Needle in the Bone

Norbert

Chapter 24

Needle in the Bone

Warnetires-Skidmore vouches for me and I am released, forty minutes late for my appointment. I approach reception. ‘I’m Rockhampton-Smythe from the lab, come to see the bone marrow. Sorry I’m late, but I got arrested for drug smuggling.’

The receptionist jerks the back of her biro in the general direction and doesn’t even look up. Maybe the junkies from far outpatients bother her all the time.

I knock and enter. Healer Dai is in his shirt sleeves and wearing rubber gloves. There is a stripped patient with his back to me lying on the examination couch. His upper torso and legs are covered, but his botty is bare.

‘I haven’t missed it, have I?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ says Healer Dai. ‘What time is it due to leave?’

‘I mean the bone marrow.’

‘Good job, boyo, because this isn’t the bus station.’

‘I know. The bus station isn’t as busy.’

He peers at me over the rims of his half-moon glasses. ‘Is you a boy?’

I sigh. ‘I’m a fully grown, fully qualified technician. I spoke to you less than an hour ago in the lab.’

‘You’re the panty sniffer from my home town?’

The events of the last hour have drained my will to argue. ‘Yes, that’s me.’

‘Then you is in the right place. Never seen a marrow before?’

I think about a gardening joke, but refrain. ‘It’s my first time.’

Healer Dai turns to the patient. ‘This little man is going to observe, look you.’

The man grunts but doesn’t look round.

‘Where should I make the tap, boyo?’

‘Judging by the position of the patient, I would say the iliac crest, though you could use the sternum.’

Healer Dai nods and swabs the skin over the pelvic bone with a numbing agent. Whilst it takes effect he explains out of earshot of the patient that he suspects Hodgkin’s. ‘Do you know what lymphoma is?’

‘It’s how an Italian with a bad leg gets back to his house.’

A nurse lurking by the door snorts with laughter.

Healer Dai just purses his lips. ‘What is the main thing the marrow should reveal?’

I decide to play it straight from now on. ‘Pancytopenia.’

‘Very good. The overriding symptom of lymphoma is a general decrease in the numbers of all the blood cells.’

A lab technician in her early forties bustles in carrying a cup of vending machine tea. Her name is Clothilda Church-Pugh, but everyone calls her Velcro because she sticks to Healer Dai like glue. As older women go, she is quite attractive, or as GT puts it: “I wouldn’t normally, but her peaches are still in season”. 

She plonks the tea down in front of the patient’s nose. ‘Aren’t I wicked, telling you porky pies? Having a bone marrow isn’t painless at all, is it? It’s excruciating agony. So I’ve brought you a nice cup of tea. That’s the aspirin for your bone ache.’

Healer Dai sighs. ‘I haven’t done it yet, Clotty, look you.’

‘Oops a daisy, that’s let the cat out the bag, hasn’t it? I’ll bring you another when it’s done.’ She picks it up and stops at the door. ‘Don’t worry, lovey, I’ll know from your screams when it’s time.’

‘Would you mind, awfully?’ I ask, ‘but I am absolutely parched. It’s been a hectic morning.’

‘Certainly,’ she says, handing me the tea. ‘I’m sure your daddy will be all right. He’s in good hands.’

‘It’s me, Norbert. I work with you. Have done for weeks.’

‘How lovely.’ She smiles and leaves.

Healer Dai taps the whimpering patient on the shoulder. ‘I’m just going to screw this into your hip bone, look you, but probably best if you don’t. It can be a bit off-putting seeing a big metal tube sticking out of your thigh.’

The terrified patient begins to hyperventilate.

‘That’s good. Deep breaths. That’s the linctus for your little cough.’

The healer places a hand on the man’s hip and screws the marrow tube into the nerveless bone, grunting with the effort. ‘Get in.’

He backs away and picks up a syringe with an extremely long, thick needle. ‘Look at the size of that grannytickler,’ he says, waving it front of the patient’s eyes, which are screwed tight.

‘I don’t want to,’ the patient groans. ‘I want to go home.’

I am shocked at the healer’s bedside manner and feel I must intervene.

‘Are you married?’ I say to the whimpering patient.

‘Yes,’ he snuffles.

‘And do you love and trust your wife?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘Then think of Healer Dai in the same way. Like a wife, he can bleed you dry and suck the living marrow out of your bones.’

Satisfied at my solicitude, I pat his shoulder and step back.

Healer Dai inserts the needle into the tube and grinds it into the marrow. ‘Are you ready, boyo? One … two…’

‘Stop, please stop,’ the patient yells.

‘Three.’

He yanks on the plunger and pulls it out in one flowing movement. The patient rises off the bed as though still attached to the needle. An ear-splitting scream echoes off the walls. His eyes bulge and his hair stands on end, exactly like Mrs Cole-Bunker after her accident with the toaster.

Velcro blunders in with the tea. ‘You called?’

Healer Dai squirts the marrow into a tube and labels it. ‘Your name, sir?’

‘I’m going to be sick.’

‘Where do I place the hyphen in that? Date of birth?’

Velcro hands the still snivelling patient his tea and sympathy. ‘I know what you’re going through. I went to an acupuncturist for a while, but all he did was stab me in the back.’

Once he’s sorted out the details, Healer Dai hands me the sample to take back to the lab for staining. It looks like wet grainy sand.

He pulls off his rubber gloves and washes his hands. Velcro holds open the jacket of his suit. He slips into it and looks at his watch. ‘I think I can get a swift nine holes in after lunch.’

Velcro is brushing imaginary specks of dust off his broad shoulders with the doe-eyed look of a faithful puppy. ‘Don’t be a silly-billy. Today is clinic day.’

He turns to face her. ‘What do you mean, Clotty?’

She takes his arm and ushers him out into the corridor, so full many of the patients are standing. ‘All these people have come to see you, the great Healer.’

‘Have they? Oh, how touching.’

He walks up to an elderly man and pats him on the shoulder.

‘It’s most awfully kind of you, but you shouldn’t have. You don’t look well. You should be tucked up at home with a bowl of soup watching Cash in the Attic. That’s the antidote for your snakebite, not sitting around in this draughty old corridor.’ He walks up the line and stops in front of a worried-looking woman. ‘What is wrong with you, madam?’

‘I have myeloma, but I’ve come to see you about my anal warts.’

‘Good Lord. Where did they find those?’ He crosses to the other side of the corridor. ‘And you?’

‘My leg hurts.’

‘Has anyone taken your pulse?’

‘No, I’ve still got it.’

‘Well don’t worry; the pain in your leg is caused by old age.’

‘It’s the same age as my other leg, but that doesn’t hurt.’

‘What’s wrong with you?’ he says to the next patient.

‘I have a bladder infection.’

‘Urine trouble then?’

Two women sitting together on the other side of the corridor are in the middle of a heated argument. Healer Dai approaches. ‘Now, now, ladies, calm down. What’s the problem?’

‘Are you the doctor?’ one of them asks.

‘Indeed I is.’

‘Then you’re just the man to settle this,’ says the other. ‘Am I not right in thinking the strongest muscle in the human body is the heart?’

‘Is it hell,’ says the other. ‘I’m telling you, the strongest muscle in the human body is the bladder.’

‘Madam,’ says Healer Dai. ‘If the muscle in your bladder was as strong as the muscle in your heart, you’d be able to piss over the pier.’

I leave him to it and return to the lab.