Articles : Editor's Choice
The Travelling Story07/14/05
I’d like to introduce a fabulous story, written by seven authors. About a month ago I had an idea – how fun would it be to start a fictional story, then send it out to a chain of waiting writers to add their own creative spins to it! I asked seven medical bloggers who frequently write some imaginative posts to build the first “traveling story” with me. I believe it may be the first of its kind on the internet. I hope you all enjoy!
Dr. Charles Begins:
Kelly awoke that morning as if it were any other. Her long blond hair was tangled into ridiculous looking ropes after a typical night of restless sleep. No more happy hours that bleed into the last call she thought to herself. I’m getting too old for this.
As she walked over to her tiny bathroom to splash some cold water on her face, a sudden queasiness overcame her. She looked in the mirror and was shocked to see her ashen color. Her eyes were bloodshot, their lids framed by a smeared charcoal mascara. What happened last night?
She was still dressed in her jeans. Plunging her hands into her pockets she found a torn piece of paper with the number 867-5309 scribbled onto it. Kelly laughed as she began singing the 1980’s classic through vocal cords that were hoarse and cracking.
But the laughing unleashed in her stomach powerful cramps. She bent over in pain, immediately knowing that something was wrong. I have to get to the hospital she thought, stumbling over to her cell phone that had somehow spent the night among cat excrement in the neglected kitty litter box. Before dialing 911 she decided that she should first call her psychiatrist.
Enter Maria of Intueri.org:
She quickly punched in his pager number, her fingers trembling from waves of nausea rolling through her svelte frame. She could not listen to the entire greeting as was her habit—his deep voice made her body tingle with wanton arousal, feeding her fantasies that he wanted her, too—before she hastily punched in her numeric message.
Her eyes spied her navel piercing sailing the stormy crest of her undulating intestines when her phone began to chime the theme from “The Smurfs”. A groan of agony escaped her parched lips as she answered her phone.
“Dr. Taul?” she moaned, feeling her stomach entering her mouth.
“Yes, Kelly,” he impatiently replied. “What now?”
“Dr. Taul,” she began, “my stomach hurts and I feel like I’m going to barf up everything in my body and I don’t feel like I can move and—“
“—now wait,” Dr. Noah E. Taul interrupted. “Kelly, this is the sixth time you’ve paged me in the past five hours. I already told you that we can no longer work together. Stomach complaints won’t change that.”
He heard her retch followed by splattering sounds through his phone.
Enter Madman of Chronicles of a Medical Madhouse:
"Sixth time in five hours?" she wondered aloud. Confusion overtook her.
"I've had enough of these games Kelly,” Noah said scornfully, but there was nobody on the other end of the line. Kelly had already hung up the phone. She felt another thrust of vomit. As her sleeves retracted in a desperate reach for the toilet she saw her bruised hands and the knife wounds that transversed both wrists. Now panicked, her eyes darting around the room, she identified the sedative bottles awkwardly thrown in the corner of the room… empty. Last night was no party.
”Are you still there, Kelly?” Noah asked. He was answered with a flat dial tone.
Dr. Taul was an experienced psychiatrist. Six years of post-graduate training conferred in him a certain instinct, and Kelly's behavior worried him. He remembered how bright and full of promise she had been as a fourth year medical student.
Their brief romance in school would end quickly. They would graduate together. He chose psychiatry while she entered emergency medicine. For Dr. Taul she was the ultimate reminder of how much we have invested in what we do, both emotionally and physically.
He'd always remember how after only one night of call the direction of Kelly's perfect life changed forever.
Enter Geena of Code Blog:
Kelly awoke to the sound of whispering voices. She was disoriented and woozy. The last thing she could remember was lying on the floor of the bathroom, unable to move and barely hearing Noah’s voice on the other end of the phone chiding her. She looked across the pool of vomit on the floor, her cat tentatively licking around the edges.
Was that a dream? She tried to focus, but the room was so bright that her pupils screamed in agony every time she tried to open her eyes. She decided it was easier to keep them closed and simply listen to what was being said. "So you found her on the bathroom floor?" asked the nurse paramedic.
Kelly heard her roommate answer: "Yes... I had just gotten home and heard the oddest thing – the sound of slurping coming from the bathroom. When I went to investigate, I found Kelly unconscious on the floor. I called 911 immediately."
"Wait a second... she looks familiar. Wasn't she that one intern who... "
"Yeah," replied her roommate, subtly grasping the nurse’s arm and leading her out of the bathroom. "She doesn't like talking about that night."
