Coma

There was the warmth of meeting someone with whom she felt a rather immediate chemical attraction; at the same time there was the nagging reality of the unprofessionalism of it all. Susan couldn’t help but acknowledge that for her to be a doctor was going to be very difficult in every respect.

Monday, February 23, 12:10 P.M.

Like a slalom skier Susan wove her way down the hospital corridor crowded with lunch carts filled with an assortment of colorless food. The reasonably pleasant aromas emanating from the evenly stacked trays reminded her that she hadn’t eaten that day: two pieces of toast on the run hardly constituted a meal.

The arrival of the lunch carts added to the appearance of utter chaos at the nurses’ station on Beard 5. It seemed to Susan that it was a wonder indeed that the right patient got the right drug, therapy, or meal. To Susan’s pleasant surprise, Sarah Sterns had a smile and a quick thank-you for Susan before pointing to the resting place for the I.V.

tray. No one else even acknowledged Susan’s presence and she left. It took her about three seconds to decide to use the stairs rather than wait for the crowded elevator. After all, it was only three floors down to the ICU.

The stairs were made of metal with an embossed surface like beaten silver. The color had been orange but now had become something approaching a dirty tan except in the center of each step, which was worn shiny by multitudinous footsteps. The walls of the stairwell were made of cinder block, painted dark gray. But the paint was old and peeling. Some previous plumbing catastrophe or accident had provided a series of longitudinal stains that descended from above along the wall to the right. The stains reappeared each time. Susan rounded the platform and started down another flight. The only light in the stairwell came from a bare bulb at each floor landing. On the fourth floor the bulb had blown, and because of the relative darkness Susan had to proceed with caution, advancing her foot to find the first stair on the next flight down to three. The distances between the floors seemed remarkably long to Susan.

By leaning out over the metal banister Susan could see down into the subbasement and up to where the spiraling stairs became lost in collapsing perspective. Susan felt slightly ill at ease in the stairwell. The decaying darkness of the walls seemed to move in on her, awakening some atavistic fear. Perhaps it reminded her of a recurrent dream she used to have as a child. Although she had not had the dream for a long time, she remembered it well. It did not concern a stairwell but the overall effect was similar. The dream involved moving through a tunnel of twisted shapes which would progressively impede her progress. She never made it to the end of the tunnel in her dream despite the fact that the goal seemed very important.

In spite of the mildly disquieting atmosphere in the stairwell, Susan descended slowly, step by step. Her deliberate footsteps rang out with a dull metallic echo. She was alone. There were no people and it gave her a few uninterrupted moments to think. For a short period of time the immediacy of the hospital receded from Susan’s consciousness.

The encounter with Berman became more complicated in her mind. The lack of professionalism was diluted because, in reality, Berman was not Susan’s patient. She had been called simply to provide a peripheral service. The fact that Berman was a patient was important only in facilitating their chance meeting. But Susan wasn’t sure if she were just rationalizing. Rounding the landing on the third floor, she paused at the head of the next flight.

She had reacted to Berman as a woman. For a constellation of inexplicable reasons, Berman had appealed to her in a basic, natural, even chemical way. To an extent that was encouraging and reassuring. There was no doubt in Susan’s mind that she had begun to think of herself in a sexless sort of way over the first two years of medical school. She had used the word neuter in talking with Berman but only because she had been forced on the spur of the moment to find a term for it. Obviously she was female; she felt female and her monthly menstrual flow emphasized its reality. But was she a woman?

Susan started down the next flight of stairs. For the first time events had forced her to intellectualize a tendency which had been developing for several years. She wondered if Carpin had been called instead of her and if Berman had been some equally attractive female, would Carpin have responded as a male? Susan stopped again, considering this hypothetical situation.

From her experience she decided that there was a very good possibility that Carpin would have performed in an equivalent fashion.

Susan recommenced descending the stairs, very slowly now. But if it were true that a male would respond in a way similar to hers, why was it so different for her? Why did she dwell on it?