For my wife on my 40th birthday

Crumpled bedcovers heap like crude sculptures in the angled sunlight
Yet warm but already forgotten as the Saturday begins
The comforting warble of a television, the burble of a coffee maker
The hum of the washing machine, the crackling of bacon
Consume the silence today as every day.

Rolled up in the back of the closet are the leather boots
The sheer stockings, the videos and the travel brochures
Bills and insurance notices splayed over the pine table
That once bore a vase of stately roses and a note
Of apology, or congratulations, who can remember which.

One life is lost but oddly enough not missed
The new too burgeoning and bright to spare grief
Nor is the old completely gone -- it surges through the cracks like vivid weeds
Found in the corners and soft whispers and passing touches
It will return. And when it does the interlopers will be missed.

The Mission Refused

Two weeks later, Cardinal left the prison through the back gate. Two weeks! When he was about to be put to death, the place was ringed with singing hippies protesting the death penalty. When he was pardoned, the hippies were abruptly replaced with middle-aged conservatives furious that he was not going to be fried. The warden couldn’t release him until they left – they were more violent by far than the hippies – and that didn’t happen until rumors spread about a abortion clinic opening up in a nearby town.

It was amazing how fast you could ignite a rumor with email and a fax machine.

It was 6 am. Cardinal started down the dusty road on foot. The warden had begrudged him even a lift into town.

No more than 200 feet from the prison, he felt the hair on his neck rise up. A black helicopter was bearing down upon him, the words “FBI” inscribed on both doors.

“Those idiots have a lot to learn about low-profile operations,” Cardinal thought. For the first time in his adult life he was in a public place without a hand-grenade. He lowered his head and walked faster.

The helicopter descended to about 5 feet off the ground, and slowly trailed him down the road like a scrawny owner holding the leash of a big dog.

A voice came out of the wind. “CARDNIAL,” it said. Someone was using a bullhorn. “GET ON THE CHOPPER. WE HAVE A MISSION FOR YOU.”

He looked over his shoulder. “Classified?”

“YES. TOP SECRET.” The sound of the horn echoed off the prison walls.

“The last time I took a mission from you clowns I ended up killing my mother.”

“YOUR MOTHER IS STILL ALIVE. WE FAKED HER DEATH FOR THE GOOD OF THE MISSION.”

“My mother is still alive? What about the insurance adjuster?”

“OH, HE’S STILL DEAD.”

One out of two ain’t bad.

“LOOK, JOHN, ARE YOU GETTING IN THIS CHOPPER OR NOT?”

“Hell no! I had enough of you people.”

“THEN I GUESS WE HAVE TO DO THIS THE HARD WAY. DON’T MAKE US SHOOT YOU.” Cardinal saw the steel of a silencer wink in the sunlight as it slid through the helicopter window.

Oh, hell, Cardinal thought. He lurched into a sprint, bullets flying over his head.

Why, oh why didn’t the warden give me my grenade back, he thought angrily. I did get a full pardon, didn’t I?

Next Episode – The Second Escape

The first insatllment of a serial suspense novel

 

Chapter I

The Death Chamber

 

As he entered the death chamber, John Cardinal felt nothing but satisfaction and defiance. He had done so many things in his life no ordinary person would have done. He had walked through a mall with a severed head in one hand. He had had dinner with the Italian ambassador, taken a bullet in his thigh, and seduced the ambassador’s dark young wife all in the same night. He had harvested a liver for his girlfriend off his neighbor – without the neighbor’s prior consent or anesthesia. Now it was his turn to die.

He wondered. Who was to blame? His cold, domineering mother? The high school English teacher-lover who gave him a “C” for effort? The avuncular family doctor who first introduced him to prostitution? Or the President of the United States, whose budget cuts forced him out of the home for the criminally insane? By now it mattered little; all of them were dead by his own hand. He took pride in his unique position – he had killed off the roots of his own evil. He was a self-perfected man.

Cardinal sat down in the electric chair. A pair of state policemen started strapping him in. Slowly a curtain behind a large window rose, exposing a jury of witnesses. He recognized his enemies among them: the Secretary of State, the Archbishop of Canterbury, conservative radio talkshow host Bush Limburgher.

The officers tightened the leather bindings until Cardinal grunted. Over the shoulder of one of the deputies, he saw the metal door to the chamber swing open. In stepped Marsha, the blonde, vaguely muscular, stunningly beautiful public defender. She was dressed in a tight, low cut blouse and a miniskirt – the kind of outfit a woman would only wear in a cheap suspense novel.

“Cardinal,” Marsha said. She trained her bedroom eyes on him. “The President has issued you a full pardon.” The jury jeered as the curtain went back down.

“It’s about time,” Cardinal said, curling his lip. “And just like him to wait they strapped me in.”

Next Episode -- "The Mission Refused" 

A few weeks ago, I admitted a new patient to the hospital through the ER. An elderly man who had terminal cancer (or so he said) and took lots and lots of pain medicine. Lots and lots and lots.

He had serious abdominal pain, and I was able to determine after a short workup that a lot of his pain was from constipation from the huge doses of narcotics. So I ordered some enemas and laxatives to get him cleaned out.

He came armed with a sheaf of papers. Old CT scans, X-ray reports, and even a newfangled PET scan. All showed firm evidence that he had serious cancer. Unfortunately, these frayed, grimy pages were from 2004. Not that I didn't believe him, but new data is usually more reliable then old, especially when you don't know where the old reports came from. I thought I should get a new scan to see where things stood today. I wrote up the orders and went home, leaving it at that.

