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Show 298 "This drug can cause your heart to race. It's possible that your chemistry might become so unbalanced that your heart could give away entirely but we'll be monitoring it," she is saying, still looking at me intently. "We have to push the edge on this or it won't work at all, if it's going to." The nurse is slapping the heart rrionitor patches onto my chest and back, attaching the leads to the machine overhead. She turns it on and I can hear my heart beating in a slow and steady rhythm. She is turning off the sound but I can still see the heart beat etching patterns on the monitor and read the number of its beats per minute. Sixty-eight. Sixty-seven. Seventy. Sixty-eight. j Dr. Chappie is looking worried. Drawn. Georgia is here also, the only other patient on this deserted and dying wing ofthe hospital. I have seen her pacing the hall pushing her IV pole. She looks thin, pale, sad. Dr. Chappie has taken over her care also. What can Georgia remember? I wonder. Dr. Chappie and the nurse leave and I am left alone with my heartbeat. It is utterly quiet. There are no visitors, walking into wrong rooms. There are no patients' noisy machines, marking crisis with impertinent mechanized beeps and buzzes. There are no nurses outside my doorway yelling things up the hallway like, '"46 blew her IV - could you go re-start it?!" or "your new kidney wants some pain meds." With only two of us on this entire wing, we |