-blown from a test tube."

She laughed. "That’s not too likely. I guess he was just born lucky." She paused for a dramatic moment. "Until tonight, at least."

"I guess."

Several hours later, and back in his office, Bill Nelson tiredly signed the last of an awesome stack of forms, explaining the accident and his response. He picked up the stack and tiredly carried them to the elevator, which surprisingly enough was waiting on his floor. As he rode up he slumped against the back wall, willing himself the strength to stay alert until he could deliver the forms, sign out, and make his way to his upper west side apartment.

Upstairs he flopped the stack into Doctor Austin’s inbox and turned back towards the elevator. He got about two steps before a voice from behind beckoned him into the office.

"Bill."

Nelson turned, resignedly, and dragged himself into the Chief Medical Examiner’s office. It was a tired office, with worn carpeting and mismatched furniture, poorly maintained. The furniture ranged from WPA to 1960's modern. The prevailing aura was drab, from faded pastel chairs to institutional green walls. With a quick look around the familiar mess, he turned to the figure behind the desk. "Someday you’ve got to do something about this office. The politicians must love visiting."

"The politicians never come here. If a crappy office is what it takes to drive them away, that’s fine with me. Besides," she continued, "I think there are other things besides the furniture that keep them away from this building."

"You’re probably right." He adopted a lecturing tone. "And for the next stop on our tour, here’s the newest of our patients. Note the channels at the sides of the table to carry away blood and other bodily fluids. The dark colored masses floating in the adjacent sink are his lungs, and... Mister Mayor? Is something wrong?"

"You think it’s funny, but several years ago I had a Committeeman vomit into a body he’d wanted to see."

"Oh, nice."

"Anyways, when the new tower is built my office will look just like any other corporate hive, and then I probably won’t be able to keep them off."

She gestured Nelson to one of the cracked green vinyl chairs, and he sank gratefully into it. Doctor Beryl Austin was a middle-aged woman, professional in appearance but showing clear signs of chronic fatigue. "So, I understand you had a rough night."

"That’s an understatement. I tripped over my own feet, managed to stick myself with the syringe I’d used to draw blood from the body, and then managed to scatter the whole tray of used merde’ across the floor."

"You’ve been checked?"

"I ran over to Bellevue right away. That’s not going to tell me much, though. It was only a few drops – enough that it could infect me if, God forbid, there was anything there to infect me with, but not likely to show up for some time."

"So now you wait." She sighed. "Well, you aren’t the first one here and you’re not likely to be the last."

"That figures. How – how many others so far?"

"Let’s see..." She ran a quick mental inventory. "You’d be the twelfth since we started keeping track. Nine of the others were fine, no infections or known effects."

"And the other two?"

She hesitated, then went on. "Both tested positive for HIV. One is on medication and the last I heard is still asymptomatic."

"And the other?"

He developed full-blown AIDS and passed away about eighteen months ago."

Twenty-five minutes later, Bill Nelson left the building and his job for the last time, though he didn’t know it at the moment. A short walk brought him to Twenty-eighth and Third, the nearest subway entrance. A quick trip on the 6 up to Forty-second, then crosstown on the Times Square Shuttle, and finally uptown on the 3 would bring him to Eighty-Sixth and Broadway, just a block from his not-too-classy apartment.

Before catching the train, though, maybe some breakfast? He turned into a familiar diner on the corner, sliding into a booth. He felt a bit more human after the first cup of coffee, and decided on a Denver omelet. He sat, waiting, staring out the window, thinking about the patient whose blood he’d gotten, and the two pathologists who’d come up with HIV from similar sticks. How had they felt the morning after their accidents, and even moreso, how had they felt when they’d been diagnosed?

The body he’d posted didn’t show any signs of disease, and it would take time to get back the lab results on the body. The forensics lab was too busy and too small to get quick answers on something like that, so the samples would sit and wait their turn for the technicians to do their magic. Maybe in a few years, when the new tower was built, things would be different, but in the antiquated, cramped, 6300 square-foot facility there was too much backlog to be able to rush blood work on a gunshot victim. The new lab, a 310,000 square-foot marvel would, if the political weenies appropriated the money for construction and operations, dramatically improve the office’s efficiency and cut turnaround time to a fraction of its current torpid pace.

 

When breakfast came, he barely tasted it, still dwelling on the unfairnesses of life, and mentally kicking himself for his carelessness with the tray of used instruments. Finishing, he silently paid the bill and headed for home.

As he descended into the station, he remembered that he needed to charge his MetroCard, and turned to the bank of MetroCard vending machines. Pulling out the card and a ten dollar bill, he inserted the card into the slot, and the machine showed it’s remaining value at forty-five cents. He stuck the ten into the projecting slot, and the machine showed the card’s new value, $10.45. When the card ejected, he tiredly took it and turned on his heel, catching his shoulder on the projecting bill slot. With a ripping noise and a stab of pain, he knew he’d just sliced his shoulder open on its sharp corner.

"Terrific," he muttered to himself. What else could go wrong?

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To Be Continued....

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© 2002 by Kim Em. All Rights Reserved. These documents (including, without limitation, all articles, text, images, logos, compilation design) may printed for personal use only. No portion of these documents may be stored electronically, distributed electronically, or otherwise made available without express written consent of the copyright holder.