Sweet Tooth Read online

Sweet Tooth

  By R. M. Huffman

  Copyright 2013 R. M. Huffman

   

  SWEET TOOTH

  I love seeing children come alive on Halloween night: the dressing-up, everyone pretending to be someone or something they aren’t; the once-a-year indulgence, often to excess.

  I feel the same way about the holiday. One couldn’t say I come alive, but you know what I mean.

  I find much irony about the day as well. The tradition of Halloween costumery comes from an old need to hide from evil spirits and monsters, but in this postmodern, materialistic world, the only predators being warned about are all too human: psychopaths hiding razors in bubble gum, pedophiles watching from shadows. The real monsters are ignored. I correct myself: they’re not ignored. Rather, they’ve become part of the game, part of the commercialization, decorations for yards and subjects of cheap mail-order costumes.

  Speaking of cheap costumes, I tuck my janitor’s thin, button-down linen shirt back into the drab pants that complete the uniform. Not too tightly - for a profession that ostensibly exists to maintain cleanliness, I’ve noticed that its members often appear rather slovenly. I press the button for the sixth floor, for all intents and purposes invisible behind the large plastic disposal cart I’m pushing. My badge is turned backward on its clip, since the face on it doesn’t match mine. At most medical centers, nobody checks identification anyway, even during the day - certainly not at Edgar Franklin Memorial Hospital.

  Why Franklin Memorial? A better question would be, why not Saint Mark’s or Lutheran? I’d think the answer would be obvious. A few decades of corporate culture doesn’t so easily negate their founders’ original intent of Christian altruism. Crosses everywhere. I don’t think so.

  Edgar Franklin, however, was a serial philanderer, a mean drunk, and a general scoundrel in his business dealings, which he nevertheless conducted with skill and volume. Thus, he was rich. His hospital was a late-life salve to his conscience more than anything, and that conscience remained firmly secular until the day he finally died. So, Franklin Memorial it is.

  The elevator dings at my floor, the tinny sound of a bell that would prefer to be somewhere else tonight. Nursing will be a skeleton crew (skeleton - how appropriate on Halloween). I’ve been here before, but services move, so I make sure this is still the correct location for inpatient endocrinology. It is. Onward to begin festivities.

  I wheel my grey mini-dumpster down the hall toward the nurses’ station. Most of the lights are off. I walk by the long, empty desk, computer screen-savers idling in a line. Behind the desk, the door to the staff break room is open, lights on the fake wood paneling flickering with the muted television. An obese nurse, who should be the only one on the floor tonight, munches from a family-sized bag of chips and thumbs through a tabloid magazine. She doesn’t glance up. I make the corner.

  Every hospital has its own particular style of scrubs, all of them basically cheap pajamas that one rents out of a vending machine or borrows from laundry service. Surgeons and anesthesiologists don’t seem to particularly care about the poor quality, but one can’t expect a female-dominated profession like nursing to capitulate to that barbarism. Hence, nurses often wear their own fashionable (read: expensive) pairs from home. This being the case, one need not acquire a hospital’s particular scrubs to be able to walk around like one belongs there. I quickly (and when I move quickly, it’s quickly indeed) unbutton my janitor’s shirt, strip off my baggy pants, and stash the uniform in the grey bin. Underneath I’m wearing a dark blue scrub set, free of “property of” printing and with the extra pockets that say “I’m store-bought.” I strap a pack at my waist: my candy-bag, if you will. I may be old - older than I look, surely - but every year it’s still exciting.

  At the first room, I pull the chart from its holder on the door and check the patient’s vitals sheet. Glucose monitoring happens every four hours, but the trend gives a good idea. This patient’s most recent blood sugar was two-hundred and twenty, at nine o’clock PM. It’s higher than is healthy for him, but not high enough for me. Right now, I feel like a boy scouting houses just before nightfall. Cartoonish gravestones in yard, complicated carved pumpkins: “Trick-or-treaters welcomed, we’ve stocked up on candy.” Lights off, no decorations: “We don’t celebrate Halloween, there’s no candy here, don’t bother us.” (Alternatively, a dark house on Halloween could signal someone who takes it very seriously indeed. Either way, leave it alone.) I lightly knock on the door and enter. No thresholds here.