The nurse had a faraway look in her eyes. "It was in all the papers. I can't imagine what those parents went through. I always wondered what happened to the girl who was involved. Such a tragedy."
"It was a tragedy," came a deep voice. Kelly's roommate and the nurse whirled around to see who was there.
"Dr. Taul!" exclaimed the nurse. "What are you doing here?"
Behind the bathroom door Kelly again forced her eyes to open.
Enter St. Nate of St. Nate's Blog:
Her squinting revealed various colors dancing before her, slowly pulling themselves apart to form a staccato bar of light in the crack beneath the bathroom door. Kelly focused on the moving shadows, desperately seeking a consistency as the shapes dissolved into a chaotic maelstrom of skewed geometry.
It was happening again. The same cursed illness that had befallen her that fateful morning years ago had begun anew.
Had it not been for the newspaper articles and her terrified classmates' testimony, she would never have believed that she had disappeared like a cheap film effect in the middle of a grand rounds presentation - only to be found a day later in a desert three thousand miles away.
All Kelly recalled from that day was seeing an overhead projected image of spinal lesions swimming among a sea of white formed by her classmates' coats, before oblivion overwhelmed her for the first time.
And then she was back in the present, once again trying to put together the broken pieces of a memory, but only aware of the cold bathroom tiles beneath her trembling body. She remembered scribbling a note last night after drinking six Vodka-Red Bulls. In a sudden moment of clarity Kelly realized the numbers weren't a phone number, or the refrain from a cheesy song, but were instead a code that explained everything.
Everyone seeks the truth, but I found it last night, amid the empty bottles of alprazolam and diazepam thrown into the corner of my bathroom.
Knowing her time was short, Kelly stuffed her right hand into her jeans and tore the note from her pocket along with her lipstick. With every move she made a little more of her body disappeared. Her left hand vanished before she could get the cap off her lipstick. Her clenched teeth remained solid just long enough to help her finish unsheathing it, and with desperation she began to jot down a message.
Kelly tried not to think about how she could no longer feel the cold vomit beneath her, or how her cat's whiskers no longer tickled her bare feet, or how her arm was becoming translucent as she wrote.
She was slipping into a presence of mind unknown to all but those who have torn off their own shadows.
By the time Dr. Taul stormed into the bathroom, all he could see was Kelly’s wilted body lying beside a crumpled scrap of paper, with these words written in brandied berry smears:
"FIND ME."
Enter Shrinkette:
During that ambulance ride to the hospital, Noah’s mind cycled through numerous emotions, but it was rage that gripped him most as they all arrived. The ER staff pushed past him to take command. Kelly lay unconscious, encased in blood, vomit, and alcohol...again. He stared at her lipstick scrawl: "FIND ME."
Kelly, where haven't we found you? Now we have to "find an airway" and "find a pulse." How about "find some treatment," and some responsibility, which you once had in abundance? And while we're at it, "find out why Dr. Taul is still entangled with this woman."
He watched helplessly as the entourage whisked her from the ER to the ICU, dragging IV's and blinking monitors. "Kelly, are you awake?" Crisp, concerned voices pierced the blackness.
I'm back, thought Kelly, arms flailing as her coma faded. I am immortal. What brain-fog is this? Skull filled with poured concrete, mouth like a cotton rag....... Haldol! They've slammed on the biochemical brakes. Before jumping off a roller coaster, wait for a complete stop. Watch your step...
In the hallway, a cluster of white coats heeded a cherubic voice: "...29 year old former MD with bipolar disorder, brought in with poly-drug overdose. Her psychiatrist is here..."
A deeper voice intervened. "She thinks I'm her psychiatrist, and that I've fired her. None of that is true. I've never treated her. We dated, years ago. I've had to get restraining orders when she's manic. We've tried to get her help for years."
Kelly stirred. Is that Dr. Taul? Be still, my heart.
"She's waking up," said the cherub. "Can you tell us what happened?"
"It's hard to say. She was agitated, vomiting, and rambling about hidden truths in a pop song. She'd been drinking."
"Let's see if she'll talk to us."
Here they come, thought Kelly. Yes, even though I am tired and falling apart, I will tell them my story. Even with my head full of concrete and rags. Even with my nausea and abdominal pain. Even though Psychiatry is not yet ready for me.
"Greetings," she called out, as the Psych Consult Team gathered near. "My powers will amaze you."
