The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder by Charles Graeber Read Free Book Online

Charlie was a good nurse, extraordinary even. She was always glad to find his name on the whiteboard schedule. Her doctors had told Amy to take it easy, but with multiple patients under her care, easy wasn’t always an option. Often she had to choose between being careful of her own heart or tending to theirs. With Charlie on shift, she had a third option. He was never too busy to help.

    O n June 14, 2003, Charlie was early by a full half hour—he couldn’t wait. He checked the computerized Cerner charts of various patients and decided on the Oriental lady. 12 Mrs. Jin Kyung Han wasn’t his patient now, but she had problems. Han had come into the hospital June 12 with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and heart disease. Her cardiologist, Dr. Zarar Shaleen, had Han on digoxin already, small doses, usually 0.125 mg, keeping her at the therapeutic level of around 0.63. Her doctor had ordered another dose of digoxin for Han on June 13. Then, when he studied her EKG, he discovered thatdig wasn’t helping her new cardiac arrhythmias. In fact, it might kill her. He ordered that the drug be discontinued.
    At 7 p.m., the nursing shifts went through their handoff report. Charlie was free again by 7:30, going straight to the Pyxis drug computer and calling up dig. He placed an order of the drug for his own patient, then quickly canceled it. The drug drawer popped open anyway. It was that easy. The new security protocols were stupid. Charlie pulled out two units and closed the drawer.
    Charlie entered Han’s room; the woman was asleep. He took the direct route, injecting the digoxin dose as a piggyback into the IV line snaking between the hanging bag and her vein. Han was no longer supposed to receive dig; the IV bolus Charlie injected represented a dose eight times what Han had ever received. 13 Then he ditched the needle in the sharps bin and left the room. It was nearly dawn; the dose would take full effect only after his shift was over. The anticipation echoed across his day off, blurring thought. Charlie reported back for work on the evening of the sixteenth, early, to check. But Han was still there.
    Charlie took the Cerner and went back through her chart. Han’s heart rate had plummeted, she’d been throwing up on the morning shift, and a blood screen found the dig in her system, which had spiked from her normal level of 0.63 up to 9.94. Han’s cardiologist immediately ordered an antidote, and Han settled down. Afterward she teetered through the day shift and into the night, not well, but surviving.

    A my called Charlie in, he was especially good at after-death care, helpful and quick. He had a serious routine, and he didn’t like to talk as he did it. He would wash the body, pull the IV needles from the veins, wrap the lines, unhook the catheters and feeding and vent tubes. Then he gathered the death kit and the shroud. Shroud : to Amy the word conveyed a holy thing, it was solemn and homespun and grave, but at Somerset the shrouds were thin sheets of cheap, clear plastic that ripped easily and were never large enough. They reminded her of generic Saran Wrap. Working alone, her dignified attempts always devolved into macabre slapstick. Wrapping a body required working multiple pieces of this plastic material under the dead weight of the corpse without ripping or wrinkle. It was like making a bed with someone lying in it. Amy’s pulling, lifting, and tugging generallymade a mess of the job. She’d tried fitting the four-foot squares so they overlapped, but there was always a gap in the middle that exposed the belly. Adjusting them this way and that she’d end up with the feet hanging out, then the head uncovered. Eventually she’d simply just wind rolls of tape around the crinkled gob, the way a child wraps a birthday present. Or, better yet, she’d call Charlie.
    Charlie had it down. He squared the sheets neatly and with just the right overlap, angling and creasing and fixing the deceased into a professional polymer cocoon,