A BITTER PILL: The 5th Lenny Moss Mystery by Tim Sheard - $15.00
UNION COMMUNICATIONS: "The book does such a wonderful job of showing workers uniting to fight for justice that several unions have used his books for steward training. Find out if Lenny and his friends win their battles in this roller coaster of a book."
Pride & A Paycheck:"There's enough suspense, fear and chills running up and down your spine to
make you keep on reading it in one fell swoop. Watch your back if you're alone in the house!"
Pride & A Paycheck:"There's enough suspense, fear and chills running up and down your spine to
make you keep on reading it in one fell swoop. Watch your back if you're alone in the house!"
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READ THE FIRST CHAPTER
ONE
One minute to midnight. A perfect time to die. The doctor stood at the bedside listening to Mrs. Dickerson’s shallow breathing, the only sound in the lonely room. He watched as the sleeping woman reached up to her nose as if to pull away the oxygen tubing, then brought her hand down again and let it settle into the bed.
He noted the purple blotches on the elderly woman’s arms from the injections and blood draws. The intravenous tubing taped to her arm was connected to an electronic pump mounted on a pole at the head of the bed.
The doctor reached into his lab coat and withdrew a syringe filled with a clear fluid. Grasping the IV tubing close to her arm, he screwed the syringe into the access port and gently pushed the plunger down, injecting the fluid into the tubing.
The slight tug on the IV tubing taped to her arm disturbed Mrs. Dickerson’s sleep. Half opening her eyes, the old woman looked up, saw the young physician standing over her, his eyes shadowed in the dim light. She watched as he finished injecting the drug into her blood stream. The medication sent a warm sensation into her arm as it flowed through the vein.
“What . . . ? Who . . . ?” Reaching a shaky hand out to him, the sleepy woman felt the young man’s fingers gently grasp her hand as he leaned down closer to hear her. In the dim light she saw he had grey eyes and a high forehead. She thought he must be very intelligent to have such a tall forehead.
“Will it help the pain?” she asked in a trembling voice.
“There will be no pain,” the doctor said. When he released her hand it fell weakly into the bed. She tried to lift her arm, but it lay on the bed, paralyzed. She tried to move her other arm, but it, too, lay inert in the folds of the blanket. She strained to bend her legs, but they were as dead as two prostheses.
A rising fear gripped her mind, bringing her fully awake. Opening her mouth to cry out, she found she could not take in enough breath to make a sound. Her fear exploded into a blinding terror. She looked up into his eyes, shocked to see he was watching her calmly and smiling as if he took pleasure in her paralysis.
She called to him with her eyes, begging for help. Praying for him to give her breath. Give her life. She couldn’t understand why he kept standing there watching and smiling and doing nothing to help her. As if he enjoyed seeing her suffocate.
As the blackness drew a veil over her eyes, the physician stepped away from the bed to deposit the empty syringe in the sharps container hanging on the wall. Then he strode out of the room and disappeared into the night.
<><><>
Pauline was hurrying to draw up her twelve o’clock meds. She’d come in at seven-forty five, late again, and barely had time to pull off her winter boots, put on her nursing shoes and take report in time for the day nurse to get out on time.
She’d completed her chart check, looking for any doctor’s orders the day shift might have overlooked. You couldn’t be too careful; sometimes a physician wrote a new order and didn’t flag it the way he should and the nurse missed it. Last week she’d skipped the check on two of her patients. As she was getting ready to sign off at the end of her twelve hour shift, she happened to see an order from six pm the night before for a change in medication. Lucky for her it was a med that wasn’t given on the night tour or she would have had to make out an incident report. One more screw up and it would be good-bye James Madison.
“God, is it almost midnight?” she mumbled. “Where does the time go?” As she pushed her cart out of the nursing station, Pauline saw a tall doctor in a lab coat come out of one of the rooms at the end of the hall and leave by the far staircase. Pauline wondered for a moment why he would be visiting a patient so late at night, but since he didn’t come down to the nursing station, she couldn’t ask him. Too bad, the graveyard shift was so boring.
She rolled the medication cart into the hallway, the little light glowing like a ship’s lamp in the night. One by one, she hung her twelve o’clock meds. She saw that old Charlie Moon, a heart failure patient, was still awake and offered him a sleeping pill.
“A shot of Jack Daniels would be better,” said Charlie with a toothless grin, his dentures soaking in a bedside up.
