storytelling

Rachel reminded me that I raised this topic in the comments here, but didn't tell the story. So here it is. Settle in, children.

Imagine, if you will, an evening in the fall. Here in the Pacific Northwest the weather is cool but pleasant, and it's dark at seven.

My husband the oh so logical Mathematician (remember this for later in the story, please) is in the habit of going to a local brew pub to meet a friend, every Wednesday evening. They drink beer and play darts. On this particular Wednesday evening, the Mathematician decides to ride his bike into town rather than driving. This is so he can drink more beer, of course. He is not only logical, but responsible. He takes off on his bike, headed for what we call the interurban bike trail. It leads from out here in the country all the way into town, and rarely has anything to do with a road where cars have to be considered. Generally very safe, if a little spooky at night. Imagine a trail through the woods, overhung with trees.

Ten o'clock. I am sewing, with my feet up and the dogs draped across my legs. I hear the garage opening: husband home from the Wednesday night outing. He comes in, and stands next to my chair. The fiddly bit of sewing in my hands prevents me from looking up.

--Have a nice time?

--Mmmmm, well. I've had better.

I look up and see that his pant leg is bloody from the knee down to the shoe. Really bloody. I leap out of the chair and into action, and as a part of that, ask a lot of questions of the what - where - how variety.

He is very calm, in spite of the fact that his knee -- visible once I have stripped him down to his skivvies -- is swollen to twice its normal size. He hit a pothole on the way home. He managed to get home, so the knee isn't broken, but it sure looks bad.

I am peering and prodding and dabbing.

--I think we have to go to the emergency room. Or at least I have to call the doctor.

--(nonchalantly) oh, and something else: I got bit by a bat on the head.

I sit down while he tells the story. Riding along the interurban, minding his own business, a bat landed on his head and bit him. Or scratched him. Hard to tell the difference. Blood was let, in any case. I consider searching his scalp for the evidence, and decide this is beyond my expertise. And, a question has occured to me.

--You weren't wearing your helmet.

--Um, no.

--So that's when you fell off the bike?

--Oh, no. The bat bit me on the way to town. I hit the pothole on the way back.

--Hold on. Let me see if I understand. On the way to town, while riding your bike -- without a helmet-- you got bit by a bat on the head. And you went on to drink beer and play darts.

--Yes, that's right.

--Okay. And on the way home you hit a pothole and did this to your knee.

--Yes, right again. But I was wearing my helmet on the way home.

--In case the bat was lying in wait, hoping for another chomp?

--Yes, I suppose so.

--You decided to go ahead into town for beer and darts while bat-saliva and blood was dripping from your scalp?

--Why not?

Fast forward to me on the phone with the emergency room nurse:

--...it's very swollen, but it doesn't seem to hurt him much.

--it sounds like a large hematoma. That could wait until tomorrow morning, if you call your doctor first thing. I didn't tell you this, by the way, because we're not allowed to make any kind of diagnosis on the phone.

-- So while you're not telling me things, I should mention that he also got bit by a bat on the head.

[pause]

--Maybe you better start from the beginning.

.... and then he came home.

--Wait. Let me get this straight. He got bit by a bat on the head ...

...and went on to the brew pub to meet his friend for beer and darts.

--He does know that bats are often rabid?

--He figured it could wait until tomorrow. I suppose he's a little jaded. He's had the rabies series before.

--Do tell.

--A feral cat scratched him.

--Where?

--On the arm.

--No, I mean, where was he?

--Greece.

--Huh. When was this?

--A long time ago. When he was a kid.

--And they gave him the rabies series in Greece?

--They gave him the rabies series, but not in Greece, in England.

--How did England get into the story?

--He's English.

--So he's visiting here? Maybe he should go home for the rabies series this time too.

--No, he lives here. He's been here for twenty years.

--Okay, so listen. He's out drinking beer, do you think maybe he imagined the bat?

--No, he didn't imagine the bat. The bat bite was before the beer. The knee was after the beer, but he didn't imagine that either, because I'm looking at the knee.

--Have you looked at the bite?

--Must I?

--This is the strangest phone call I've had in a while.

--Imagine how I feel.

When I got off the phone with a plan (to call our doctor first thing in the morning about the knee and the bat and the bite on the head), the Mathematician was deeply asleep with his swollen knee up on a pillow. The beer, I think, or all the excitement.

The next morning we called the doctor's office and spoke to Sue, Meg and Dick's nurse. The conversation with the emergency room nurse pretty much repeated itself, after which the Mathematician went in to be seen.

Dick let the blood out of his knee and looked at his scalp, and Sue looked at his scalp, and then they called the Health Department and the Health Department wanted to see him, and they all looked at his scalp, and then he was sent to the emergency room, more looking at the scalp, including by the nurse I hadn't talked to the night before.