Earnest interns took notes, their minds bursting with medspeak. I was like them, she mused. I'm still like them...only better.
"My first vanishing act occurred at this very hospital, after my worst call night ever. One catastrophe, then another, and another. I couldn't concentrate. I was obsessed with the plight of... desert creatures, dying in the heat. They needed me. I was going to be their doctor..."
Which one is the attending? They're all hot. Where's Dr. Taul?
"I loaded up my car with ice, and drove off to rescue them. I had fifteen patients here. I left all of them! It... made sense at the time..."
The most angelic intern stepped forward. "Kelly, can you tell us what led you to overdose this time?"
Enter Orac of Respectful Insolence:
The haze lifted for a minute. “Overdose?” Kelly wondered again. She was confused. What happened this time? It’s like the last time, but different.
Only this time she wasn’t obsessed with the plight of any creature but herself. She struggled to remember what had happened the night before, what had led her to end up at home and vomiting.
Why can’t I remember? Concentrate! she told herself. The psychiatry team stood impassively around her bed, waiting for a response. Damn them. I could probably figure out what happened last night if these twerps would just leave me alone for a few minutes.
She was sure now that psychiatry wasn’t ready for her yet. But she had to tell them something, or they’d just keep hounding her. Or worse, they’d put her in a room and leave her completely alone with the swirling mists of color that were presently clouding her consciousness.
“Maybe I need a surgery consult,” she said aloud. “You know, crampy abdominal pain, nausea and vomiting. How do you know this isn’t just appendicitis? Or maybe gallstones?”
“Well, for one thing, you aren’t febrile,” said the E.R. attending. “For another, your white count is completely normal. For a third thing, you smell like a distillery.”
Damn, thought Kelly. She would almost welcome the oblivion of anaesthesia and surgery right now.
“Kelly,” the angelic intern said again more insistently, moving closer. “What happened?” He smelled like baby powder. Baby powder for a baby face. Man, I’m getting old, thought Kelly. These interns look like children. She wondered if he even needed to shave every day.
“You won’t believe me.” said Kelly. It was true. They wouldn’t.
“Try us,” said the intern.
“I was abducted by aliens,” said Kelly.
“That’s not funny,” one of the psychiatry residents scolded, letting his professional detachment slip a moment.
“No, really. It’s true. A big spaceship appeared and beamed me aboard. They had huge heads, big eyes, and didn’t say a word. But they pumped me full of strange drugs and used all sorts of weird instruments to probe every orifice of my body--”
“Stop it,” asserted Dr. Taul, stepping forward from behind the encircled psychiatry team.
Kelly stopped. Noah has come back!
“Please stop screwing around and tell us what really happened last night,” said Dr. Taul.
“OK,” said Kelly. “I think it’s coming back to me now.” She was feeling somewhat more lucid. At least the IV pole was no longer twisting like a spring, and the fluorescent lights above her were no longer pulsating in multicolored, amoeba-like lighting effects favored by so many psychedelic bands from the 1960’s.
“Yes,” said Dr. Taul. “Go on…”
“I think I killed someone,” Kelly said simply, and suddenly her mind was completely clear.
Enter Dr. Charles, delighted to pick up the story he cast in a bottle across the internet one month ago!
There was a collective gasp from the assembled psychiatry team. Something in Kelly’s voice assured them of her sincerity this time. This was no relatively harmless dissociative fugue into the desert to save thirsty animals, nor was it a playful mockery involving UFO’s. Kelly looked down at the gray hospital floor in shame.
The tears poured out now, washing away the remaining charcoal mascara around her pretty eyelids. She bit her brandy-berried lips in an effort to choke back the sobs. “Noah? I need to tell you what I did,” she said, looking up at him with a pathetic longing.
Dr. Taul felt a queasiness fumbling through his bowels, and he loosened his collar. “Say it, damn you!” As soon as the words were out he regretted them.
“I still love you, Noah,” she began. “Last night was our anniversary, do you remember?”
The rest of the hospital faded away. At the center of his tunnel vision was Kelly, the spitfire he had been in love with all those years ago. For a moment he pardoned the craziness, the dysfunction, and the pain between them. “I had forgotten, Kelly. I’m sorry”
“I went to your apartment last night,” Kelly explained. “You weren’t there. You were on call, or at least that’s what your wife said…”
Again cold fingers of fear grasped at Noah’s intestines.
