Free Travels by Michael Crichton

of the house staff needed a shrink. I was just a medical student,the lowest of the low. And at the end of three months, Tim was going to give me my grade.
    But now Tim was planning to do a punch biopsy on Emily’s hipbone, a painful and, I believed, unnecessary procedure. I felt he wouldn’t dare to do it if Emily weren’t an old woman without friends or relatives, a woman no better than an alcoholic bum, a woman who had been lousy on admission.
    “I’m doing it at one o’clock,” he said. “Want to assist?”
    “No,” I said.
    “I’ll let you do it, if you want.” A bribe.
    “No,” I said.
    “Why not?”
    I’d already registered my protest, so all I said was “I have clinic follow-ups all afternoon.”
    “Okay,” Tim said. “You missed your chance. I’ll get the nurse to help me.”
    I still hoped he wouldn’t go through with it, but he did. The test was negative. Emily’s marrow was fine.
    Still, they kept Emily in the hospital. She had been there two weeks now. There was an unspoken rule about old people, which was that you discharged them from the hospital as soon as possible. Emily had gained strength steadily during the first week, but now she was starting to decline, to drift into a vague passivity.
    At rounds the next day, the house staff discussed further tests for Emily. More exotic blood chemistries. Another EEG. A series of brain X-rays, a pneumoencephalogram. These tests would take at least another week.
    I was already feeling guilty about the bone-marrow biopsy. Now I felt I had no choice. I spoke up.
    I said that, while Emily was clearly a strange person, her health now seemed basically good. There wasn’t any compelling reason to do further tests. If she was senile, as everyone thought, then these tests wouldn’t benefit her. There was no advantage to diagnosing an incurable disease. True, we had never found out what had put her in a coma, but we had been trying for two weeks and there was no reason to think we would succeed in a third week. Meanwhile, Emily was in noticeable decline. I argued we should discharge her, and do any further tests on an outpatient basis. And I suggested that if Emily had a family, they would now be pushing us to let her go, and that by keeping her around, we were open to a charge of exploiting her as learning material.
    I was sweating by the end of my speech. Everybody stared at me. The chief resident said nothing. He turned to Tim, and asked when the tests would be scheduled.
    Tim said the tests would be scheduled all during the coming week.
    The chief resident said, Fine. Go ahead.
    And that was that.
    We went on to the next patient.
    “What do you people think is wrong with me?” Emily said later, when she and I were alone.
    “We’re not sure,” I said.
    “Nothing is wrong with me,” Emily said. “I feel fine. I don’t want any more tests.”
    “I can understand that feeling,” I said.
    “Well, then, why do I have to have them? He hurt me,” she said, pointing to her bandaged hip.
    I was on dangerous ground now. I had to choose my words carefully. “If you want to leave the hospital,” I said, “no one can stop you.”
    “You mean I can just walk out of here?”
    “No, you have to be discharged. But if you insist on it, they have to discharge you.”
    “They do?”
    “They’ll try to talk you out of leaving, but they can’t make you stay.”
    “Good,” Emily said. “I’m sick of all you fucking doctors and your fucking tests.”
    “Guess who checked out?” Tim said that night in the cafeteria. “Emily.”
    “Oh yes?”
    “Yeah. Discharged herself against physicians’ advice.”
    “When?”
    “Tonight. Screaming and swearing, nobody could talk any sense to her. They had to let her go. I think somebody put the idea into her head.”
    “Oh, really?”
    “Yeah. Somebody talked to her.”
    “I wonder who?”
    “I think somebody from Accounting. They’re not sure if she’s covered by Medicare, you know, and I think