The Final Diagnosis Read Free

with the intern who had escorted her to Obstetrics.
    Apparently, as was normal for an urgent case, the intern had cleared the passenger elevator down below on the main floor.
    “All them nice peopl’ movin’ out of th’ elevator fo’ me,” she was saying. “Why, ah nevah felt so important befo’ in all mah life.” At this point Dornberger heard the intern tell the patient to relax and the answer came back, “Relax, sonny? Ah am relaxed. Ah always relaxes when ah has a baby. That th’ only time there’s no dishes, no washin’, no cookin’. Why, ah look forward to comin’ in here. This just a holiday fo’ me.” She paused as pain gripped her. Then, partly through clenched teeth, she muttered, “Nine children ah’ve got, and this’ll be the tenth. Th’ oldest one’s as big as you, sonny. Now you be lookin’ fo’ me a year from now. Ah tell you, ah’ll be back.” Dornberger heard her chuckling as her voice faded, the delivery room nurses taking over, while the intern went back to his post in Emergency.
    Now Dornberger, scrubbed, gowned, sterile, and sweating from the heat, followed his patient into the delivery room.
     
    In the hospital kitchens, where the heat was less of a problem because people who worked there were used to it, Hilda Straughan, the chief dietitian, nibbled a piece of raisin pie and nodded approvingly at the senior pastry cook. She suspected that the calories, along with others, would be reflected on her bathroom scales a week from now but quelled her conscience by telling herself it was a dietitian’s duty to sample as much as possible of the hospital fare. Besides, it was somewhat late now for Mrs. Straughan to be fretting on the subject of calories and weight. The accumulated result of many earlier samplings caused her nowadays to turn the scales around two hundred pounds, a good deal of which was in her magnificent breasts—twin Gibraltars, famed through the hospital, and which made her progress not unlike the majesty of an aircraft carrier preceded by an escort of twin battleships.
    But, as well as food, Mrs. Straughan was in love with her job. Glancing around her with satisfaction, she took in her empire—the shining steel ovens and serving tables, the gleaming utensils, the sparkling white aprons of the cooks and their assistants. Her heart warmed at the sight of all of it.
    This was a busy time in the kitchens—lunch was the heaviest meal of the day because, as well as patients, there was the full hospital staff to be fed in the cafeteria. In twenty minutes or so the diet trays would be going up to the wards, and for two hours afterward the service of food would continue. Then, while the kitchen help cleared and stacked dishes, the cooks would begin preparing the evening meal.
    The thought of dishes caused Mrs. Straughan to frown thoughtfully, and she propelled herself into the back section of the kitchen where the two big automatic dishwashers were installed. This was a part of her domain less gleaming and modern than the other section, and the chief dietitian reflected, not for the first time, that she would be happy when the equipment here was modernized, as the rest of the kitchens had been. It was understandable, though, that everything could not be done at once, and she had to admit she had browbeaten the administration into a lot of expensive new equipment in the two years she had held her job at Three Counties. All the same, she decided as she moved on to check the steam tables in the cafeteria, she would have another talk with the administrator about those dishwashers soon.
     
    The chief dietitian was not the only one in the hospital whose thoughts were on food. In Radiology, on the second floor, an outpatient—Mr. James Bladwick, vice-president of sales for one of Burlington’s big-three automobile dealerships—was, in his own words, “as hungry as hell.”
    There was reason for this. On his physician’s instructions Jim Bladwick had fasted since midnight,