The Four Fingers of Death Read Online Free Page A

lot of balancing things on the head. Tara wheezed, “The Rodriguezes will be back soon.” Tara said this because there were five grown Rodriguez children, all living at home. They each drove occasionally. Rather too fast, if you asked me. Nevertheless, I said to my wife, “Are you frigging crazy? We have to get you up to the hospital and into the operating room.” This was when, despite my urgency, I realized exactly how scared my wife, Tara, was. She was scared enough that she would rather die in the driveway of heatstroke than go through with the operation.
Which was why I had to yell. I don’t like yelling. In fact, Tara and I had an arrangement where no yelling would take place, ever , which was counterproductive, at least according to an online course on marital communication I had once taken, entitled “The Healthiest Relationship: Ten Preliminary Steps,” by Deep Singh, PhD. (1) Assess what works for you. (2) Accept your shortcomings. (3) Practice tolerance and understanding . I can’t remember the other seven steps. But let us not dwell here. I also need to reconstruct for you now what was already happening in the hospital—the sequence of events in which poor George was being harvested of all his usable bits.
I don’t know the biographies of all the recipients the way I know the biography of George. And yet I can tell you a few things: his corneas passed on to a septuagenarian in Pasadena, his liver went to a baritone of the popular-music world whose hepatitis C had compromised the liver he was born with, and George’s heart went to a retiree in the northern part of our state, a former autoworker. These heroic stories fork off from the story of my wife, Tara, each taking place on the same day, with similar drama. Be at such and such a medical facility at such and such a time. There were worried people like me in waiting rooms all over the southwestern part of the nation. We constituted a community of worriers, all of us with fingernails chewed to the quick, with shooting pains in the lower intestines, red eyes, unwashed hair, caffeine breath.
In our case, the lead surgeon was called away from a floodlit driving range on Bureau of Land Management preserves, there in Southern Arizona. The engine of the ambulance had scarcely cooled before he was scrubbed and began bombarding his surgical tools with gamma radiation, in order to prevent antibiotic-resistant menaces. Interns and residents gathered around the operating table and in the theater above. George’s body cooled. His O-positive blood began to drain from the corpse via a pump that resembled an old-fashioned concertina. The residents flushed his arteries with a preservative that insured George’s lungs would not decay, and then they inflated them slightly, in the hope that these organs would resume function once inside Tara’s chest. They cut in all the many places that they needed to cut. And they slid the excised lungs onto plastic liners, and then they fitted these liners into a pair of six-pack holders that people used more often to take beer to picnics. Then they were ferried to URB in helicopters that were ready to scramble for medical emergencies in the desert.
Meanwhile, we were still in the driveway: “We’re not waiting for the Rodriguez kids to get back! I’m calling an ambulance!” “I don’t want an ambulance!” “You’re not thinking clearly! You only have twenty percent of lung capacity! And if the lungs aren’t in your body in six hours, then we have to wait for the next available set of lungs! I don’t give a rat’s ass if the surgery is making you uncomfortable! I don’t care if all the neighbors see! We’re getting an ambulance!” At which point Tara started crying, and I could hear her choking through the oxygen mask, and this naturally made me upset, because I genuinely hated it when my wife cried, which she nonetheless did regularly, because her disease, this scourge, had robbed her of her youth, had robbed her of