Scene 2 - El Electrocardiógrafo
(en Espanol - google translation)
A man sits in a chair. He stares at the small dim screen sitting on a cart to his right. He adjusts the dials below the screen and hears a soft beep as the crest of the waved line of light on the screen passes a vertical line. “Beep…………..pause……….. beep………….pause…….beep.
But from the thousands of beeps he has heard over the last decade he knows as he peers closer to the screen, that the beeps are too rapid and on the screen he can see between the tall crests the serrated line between them that is the telltale sign of atrial fibrillation. With a slow breath of resignation he takes a piece of notebook paper lying next to the machine and folds it down the long middle. He creases the new edge between his fingers and makes two more folds so as to have formed eight small sections from the single sheet. Again creasing all of the edges he then unfolds the paper and tears off the bottom quarter and then separates that quarter sheet into the eighth of a sheet.
On the shelf below the screen lays a clipboard with a page of fifty lines of handwritten names followed by a birth date and other information. Carefully he records one of the names, birth date and identification numbers onto the small sheet followed by his own name, date and signature. At the bottom of the small sheet he writes, “fibrilación auricular, propranolol 20 mg x 2, diariamente”
The small handwritten sheet remains on the clipboard as he places it back on the shelf beneath the monitor and presses a switch that silences the machine. Then turning to the patient seated in front of him, he gently removes the two leads attached to the middle of their upper chest, placing them on the cart next to the monitor as the patient pulls her blouse back over her shoulders and begins slowly buttoning as he returns to her and says, “Mi amor. Tienes un pequeño aleteo en ese latido del corazón. No hay mucho de qué preocuparse, pero te he recetado propranolol.”
He gently hands her the prescription which she takes in her left hand as her right hand reaches into her lap and with a flick of fingers opens an accordion fan to give herself three gusts of the humid air. “Aye calor! Gracias doctor. Muchas gracias. Siempre es un placer verlo. Espero que su esposa esté bien.”
The doctor thanks her and asks her the same of her family and they speak no more of her condition or the medication as she knows that he knows as does she, that in their city, half the women her age have been prescribed propranolol or medication of a similar sort for heart conditions, anxiety and other ailments, but there is no such medication or substitute to be found in the hospital or the small, pharmacies sitting with their empty shelves throughout the city. And both know that this is not a condition unique to their city, but rather it is a country of elderly with this condition and that the only medicines to be found for it, are found on in the street or rather on a digital highway leading to a black market of items privately imported in the suitcases of the fortunate souls with friends and relatives returning from other countries who then list the medicines for sums that would seem perfectly reasonable in the country of their original purchase, but where a month of medication for the woman would exceed half her family’s, or even the doctor’s family’s total monthly earnings.
But the woman stands, and with an “Adios mi amor” to her doctor, she departs while another perspiring while in waiting settles into the chair before her doctor and begins unbuttoning her blouse as her doctor takes his clipboard and reads to her the next name on his list.
“Sí, ese soy yo.”
“Ah, te recuerdo de tu última cita. ¿Cómo has estado?”
“Muy bien, gracias ¿Y tú y tu esposa?”
“Ella es maravillosa,” he says as he places his stethoscope on her upper chest and begins asking the same series of questions he will ask fifty patients that day, as he gazes down the hallway lined with the infirmed sitting with shallow breaths, and accompanying family members faithfully standing with them, all perspiring in a hospital without air conditioning or a fan to provide the slightest relief from the suffocating mid day tropical heat.
And as he gazes down the hallway those sitting there quietly gaze back at him in a quiet desperate deprivation, some murmuring of the heat and others perhaps asking the simple question shared by all who suffer, “¿Por qué yo, Dios? ¿Por qué yo?”