“She is a beautiful woman, Noah. You are so lucky. I guess I looked quite upset. She was so kind to have let me in. We sat down for three hours and I told her everything that happened between us.”
“Good Lord, Kelly,” Noah said with disgust. “You are crazy, do you know that? How dare you bring your sickness into my life!”
Kelly began sobbing. “I tied her up in her chair. She kept screaming so I took off my socks and stuffed one in her fat mouth. Those same lips that kiss yours each night… really it’s not fair, Noah! I helped myself to your liquor cabinet, particularly the vodka and red bulls. Your medicine cabinet is well stocked, too. The alprazolam and diazepam were delicious!”
Noah lunged at her, grasping at her throat. “What have you done!” he screamed, clenching his powerful fists around her throat. Kelly offered no resistance, her scarred wrists and hands remaining limp by her sides.
The psychiatry team dropped their charts and tried to pull Noah off her. He was like a wild bull. The angelic intern stepped forward and laid his baby soft white hands upon Noah’s shoulders. Dr. Taul reeled around, backhanding him across the room. The intern crashed through the wall and into the next examining area where another patient was having their rectum disimpacted of stool.
“Excuse me,” the intern said politely. “Please carry on with your important work here.” And then he passed out.
The team finally subdued Noah and dragged him away. Kelly let out a few feeble coughs, and then picked up her narration.
“You have such an antiquated collection of records, Noah. I found a few priceless ones… do you remember our song?” She reached into her pocket and produced the tattered scrap of paper, holding it up for all to inspect like a little girl would do for show-and-tell. “Eight six seven five three 0’ nay-eee-ay-eeen.”
“Give her another shot of Haldol!” Noah screamed through tears of rage, blood now trickling from his nose which had likely been broken in the melee. “I never liked that stupid song, Kelly. Why do you to this day still not get it! We were never good together! What did you do to my wife?”
Kelly took a deep sigh. Between playing Noah’s old records for his captive wife and waking up nauseous this morning her memory was a complete blank. “I don’t know… let’s call her and find out.”
Noah snatched his cell phone from his hip holster and called his home. It seemed like an eternity before he heard the first ring. And then the second. On the third ring a deep voice answered: “Hello, this is Detective Roberts?”
Oh God, Noah thought. She’s dead. “This is Dr. Taul. Please tell me how my wife is? Is she… okay?” he asked pleadingly.
“Dr. Taul, I regret to inform you that we found your wife bound and gagged in your apartment. She’s alive, but in a catatonic state of sorts. It would appear that she spent the entire night sitting in your living room chair, bound with duct tape, listening to a certain 1980’s song over and over and over again. I believe we have some questions for you, sir.”
Noah put down the phone and stared exhaustedly across the ER. His wife was alive. He could barely hear Kelly’s screeches as security placed her in four point restraints and led her off to the isolation room.
“Good work!” cheered the constipated patient in the next room, whose disimpaction had been temporarily interrupted. Her beet red face looked absurd peering though the hole in the wall. “That girl sure can sing!”
Dr. Taul shook his head and felt a cautious laugh shaking his belly. His life was steeped in absurdity: the hospital, his relationships, his patients. They were all certifiably insane.
He closed his eyes and pictured Kelly. He saw thick blond hair trailing behind her in the wind, as they drove into the desert in his hot rod convertible. Her laughter filled the air as they both sang along with the radio pumped up at full volume. The world was so full of possibilities then.
Noah gathered his things and walked out of the ER. He could feel the stares of the entire room upon him, but it mattered little. He would go home to his wife, hold her, and tell her how much he loved her.
And then he would have to pick up his old cat from Kelly’s apartment. That little bugger sure could stink up the place.
I’d like to thank all seven authors for contributing fantastic parts of this evolving story. This was done entirely over email. I sent out the original post to Maria, who then passed it on to Madman, who then passed it to Geena, and so forth. Given our hectic schedules, this process took about one month to generate a complete 9-page story of about 3,300 words. Originally I asked the writers to keep their contributions to 200 words or less, but we got excited towards the end and went well over. In order to keep the story seamless I took the liberty of editing certain parts, but the author’s individual contributions were largely left untouched. Any resemblance to real people or places is entirely coincidental. Painting in the public domain here. I hope you had fun reading it, and I’d like to do another traveling story sometime in the future, so let me know if you’re interested.
Thanks again.
You can visit Dr. Charles blog at http://drcharles.blogspot.com/