Finally they gave him the first round of rabies shots, and he had to go in every week for four or five more rounds of shots, I forget now, because to tell the truth, I really didn't want to know.

So that's the bedtime story, complete with a moral, which I don't think I have to spell out.

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Robyn sent this link to artists in the Urals (Ekaterinburg, to be exact) who have worked their magic on computer hardware.

Something for my holiday wish list. Or many somethings.

For your information, the Wikipedia people have this to tell us about the place:

Yekaterinburg (also transliterated as Ekaterinburg or Jekaterinburg) (Russian: Екатеринбу́рг) is a major city in central Russia, the administrative center of Sverdlovsk Oblast. Situated on the Asian side of the Ural mountain range, at 56°51′ N 60°36′ E It is the main industrial and cultural center of the Ural region. Its population of 1,300,000 (2002) makes it Russia's fifth largest city. Between 1924 and 1991, the city was known as Sverdlovsk (Свердло́вск), after the Bolshevik leader Yakov Sverdlov.

I really adore the funky architectural keyboard -- and now I'm wondering why they don't have a coordinated mouse.

Posted by at 4:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When I lived in Ann Arbor, I had a good friend who happened to be a physician who specialized in infectious disease. Her husband was a surgeon. He was also an avid hunter and trapper. These were great friends to have while I was writing Into the Wilderness.

Me: Jim, I need to shoot somebody with a rifle. He's in the bush. Here's the thing: he's got to survive, and without immediate medical attention.
Jim: Shoot him in the buttock.
Me: Jim, this is the good guy. His dignity has to remain intact.
Jim: Okay, go for a lung shot then. Right lung, about here. (Finger prod) That will avoid all major organs. If he's in good shape and the rifle isn't loaded for bear, he's got a decent chance.

Thus was Nathaniel's injury conceived.

I've fallen out of touch with these friends, but I have other medical consultants. It seems doctors (at least, the ones I know) are happy to talk about fictional diseases and injuries. I'm guessing it's more fun to be cornered at a party to talk about a fictional patient that it is to be cornered by the friend of a friend with an odd wart.

My Neighbor Bob and his wife Sheila had a party on Saturday, and at that party were my doctor and her husband, also a doctor. These are people I know outside of their professional capacities. Meg is a great person to talk to about books and kids and almost anything, and so I zeroed right in on the two of them to corral them into a fictional consultation.

Me: I've got to kill somebody.
Dick: (eyes lighting up) Need some ideas?
Me: Always. But this particular time, I know approximately what kills the guy.

Meg and Dick lower their heads to listen. My mother-in-law, who is also a physician, gets this look on her face whenever you ask her a medical question. The professional, serious look. In her case there's a sound that goes along with it. You give her a symptom, she makes a low, confirming, supportive sound in her throat. The sounds says: I'm listening. I'm not giving anything away. Go on.

So Meg and Dick* are listening. I tell them I need to kill off a healthy, active 30 year old. What can I give him that will put him on the heart transplant list? He needs to die waiting for a transplant. At home.

An interesting discussion follows, in which many words of six or more syllables are bandied about. Meg and Dick consult, and offer me cardiomyopathy following from viral myocarditis.

This is just what I need, I tell them. Or rather, it's just what the character needs. Poor guy.

Meg and Dick promise me a list of medications and symptoms, but of course I have to do some of this work myself. I settle down with Google. The most common infectious agents for myocarditis are:

• Viral (e.g., Coxsackie virus)
• Poliomyelitis
• Diphtheria
• Toxoplasmosis
• Trichinosis
• Trypanosomiasis
• Acute rheumatic fever

At this point I remember NYPD Blue, and the way the writers killed off Bobby Simone with viral cardiomyopathy. A quick google brings up the four stages of heart failure, and I remember Bobby going through all of them. I remember my father going through them too, because he died of congenital heart failure.

But this is research that has to be done. I push ahead on google. An hour later I'm in a vague sweat and I'm having some trouble breathing. Did I mention that heart failure was what killed my father and six of his brothers and sisters? If this weren't the perfect way to knock the character off, I'd be backpedaling by now. In fact, I do backpedal, in a way. I look up hypochondria. I look up cyberchrondria:

Hypochondria, the excessive fear of illness, has now been overtaken by cyberchondria—the same fear made much worse, fuelled by volumes of easily-accessible material available on the Internet.
[Daily Record, May 2001]

Such are the dangers of researching fictional death. You are forced to look at the possibility of your own. You also spend hours and find that at the end of them, in addition to higher blood pressure and a racing pulse, you've got a blank manuscript page. It's the curse of an active imagination, and a fast internet connection.
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*I was sure that I had posted on the story of the bat, the husband-without-a-bicycle-helmet, Dick, and the rabies shots, but a search brings up nothing. Sometime I will have to tell that story here.

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