Sandman by Sean Costello

the extent of his injuries, he was still conscious. Jack appraised the situation while Quinn filled him in.
    The kid had been struck by a bus while crossing a busy downtown thoroughfare, Quinn told him, dragged fifty yards before the driver could stop the vehicle. That he was alive at all was some kind of brutal miracle. Below the knees his jeaned legs resembled freshly ground hamburger. His left hand was missing, the stump wrapped in a dripping pressure bandage, and the fractured bones of his right forearm jutted through the flesh. His abdomen had been laid open by something under the bus, and his face and chest were one big weeping road burn.
    “Okay,” Jack said. “Let’s get this kid upstairs.”
    “There goes your beauty sleep,” Quinn said.
    Nodding, Jack rolled the stretcher out of the cubicle.

7
    DR. NILES McRAE AWOKE ON the morning of Tuesday, June 10 disoriented and afraid. He’d been dreaming that his day-to-day role as a physician had undergone an ironic reversal and suddenly he was the patient. Not only that, he’d been about to undergo a delicate surgical intervention that could prove fatal: coronary artery bypass grafting. It was nonsense, of course. He was twenty-eight years old, fresh out of med school and about to marry the girl he’d been dating since the ninth grade...
    Then the fog of sedated sleep burned away and with dawning horror Niles realized he was fifty -eight years of age, sedentary, overweight—and he really was about to go under the knife. Hell , Niles thought, why not be honest: they’re going to split me open with a bonesaw. All those starchy, on-the-fly lunches and deep-fried cafeteria dinners drowned in gravy, not to mention the two or three evening martinis he always managed to convince himself he’d earned, all of that had finally caught up with him. Eighty percent blockage of three vessels, the fourth totally gridlocked with plaque. The pain had caught him on the throne of all places, during an especially nasty tug of war with constipation. Without warning, a fifty-pound sledge had slammed into his chest, closing off his windpipe and sending a searing aftershock down his arm. Niles had uttered a startled grunt, toppled off the john with a foot of Delsey Extra Soft wadded into his fist and writhed in agony until the lights went out.
    Heart Attack.
    MI.
    Like most people, Niles had always believed this sort of thing never happened to doctors, any more than right-thinking clergymen fried in hell. But here he was, propped up in bed in the Med Center Coronary Care Unit with his chest and legs shaved bald, a catheter draining his bladder and an I-MED pump squirting some very serious drugs into his bloodstream. Nasal prongs fed oxygen into his lungs and five sticky electrodes gave a running record of his heart’s activity.
    He glanced at the monitor and a needling sweat broke out in his armpits. Christ, look at all those PVCs. In his busy cardiology practice Niles saw dozens of tracings like this every day and did little more than shake his head. But my, how the story changed when those malignant little blips belonged to you.
    Niles thought about dying.
    The hell of it was, a life in medicine did little to prepare a person for his own certain end. If anything, it made the task more onerous. Niles knew too much, that was the problem. Your average Joe, once he’s rolled through those emergency room doors, believes his troubles are over. Sure, he’s afraid. But does he realize that the plastic tip of an IV catheter, the most fundamental piece of invasive equipment used in any hospital, can shear loose and take the red cell express to his lungs? Has anybody told him the Foley catheter they snake into his bladder can cause a potentially lethal infection? Does he understand that when they operate on your heart, the fucking thing stops for more than an hour? Does he have even the dimmest inkling of the hundred other things that can go wrong at any stage in the game? Of course not. To