The next morning, the patient's nurse called me to say that he had refused the CT scan. An hour later, the phone rang again, this time because the patient had announced that he was leaving AMA (against medical advice, that is, leaving the hospital without being discharged by a doctor). I felt a pang of concern. I would have discharged him from the hospital that same morning if he had waited for me to show up. But I was very busy that morning and could not get to him before my clinic started.

Rarely will I prevent a patient who has advanced cancer from leaving the hospital. If a patient is terminal (and by his story this patient was), what is the point of a long hospitalization? I wouldn't want to spend my last days on this earth in a hosptial bed either.

Thus, I was fine with the AMA. No offense. His bowels were moving again, his pain was better, let him go.

I was offended by what happened next. The guy shows up at the front desk of my office to "pick up some prescriptions." Since he did not feel like waiting for me to round on him, he decided to round on me. The problem is, his prescriptions were Percocet, Oxycontin, and Fentanyl. Mind you I saw him for the first and only time in my life the day before when I accepted him from the ER. I had never, ever, seen him in my clinic.

There was no reason for me to doubt that the patient was just as sick as he said he was. But he refused the test I needed to assess how ill he really was, then left the hospital before I could check him to see if he was all right, and showed up at my office, not to be seen -- no, it would take too long to sign in and see the doctor -- but to pick up a mess of narcotics sufficient to keep a VW bus full of hippies sailing across the universe for about a week. Pushing it, maybe, just a little?

I told the clerk at the front desk to send him away.

And yet, this kind of thing happens to me from time to time. Not exactly like this, of course, but every so often a patient will ask me to do something far outside the normal scope of medical practice simply because he thinks the doctor is supposed to do whatever he asks of him whenever the asks it. I have had a patient ask me to come by his house on a Saturday night to look at a rash. Once one called me at 2:30 AM on Sunday morning for a refill on her birth control pills. Another time a patient brought a child in for a cold and then asked for Viagra for himself (he was not my patient). And on and on.

In his defense, this patient's wife had pulled me aside the day before and told me he sometimes acted strangely. Possibly the medication, possibly cancer spread to the brain. But if he was going over the deep end, she was the one who drove him to my office!

If he really had terminal cancer (something I was not able to prove to my satisfaction) and the disease was taking his mind, why is it that the last drop of logical thought to be wrung from the tips of his neurons was, "Go to Dr. Hebert. He'll write whatever I ask him to."

Perhaps I should have gone into the fast food business. Or prostitution. Then I could give people whatever they wanted and I wouldn't feel guilty about it.

I was wandering the internet today and stumbled across a fascinating incident that occurred in the Colorado legislature a little over a month ago. A representative in the House named Ted Harvey was incensed that the legislature was considering a resolution to honor Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood for 90 years of service to the state of Colorado. Harvey is strongly anti-abortion and thought the legislature had no business endorsing what he called "genocide."

So Harvey pulled off a very clever publicity stunt. He recruited a Nashville singer named Gianna Jessen to sing the national anthem before the session began. Jessen suffers from cerebral palsy, but even more importantly, she is a very rare bird in medicine -- an abortion survivor. Her 17 year-old mother attempted a late term abortion at about 30 weeks. The fetus was expelled from the uterus -- and lived. Jessen is now 29.

After Jessen completed the national anthem Harvey "introduced" her to the House. He proceeded to tell the assembly that Jessen's cerebral palsy was a result of the failed abortion. He was about to finish his speech with an indictment of Planned Parenthood when he was cut off. He was informed by the Speaker that it is against House rules to use an introduction to speak against a matter pending before the House.

Harvey's actions resulted in the kind of outrage one might expect. Planned Parenthood responded with a colossally stupid statement: "There's no statistical evidence that cerebral palsy has been caused by failed abortions." No, I guess not, because failed abortions are too rare to gather statistics on, but is there anyone out there who thinks a failed abortion attempt would not cause neurolgical damage?

But the prize for dumb goes to Democratic House Majority Leader Alice Madden, who said, "I think it was amazingly rude to use a human being as an example of his personal politics." Pardon me, but I thought politics was supposed to be about human beings. The problem with politics in this country is that it does not refer to human beings enough, not that it refers to them too often. And anyway, Jessen was not offended by Harvey's "rudeness." She told the Denver Post: "We need to discuss the humanity of it. I'm glad to be able to speak up for children in the womb. If abortion is about women's rights, where were my rights?"

Although his actions may have been a little over the top, I think Harvey did a good thing. Pro-abortionists have made a living from telling the stories of victimized women who seek abortions. I do not see how they can complain about getting some of their own medicine. Anti-abortionists have always argued that the fetus is the real victim in abortion. Here we actually get an opprortunity to hear from one, and we are told such arguments are out of bounds.

I do not take Harvey's hard line on abortion. I do not consider it murder, only unnecessary killing. But I agree with him that in some intellectual circles a pro-abortion stance is considered a given, and I think I would be offended too if a group of legislators tried to pass off a public endorsement of abortion as a pat on the back for "family planning." Family planning and an abortion clinic are not the same thing and Harvey had every right to protest loudly against such a sham.

If you want to read the whole story, check out this link and this one.