Impuls

Aster

Wood stares at her, and Emily's knees shake for some reason.

* * *

The wards in the neurology ward at Royal London Hospital are like rooms in an expensive hotel: beds with high, soft mattresses, staff call buttons at the headboard, drawer drawers by each bed; wide, light-colored cabinets along the walls; and water coolers. Almost every room has four patients with similar diagnoses; probably to make it less boring to spend time, or perhaps to make it a little easier for the attending physician. There are no televisions, but there are miniature folding tables hidden at the base of each bed; through the tinted glass of the doors, Emily sees that some of them have laptops on them.

When she first moved to London, she was fascinated by the British way of hanging curtains – thin, arched cotton in pastel shades, gathered in two places, so that the middle is longer than the sides. There's no such thing here-the panoramic windows can't be curtained; but by pressing the mechanism, the blinds can be fully opened and let the pale sun into the rooms.

This was Emily's first time in Block F: her practice was limited to the orthopedic ward, where she had been assigned to work initially, and, very occasionally, to the emergency room. There, the emergency room was the most interesting place to work; but unfortunately, Melissa quickly gave the position to another nurse, older and more experienced.

Emily turns her head, looking around like a child in a new place.

Neurology occupies the entire sixth floor of the building; only Oncology is higher, taking over two areas at once. According to the signpost, the fifth floor is occupied by hematology and endocrinology; the fourth floor is the giant immunology department and everything related to it; the third floor leads to the physiotherapy center and other healing procedures; the second floor is occupied by rheumatology with its many patients and the vascularization center – a glass corridor leads to the next building.

There were other floors, other centers, and detailed plans of each, hanging on the walls and in the elevators, but Emily never paid much attention to that. For her, even part of the main medical block was a veritable maze she would never climb into without a guide.

A giant anthill.

– Stop standing there," Avis says suddenly angrily, almost throwing the file at her. – Take it. Gather some more anamnesis and take it to Moss. Good luck with that.

Emily doesn't have time to say anything: Wood runs away, holding a stack of cards; and she herself is picked up by a maelstrom of white coats and carried to the wards.

Neurology is noisy and large; not as noisy as the emergency room – another circle of life's chaos – but there is a lot of staff, and Emily doesn't understand: how is it that only four people didn't leave, that they weren't replaced? And why did Wood get so worked up in the first place?

Thoughts bounce: too much emotion for one day; usually in her gray life everything is measured and scheduled, here a drip, there a shot, and here to help the orderlies in surgery; but today it's as if all her stability crumbles.

Brick by brick.

Here and there the yellow badges of the operating room nurses flickered, voices buzzed, the metal handrails of the wheelchairs rattled; the whole space was filled with sounds and conversations. Trying to concentrate, Emily leans against a cool wall in a nook and opens a folder.

Unnamed girl, she reads, admission overnight; under "diagnosis," cortical blindness, followed by the tests performed: visometry, CT scan of the head. In small handwriting, barely legible, along the bottom edge of the sheet are sprawling letters: retrograde. Emily clears her throat: How do you find the room of a man with no name among hundreds of other patients? The smart guy who filled out the chart wrote nothing else, and she quickly got the feeling that the girl who was admitted had simply been forgotten about.

She wandered through dozens of doors, searching for her patient, until suddenly she found her in the farthest room: three of the four beds were empty, and the fourth was hidden from view by a wide screen. Johnson wouldn't even have noticed if her palm wasn't clearly visible through the taut fabric.

Duty:

– Hi, I'm Emily. I'll be working with you.

And she comes closer.

She has a snow-white bandage over her eyes; the same bandage wraps around her head, visibly thickening at the back, as if after a recent operation. She is gaunt and skinny, as if she had been malnourished for years; and her skinny arms, covered with a network of scratches, move nonstop over and around the bedspread – groping the screen, clinging to the corners of the handrail, twisting the wires.

– Dr. Higgins has already worked with you-" she looks at the chart, "-Higgins. He prescribed some treatments for you. Do you remember that?

The nameless girl nods briefly:

– Will you tell me what's wrong with me?

Her voice is so calm that Emily is momentarily lost: Is she really completely blind?

– Dr. Higgins thinks it's some kind of acquired blindness. – Emily adjusts her pillow. – But the diagnosis hasn't been confirmed yet. You also have partial amnesia, but you've probably been told that. It's not so bad, because right now you can still remember events; but it will take time to get an accurate diagnosis. – She pulls out a blank, blank sheet and enters readings from the screens. – I'll take you for an echo and an electroencephalography today. Now we need to rule out arteriovenous malformation… – She stammers. – It's, uh, when your veins and arteries are tied together so tightly that they interfere with the flow of blood in them. You see…? – Waiting for a nod, Emily continues, "So you and I will stop by the angiography on the way; they will look at your vessels again. She sits down in the easy chair and irritably tucks a newly dislodged strand behind her ear.

– There is one "but. – The girl turns her head at the sound. – I don't remember anything.

– We'll remember together. – Emily prepares to take notes. – Imagine you're putting together a mosaic. Do you think you like mosaics? – Nod again. – Great. I don't need to know that much, but you try anyway. Okay…? Let's start simple then…

The scant information I've gathered is enough to fill in the blanks and find out how she got here: yellow street lights, neon signs on Stepney, screeching tires, and the lights of the paramedics' car. She, says the patient, had red hair – the one that found me. I remembered that because I feel like I had red, too. Scarlet. Like blood.

And confusedly, defenselessly she adds:

– You know, I wasn't sick with anything. Nothing. I am sure of it.

The scant information I've gathered is enough to fill in the blanks and find out how she got here: yellow streetlights, neon signs on Stepney, screeching tires, and the lights of the paramedics' car. She, says the patient, had red hair – the one that found me. I remembered that because I feel like I had red, too. Scarlet. Like blood.