“Sorry, Charlie, I can’t get a doctor’s order for spiritus fermenti, the pharmacy stopped stocking it a long time ago.”
“That’s okay, I’ll get my nephew to bring me a bottle to hide under my pillow.”
Pulling the top sheet up to her patient’s chin, Pauline went on to the next patient. At the end of the hall she carried an IV antibiotic into Mrs. Dickerson’s room. She was about to hang the medication when she saw that the patient’s mouth and eyes were open, but she was just staring into space. Bending down, she realized the patient wasn’t breathing.
“Oh, shit!” she mumbled. She stepped out to the hall and yelled, “Hey, Janey, call a code and bring the crash cart!”
Hurrying back to the bedside, Pauline saw there was no Ambu bag to administer oxygen. She bent down, pinched the patient’s nose and pressed her mouth against the patient’s mouth. The lips were rubbery and cold. Pauline knew by the cold lips it was too late to save the old woman, she had been down too long.
As the float nurse banged the crash cart on the doorframe hurrying into the room, Pauline yelled, “Get out the bed board!” She lifted the limp torso a few inches to allow the other nurse to slip the board beneath the patient, then laced her fingers together and pressed the heel of her hand on the woman’s bony chest. She pushed down gently, not wanting to break the old brittle ribs but still hoping to circulate a little blood.
A resident hurried into the room, saying, “Okay, ladies, what’ve you got for me?”
“I found her in arrest,” said Pauline. “I think she’s been down awhile.”
“I’ll grease the paddles for a quick look.” Pauline noted that the resident was cool and calm, not to mention tall and handsome, with a high forehead and grey, serious eyes. He applied the conducting jelly to the paddles and pressed them to the chest, then turned to the heart monitor.
“Flat line. That’s a bad sign,” said the resident. “Give her two amps of epi and a gram of magnesium.”
While the young physician took over the chest compressions, the Attending physician on call for codes sauntered in, followed by a gaggle of other personnel. Receiving a quick report from the resident, the Attending ordered an electric shock with the paddles. “Can’t be too sure it isn’t a fine V-Fib,” he said. “I mean, you’ve got nothing to lose. Right?”
Three shocks and three runs of drugs failed to restore a rhythm to the heart. An external pacemaker produced a regular spike on the screen, but no electrical sign that the heart muscle was contracting and no palpable pulse.
“Shall I try an intra-cardiac injection of adrenalin?” asked the young resident performing chest compressions. The Attending waved him off, saying he was going to call off the code. He instructed the resident to fill out the death certificate while he phoned the family.
As the Attending physician left the room, Pauline hurriedly wrote his name in the summary report she was required to fill out. She knew the names of everyone except the first resident to come to the code.
“Excuse me, doctor, what is your name? I need it for the code sheet.”
“I’m Doctor Whyte,” he said. “With a ‘y.’ My great grandfather was from Cornwall, England, a land of smugglers and pirates.”
“That sounds romantic,” said Pauline.
Moving closer to her, Whyte said, “Alas, we live in an age where romantics are not revered.” He looked down at the form she was filling out. “You have lovely handwriting, did you attend Catholic school? They’re so strict about handwriting, aren’t they?”
“I went to Saint Hubert’s,” she said, stepping away from him, embarrassed at the handsome doctor’s attention to her.
“At the Jesuit school I attended in Saint Louis they still believed in rapping our knuckles with those long, heavy rulers. I used to go home with red, swollen hands, but I learned to write clearly.”
“You’re probably one of the few doctors with handwriting I can actually read.”
Whyte turned back to see the aide begin bathing the naked body. “Do you need help with the postmortem care? I’m having a quiet night on call, I was just catching up on my H & P’s for tomorrow.”
“Oh no, we’re fine, thank you,” said Pauline, looking into his smiling grey eyes.
Dr. Whyte watched the aide run a dripping washrag over the corpse’s chest and abdomen, the water running down onto the bed. “Well, okay, I’ll leave you to your important work,” he said and left the room, looking back one last time before closing the door.
Rose, the nurse’s aide, flashed a devilish smile at Pauline. “Oo, Pauline, that doctor’s got the hots for you. See how he turned back to take another look?”
