Free The Inquisitor by Peter Clement Page B

it, Earl, wake up. You see something that atrocious in ER, and you'd move in with morphine, ketamine, fentanyl- whatever it takes. I can't do that. For me it's beg the nurses, who ask the residents, who don't prescribe enough, then beg them to get their staff supervisor. Even then a third of them won't budge from the guidelines, but I beg them as well anyway, and all the time the screeching goes on. I tell you, there ought to be a court for medical atrocities, just like there is for atrocities of war, and this kind of torture by omission should be made a crime…" He seemed to run out of breath and simply stood there, panting as heavily as if he'd just completed one of his runs.
    Earl sat stunned. He knew that crap happened, as hideously as described, and he condemned it whenever he could, but he'd never before seen it from so stark a point of view. At first he didn't know what to say. Finally he asked, "It's really getting to you?"
    Jimmy nodded. "Sometimes." His eyes focused on something Earl couldn't see.
    Judging from the pain reflected in the priest's gaze, Earl didn't want to see it. "You still could have come to me, Jimmy," he said softly. "Brought me patients' names and chart numbers. That's the kind of documentation that would have nailed Wyatt and others like him."
    "Yeah, right. Case by case, committee by committee- it takes forever that way."
    Earl exhaled long and hard. "But keep at it enough, and even the thickest-skulled dinosaurs change their ways in the end."
    "Then why didn't you do it?"
    "Me?"
    "Yeah. You're a physician. Nothing stopped you from stepping up with charts and patient names these last twenty-five years."
    Earl bristled. "Nobody dies like that in my department. Certainly not since I've been chief."
    Jimmy's eyes narrowed into a hard, unjoking glare. "And that's the trouble with you, Earl. You hide in ER."
    "Hide?"
    "Yes, hide. It's a domain as black and white as any in the hospital. The sicker the patients, the easier your job. Stabilize 'em, medicate 'em, and ship 'em upstairs. Don't get me wrong, you're great at it- decisive, skilled, and courageous. But one of the reasons the job suits you isn't so noble. The patients don't hang around, and you like it that way. The ones who don't make it, you can honestly tell yourself they died while you were trying everything possible. The ones who do, their pain, fear, and despair are muted by shock or postponed by drugs. The long and short of it all is that you get to keep your losses more cut-and-dried. No having to deal with the long, messy aftermath that survival involves."
    "Whoa. Now wait a minute, Jimmy. I find out how people did after they left ER. Their doctors tell me-"
    "I'm not talking about the clinical results or satisfying your medical curiosity."
    "Jesus, Jimmy, what the hell's the matter with you?"
    "What's the matter is, you can't be VP, medical and bury yourself in a mentality that has a fix for everything."
    Earl leapt to his feet. "That's not fair!"
    "What's fair got to do with it? You want to face a patient's lingering, share in his or her long-term agony, witness their slow settling for a fraction of a former life, then watch your successes as they piece together what they lost from the heart attack or stroke or car accident that derailed them."
    "Damn it, Jimmy, how dare you-"
    "Why, in all the years I've been here, I never once saw you up on the floors visiting with any of the people you saved."
    Earl felt he'd been gut-punched.
    He stood behind his desk as a tiny prickle of sweat dampened the back of his shirt despite the chill of cold air pouring over his head from a ventilation duct in the ceiling.
    The black of Jimmy's eyes increased its hold on him. "If you'd had any inkling at all for that part of the game, Earl, now and then I would have found you on the wards where it plays itself out. And maybe, just maybe, when you came across wretched souls with barely days left to live, bellowing like wounded beasts, you might have