Manitou Blood Read Free

care of you. It’s my job. You were lucky that the finest gastroenterologist in the entire Western hemisphere happened to be watching you when you started to bring up all that blood.”
    â€œDo you have any idea what’s wrong with me?” she asked him.
    â€œNot yet. You have very low blood pressure, which iscausing us some serious concern. Your CBC shows that you also have pernicious anemia, which is probably caused by an inability to absorb sufficient quantities of vitamin B12. But neither of those conditions would directly cause you to hemorrhage, and so far we haven’t been able to detect any lesions in your digestive tract or any vesicles in your esophagus.”
    â€œI’m not sure I know what any of that means.”
    â€œIt means, simply, that we haven’t yet discovered what’s wrong with you.”
    She didn’t answer him directly, but turned her face away, so that she was staring at the picture of Jesus. “He looks sad, don’t you think?”
    â€œHave you been feeling at all sick lately?” Frank asked her.
    â€œNo, not exactly. I’ve been feeling . . .
different
.”
    â€œAre you on any medication? Antianxiety agents? Antidepressants? How about diuretics?”
    â€œI take ginger and yarrow, for menstrual cramps.”
    â€œOkay . . . how about alcohol? How much do you drink, on average?”
    â€œA glass of red wine, sometimes. But not very often. I get drunk very easily, and I don’t like losing control.”
    â€œStreet drugs?”
    â€œNever. Well, once, but that was over a year ago.”
    â€œTell me about your diet. Are you a vegetarian?”
    She nodded, although she still kept her face turned away.
    â€œSometimes strict vegetarians suffer from vitamin B12 deficiency,” Frank told her. “It’s pretty easily sorted, though, with tablets or injections.”
    He scribbled a few notes, and then he said, “Dr. Gathering tells me you’re very sensitive to sunlight. How long have you suffered from that?”
    â€œI don’t know . . . three or four days. Maybe longer. I can’t really remember.”
    â€œIs it just your eyes, or is your skin sensitive, too? Do you get a rash or anything like that?”
    Susan Fireman shook her head. “I can’t go out without my makeup, even if the sun’s not shining.”
    â€œWhat happens if you don’t wear makeup?”
    â€œIt
hurts
. It feels like I’m standing an inch too close to a furnace.”
    Frank made a note to talk to Dr. Xavier, the skin specialist. Then he said, “You’ve been having recurrent nightmares, too, I understand?”
    Susan Fireman pulled a dismissive face, as if she didn’t want to talk about it.
    â€œA recurrent nightmare can sometimes be a symptom of an underlying medical problem. It’s your body sending a warning to your brain that something might be seriously wrong.”
    â€œI don’t know . . . this feels more like a
memory
than a nightmare.”
    â€œYou keep dreaming that you’re on board a ship, is that it? And you’re shut up inside a box, in the dark.”
    â€œNot just shut up. The lid’s screwed down tight. And there are more boxes stacked on top of my box, so that I couldn’t possibly get out, even if it
wasn’t
.”
    â€œI see. So how do you know you’re on board a ship?”
    â€œBecause I can feel it moving. It pitches up and down, and then it rolls. And I can hear timbers creaking, and the sound of the ocean. Sometimes I hear somebody shouting, in a very singsong way, and that frightens me more than anything else.”
    â€œDo you know who it is?”
    Susan Fireman turned back and looked at him. “It’s a boy, by the sound of it. He shouts out something like
tatal nostru
, over and over again. There’s a whole lot more but when I wake up I can never remember it.”
    â€œTattle nostrew? Do you have any idea