“Yeah, right. Like he’s really into women who are fair, fat and forty.” She helped finish bathing and wrapping the body. Just as the aide was about to zip the body bag closed, Pauline squeezed a dab of petroleum jelly onto her finger and ran it along the edge of the eyelid. Then she gently pressed the eye closed. She repeated the trick with the other eye, leaving them glued shut.
“She looks nice,” said Rose.
“Yes, she does look nice. I mean, for a corpse.”
One minute to midnight. A perfect time to die. The doctor stood at the bedside listening to Mrs. Dickerson’s shallow breathing, the only sound in the lonely room. He watched as the sleeping woman reached up to her nose as if to pull away the oxygen tubing, then brought her hand down again and let it settle into the bed.
He noted the purple blotches on the elderly woman’s arms from the injections and blood draws. The intravenous tubing taped to her arm was connected to an electronic pump mounted on a pole at the head of the bed.
The doctor reached into his lab coat and withdrew a syringe filled with a clear fluid. Grasping the IV tubing close to her arm, he screwed the syringe into the access port and gently pushed the plunger down, injecting the fluid into the tubing.
The slight tug on the IV tubing taped to her arm disturbed Mrs. Dickerson’s sleep. Half opening her eyes, the old woman looked up, saw the young physician standing over her, his eyes shadowed in the dim light. She watched as he finished injecting the drug into her blood stream. The medication sent a warm sensation into her arm as it flowed through the vein.
“What . . . ? Who . . . ?” Reaching a shaky hand out to him, the sleepy woman felt the young man’s fingers gently grasp her hand as he leaned down closer to hear her. In the dim light she saw he had grey eyes and a high forehead. She thought he must be very intelligent to have such a tall forehead.
“Will it help the pain?” she asked in a trembling voice.
“There will be no pain,” the doctor said. When he released her hand it fell weakly into the bed. She tried to lift her arm, but it lay on the bed, paralyzed. She tried to move her other arm, but it, too, lay inert in the folds of the blanket. She strained to bend her legs, but they were as dead as two prostheses.
A rising fear gripped her mind, bringing her fully awake. Opening her mouth to cry out, she found she could not take in enough breath to make a sound. Her fear exploded into a blinding terror. She looked up into his eyes, shocked to see he was watching her calmly and smiling as if he took pleasure in her paralysis.
She called to him with her eyes, begging for help. Praying for him to give her breath. Give her life. She couldn’t understand why he kept standing there watching and smiling and doing nothing to help her. As if he enjoyed seeing her suffocate.
As the blackness drew a veil over her eyes, the physician stepped away from the bed to deposit the empty syringe in the sharps container hanging on the wall. Then he strode out of the room and disappeared into the night.
<><><>
Pauline was hurrying to draw up her twelve o’clock meds. She’d come in at seven-forty five, late again, and barely had time to pull off her winter boots, put on her nursing shoes and take report in time for the day nurse to get out on time.
She’d completed her chart check, looking for any doctor’s orders the day shift might have overlooked. You couldn’t be too careful; sometimes a physician wrote a new order and didn’t flag it the way he should and the nurse missed it. Last week she’d skipped the check on two of her patients. As she was getting ready to sign off at the end of her twelve hour shift, she happened to see an order from six pm the night before for a change in medication. Lucky for her it was a med that wasn’t given on the night tour or she would have had to make out an incident report. One more screw up and it would be good-bye James Madison.
“God, is it almost midnight?” she mumbled. “Where does the time go?” As she pushed her cart out of the nursing station, Pauline saw a tall doctor in a lab coat come out of one of the rooms at the end of the hall and leave by the far staircase. Pauline wondered for a moment why he would be visiting a patient so late at night, but since he didn’t come down to the nursing station, she couldn’t ask him. Too bad, the graveyard shift was so boring.
She rolled the medication cart into the hallway, the little light glowing like a ship’s lamp in the night. One by one, she hung her twelve o’clock meds. She saw that old Charlie Moon, a heart failure patient, was still awake and offered him a sleeping pill.
“A shot of Jack Daniels would be better,” said Charlie with a toothless grin, his dentures soaking in a bedside up.
“Sorry, Charlie, I can’t get a doctor’s order for spiritus fermenti, the pharmacy stopped stocking it a long time ago.”
“That’s okay, I’ll get my nephew to bring me a bottle to hide under my pillow.”