  “Trick or treat,” I whisper, giving a closed-mouth smile to the extremely fat man who groggily turns toward the dim light I let into the room. He doesn’t recognize me, but it doesn’t matter. Patients are accustomed to a spinning carousel of strangers in scrubs or white coats, most of whom never introduce themselves. “I’ll just be a second here. Need to check that infusion.” I move the controls with the nurse call button out of the patient’s reach. At the head of the bed is the insulin pump. If you’ve never seen one, it’s a bag and tubing connected to a machine that delivers the fluid in the bag at a set rate. The machine’s program is locked in, but I reach over, hold down the secret button in the back that anyone who’s ever used these things knows about, and unlock it. I turn the pump off.

  “Happy Halloween,” I say quietly, reaching into my pack and pulling out a miniature candy bar. I hand it to the man. “Don’t tell anybody, okay?” He grunts his sleepy assertion, tears the wrapping open, and stuffs it whole into his fat face. I smile again at him, give a quick wave, and leave.

  I do the same thing, more or less, to eight more patients, all poorly-controlled diabetics. Insulin off, sneak a conspiratory candy bar. One lady even asked if I had a different kind. I did, and I obliged her.

  If you’re a medical professional, I know what you’re asking. “Why not just run in some dextrose and be done with it?” You wouldn’t dump a spoonful of sugar on your food and call it “candy,” would you? It isn’t the same.

  With a little time to kill, I go back to my trash cart. On the off-chance that the nurse will emerge, I change back into the janitor’s uniform. She does emerge, like a bloated hippopotamus wading out of a muddy river. I hear the door to the break room pushed open. She waddles around the corner.

  “Hey, Erline.” She realizes I’m not Erline. “Who are you? Where’s Erline?”

  “Erline called in sick. She wasn’t feeling well.” This is true. I’ve had my hands on a night-shift schedule for this place for a while now. I visited Erline in the middle of last night, when she got off work. She won’t remember, but she’s a little anemic right now. She’ll be fine. I didn’t kill her, and I didn’t turn her.

  “Hn. Okay.” She lumbers back into the break room and turns on the sound to the television. Fine with me.

  I wait until about an hour has passed since I saw the first patient. During this time I restock my empty pack with syringes and small-gauge needles. I don’t think the nurse is highly motivated to do her work promptly. Even if she were, I’ll have at least another hour to gather my goodies before she gets up to make her rounds.

  Humans who have been fed upon don’t seem to remember our visits well, if at all. The phenomenon isn’t a quantifiable entity, but I theorize that it’s related to the same inexplicable (by empirical science, anyway) metaphysical quality responsible for our lack of reflection. To these patients, already somnolent with the late hour and likely somewhat delirious from illness and hospitalization, the memory of my visits will be somewhere between fleeting and absent for them.

  Patients, especially diabetics, are used to skin pricks and blood samples. The first man snores through my arterial stick. I fill up a ten-milliliter heparinized syringe with bright red blood, then replace that syringe with a second. W
e prefer oxygenated arterial blood rather than venous for the same reason I’m sure you prefer fresh bread over stale. The heparin will keep the blood from clotting. Doesn’t it change the taste, you ask? No more than the copious amount of sodium benzoate you intake every day.

  While I’m placing a cap on the second syringe, the light in the hall becomes brighter behind me. The break room’s door is wide open. The elephantine clop of the nurse’s gaudy clogs signals her approach. I sigh. Her rotund shadow fills the patient’s room.

  “What are you doing?” The plump queen of this infirm hive is upset. She saw me in a janitor’s uniform, and now I’m dressed in scrubs. Not all is lost.

  I turn and give her my most seductive smile. “I think