Chapter 41

Wednesday night.
Kelloway Powder was on edge.
On the edge of her patient’s bed, going through how Mrs. So and So was feeling after emergency surgery.
She was working her regular eight-to-eight day shift in the ICU.
Kelloway’s patient was a funny old bird named Jackie Chapman. She had been in a motorcycle crash with her husband. They’d just bought a big Honda to share and joined a retired Maritimer’s motorcycle club. On the third time on a run to P.E.I. some 15-year-old without a driver’s license clipped the back wheel trying to pass on the 101. Her husband died of trauma arrest right there on the asphalt.
Mrs. Chapman was being moved out of ICU tomorrow, but she still might lose her left leg from the knee down.
“When was your last bowel movement?”
“I peed, I guess. I felt I had to go number two, but then I couldn’t.”
“Not since…?”
“Yesterday morning.”
“Okay. Those blue pills are stool softeners. If they don’t work by tomorrow, the ladies in the morning might have to interest you in a Fleet.”
“An enema?”
“An enema.”
“Uhuh. I don’t even let my husband go there.”
Kelloway laughed.
Mrs. Chapman got a tear in her eye.
After Chapman, Kelloway was ready to go, but then her student came mousing up in the kitchenette.
“It’s Baby Arthur. Can you give me a boost before you go?”
Baby Arthur was nursing slang for Arthur Muir, an 81-year-old with too many serious ailments to count, but not quite enough to end his suffering in a timely manner.
C. diff was the least of his worries, but whenever a nurse tried to move his body, even slightly, he sprayed contagious diarrhea everywhere, like from a firehose.
“I thought he was dead?” Kelloway said.
“No. It’s, Code Brown,” the student nurse said, looking sorry. “Can you help me? Elke’s on break.”
“I was supposed to be off an hour ago!” She sighed and set her charts down on the counter.
“I’ll get the baby diapers.”
They zoomed over to the supply room and started grabbing enormous adult-sized diapers and stacks of disposable bed pads and a wash basin.
Outside the unit, they rubbed their hands with alcohol sanitizer, put on masks, gowned up and slipped on pairs of purple nitrile gloves.
“Sandra, call SPD, we need more linens and isolation gowns. And why do they act like they hate us? We’re a critical area?”
Kelloway and the student entered the unit, enduring Baby Arthur’s moans and whimpers, his tear-inducing stench and the wet diarrhea noises. They opened his Johnny shirt and rolled his limp skeleton sideways, carefully peeling off the soiled bed pad and huge diaper. Kelloway scooped most of the mound of brown porridge off his ass with a bed pan and then washed and wiped the sticky feces from his grey pubic hair and scrotum and shriveled penis. Dark brown greasy feces was on the sheets, across the bed. The over-bed table, the nightstand, the floor, the respirator machine.
“Okay. We’ve done all we can. Call housekeeping,” Kelloway sighed. “We need to bring him out of the room and terminally clean the room. Ask for that short bitchy one. A personal request for Emily Gary from Geary. The one that looks like a Cornish hen.”

Kelloway dumped her gown, gloves and mask into the garbage and washed her hands again with alcohol.
Nothing could stop her now from leaving the hospital.
She ran into the staff lounge marked “treatment room” and shut the door.
Inside was a lunch room, couches, vending machine, TV, fashion magazines, a sink and yellow lockers.
The door was labelled ‘treatment room’ so nurses could take breaks in there without patient’s families barging in and demanding help.
She grabbed her purse and walked over to the sink to wash her hands and face.
Fiona Hendsbee came in behind her. They were both on the same eight-to-eight shift rotation.
It was 8:55.

“I’m trying out a recipe for maple-glazed meatballs,” Fiona was saying in her pleasantly droning voice. “But where can I get real maple syrup ‘though? SaveEasy closes at nine.”
Kelloway scoffed. “You’re going home to make meatballs?”
“Why not?” Fiona rubbed cream under her dry eyes.
Kelloway leaned over the sink and scrubbed her hands with Bacti-Stat.
“Because, its 9 o’clock at night and you just worked 13 hours, and you’re pregnant as a hippo. Why can’t Steve make his own meatballs?”
Fiona was seven months pregnant with her second child. Her first was about Athan’s age.
“Because Steve can’t cook dinner and watch Toby, trust me. I’d come home and she’d be face down in the swimming pool.-”
“-And real maple surple. You spoil him rotten.” Kelloway said.
“-And dinner would be burnt.”
“You work, you make dinner, you clean house, your pop babies out of your (Kelloway whistled). What does Steve do besides, go to work and push his dick in?”
“You said maple surple…” Fiona said, giggling. “Maple surple?”

Both girls started giggling at eachother.
Kelloway took the small bottle of mouthwash out of her locker, unscrewed the cap over the sink and took a swig, feeling the burning liquid hit the back of her throat.
“-Gollckkkkkkkkhh!”
A spray of foam exploded out of her mouth and hosed against the mirror. Kelloway’s body and hair began to tremble like crazy. She jerked forward and vomited more green foam, then coffee, cream of mushroom soup and bits of digested salad into the sink, making terrible wretching and coughing noises.
Her hands clutched spider-like on the sides of the sink.
“Oh no!!!” Fiona covered her mouth with her hand. “What is it??”
“Ah-ah-eck-eck-eck!”
Fiona moved behind her friend and pulled her hair back away from her mouth as Kelloway continued to vomit. “Oh, shit. Here.” Fiona turned on the cold water and helped Kelloway plunge her mouth into the running stream.
Kelloway was obviously in physical pain. She stuck her tongue out and let the water pour in and out of her mouth.
“I’m going to call someone. Hello!” Fiona yelled at the closed door.
“OhhhGod,” Kelloway said, finally. “My throat’s burnig!” She plunged her head further into the sink and urgently gargled the water under the stainless steel diplodocus tap.
The water could not get into her mouth fast enough.
“What’s happening?” Fiona held her own lower abdomen with one hand. The shock of Kelloway’s fit was giving her Braxton-Hicks contractions up and down her belly and a feeling of pressure between her legs.
“Ugghhg,” Kelloway’s eyes were pumping tears out that ran down her cheeks like a thick goo. “There’s something in the mouthwash- Nh- Grab the mouthwash, Fee.”
A few of the nurses and the ward clerk rushed into the room and stood in a crowd just inside the entrance. “What’s going on?” One of the nurses said.
“What’s happening to Kelly?”
Fiona looked up from Kelloway’s side: “Get Sharon! Right now!”
Sharon Havelock was the nurse manager in charge of the ward.
“Kelloway has been poisoned!”