Quill & Parchment: Why the Willow Weeps

Part 7: Why the Willow Weeps
by Jonathan Shute

The alarm was sounded so often on the terminal wing that that the full code blue
teams rarely responded. Usually a nurse or an orderly would check the alert solo
and summon help only if necessary. Most of the patients were on a "do not resucitate"
basis, so most of the code blues were something less than urgent. It simply meant
that there would probably be a vacancy tomorrow. When the guy in 208 triggered the
alarm with his escape attempt, half of the oncology department showed up to see
the spectacle.

The poor old guy had climbed out of his bed, ripping out all of his tubes in the
process and triggering the code blue. He somehow stood erect on bones as fragile
as porcelain, removed the armrest from the wheelchair next to his bed and threw it
through the window of his room. The funereal quiet of the cancer ward was shattered
with the breaking glass and the subsequent shouting of the orderly and within a few
minutes the room was full of curious staff. The attending nurse knew the patient
well, he had seniority on the ward and on the planet as a whole, for that matter.
Old Fred was just a couple of weeks shy of his ninety-third birthday and he had
scarcely left that bed in over a year. He had never done so under his own power.
The presiding nurse thought it curious enough that he should summon the strength
and inclination to get out of bed and break the window but more curious still was
that, according to his chart, he hadn't walked in nearly a decade. The old man
passed out cold after breaking the window, most likely as a result of excruciating
pain and had fallen in a heap more than ten feet away from his bed.

"You trying to make a break for it Fred? We've never had a successful escape from
2nd floor west and we're not about to let an old duffer like you get the better of us."

Fred was unresponsive, oblivious.

"Can you hear me Fred? We're going to send you down to radiology to see if you've broken
anything."

His vital signs were normal for a man in his condition but Fred was dead to the world,
still fast asleep on the spot where he had fallen beside the lake.

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