Pulling the top sheet up to her patient’s chin, Pauline went on to the next patient. At the end of the hall she carried an IV antibiotic into Mrs. Dickerson’s room. She was about to hang the medication when she saw that the patient’s mouth and eyes were open, but she was just staring into space. Bending down, she realized the patient wasn’t breathing.
“Oh, shit!” she mumbled. She stepped out to the hall and yelled, “Hey, Janey, call a code and bring the crash cart!”
Hurrying back to the bedside, Pauline saw there was no Ambu bag to administer oxygen. She bent down, pinched the patient’s nose and pressed her mouth against the patient’s mouth. The lips were rubbery and cold. Pauline knew by the cold lips it was too late to save the old woman, she had been down too long.
As the float nurse banged the crash cart on the doorframe hurrying into the room, Pauline yelled, “Get out the bed board!” She lifted the limp torso a few inches to allow the other nurse to slip the board beneath the patient, then laced her fingers together and pressed the heel of her hand on the woman’s bony chest. She pushed down gently, not wanting to break the old brittle ribs but still hoping to circulate a little blood.
A resident hurried into the room, saying, “Okay, ladies, what’ve you got for me?”
“I found her in arrest,” said Pauline. “I think she’s been down awhile.”
“I’ll grease the paddles for a quick look.” Pauline noted that the resident was cool and calm, not to mention tall and handsome, with a high forehead and grey, serious eyes. He applied the conducting jelly to the paddles and pressed them to the chest, then turned to the heart monitor.
“Flat line. That’s a bad sign,” said the resident. “Give her two amps of epi and a gram of magnesium.”
While the young physician took over the chest compressions, the Attending physician on call for codes sauntered in, followed by a gaggle of other personnel. Receiving a quick report from the resident, the Attending ordered an electric shock with the paddles. “Can’t be too sure it isn’t a fine V-Fib,” he said. “I mean, you’ve got nothing to lose. Right?”
Three shocks and three runs of drugs failed to restore a rhythm to the heart. An external pacemaker produced a regular spike on the screen, but no electrical sign that the heart muscle was contracting and no palpable pulse.
“Shall I try an intra-cardiac injection of adrenalin?” asked the young resident performing chest compressions. The Attending waved him off, saying he was going to call off the code. He instructed the resident to fill out the death certificate while he phoned the family.
As the Attending physician left the room, Pauline hurriedly wrote his name in the summary report she was required to fill out. She knew the names of everyone except the first resident to come to the code.
“Excuse me, doctor, what is your name? I need it for the code sheet.”
“I’m Doctor Whyte,” he said. “With a ‘y.’ My great grandfather was from Cornwall, England, a land of smugglers and pirates.”
“That sounds romantic,” said Pauline.
Moving closer to her, Whyte said, “Alas, we live in an age where romantics are not revered.” He looked down at the form she was filling out. “You have lovely handwriting, did you attend Catholic school? They’re so strict about handwriting, aren’t they?”
“I went to Saint Hubert’s,” she said, stepping away from him, embarrassed at the handsome doctor’s attention to her.
“At the Jesuit school I attended in Saint Louis they still believed in rapping our knuckles with those long, heavy rulers. I used to go home with red, swollen hands, but I learned to write clearly.”
“You’re probably one of the few doctors with handwriting I can actually read.”
Whyte turned back to see the aide begin bathing the naked body. “Do you need help with the postmortem care? I’m having a quiet night on call, I was just catching up on my H & P’s for tomorrow.”
“Oh no, we’re fine, thank you,” said Pauline, looking into his smiling grey eyes.
Dr. Whyte watched the aide run a dripping washrag over the corpse’s chest and abdomen, the water running down onto the bed. “Well, okay, I’ll leave you to your important work,” he said and left the room, looking back one last time before closing the door.
Rose, the nurse’s aide, flashed a devilish smile at Pauline. “Oo, Pauline, that doctor’s got the hots for you. See how he turned back to take another look?”
“Yeah, right. Like he’s really into women who are fair, fat and forty.” She helped finish bathing and wrapping the body. Just as the aide was about to zip the body bag closed, Pauline squeezed a dab of petroleum jelly onto her finger and ran it along the edge of the eyelid. Then she gently pressed the eye closed. She repeated the trick with the other eye, leaving them glued shut.
“She looks nice,” said Rose.
“Yes, she does look nice. I mean, for a corpse.”