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Mrs. Posner's Smile
She arrived like the others—fasciculating eyelids, cyclic moaning, odor of stale urine. You come to regard them in a certain way. You roll them like logs, reaching in to place your stethoscope over bags of papery skin. You offer them too-loud, semi-facetious greetings, as if their ailment were deafness rather than coma. You identify them by their numbers—sodium, white blood cells, oxygen saturation—and they stand out as notable individuals only by the salient aberrancy of their counts.
The night of her admission, she was a sodium lady. I drew my first blood gas on her. How fortunate I was to do my first on a sodium lady—no questions like “Now, how many times have you done this before?” My resident easily immobilized the woman's arm, which her brainstem made a reflexive attempt to withdraw. Only a slight groan bore witness to the quiver of my hand as it searched for the radial artery. With the flash of red in the syringe hub, she blipped into my medical school history book—“first blood gas.” And her entry would have remained at that if it weren't for what awaited us the next morning.
When the team entered her room, she was perched in the bed, her hair matted into a hoary cockscomb. A bland …
