§ 226 Down and Out for the Count
Dr. Jones, a young physician with a growing practice, had been going night and day for the better part of a week. If it wasn’t the stork busy in one part of the town it was the malaria microbe busy in another. He kept up his round of visits until exhausted nature demanded a respite.
He staggered into his house in the evening completely fagged out, and tumbled into bed, telling his wife that, excepting upon a matter of life and death, he was not to be called.
At two o’clock in the morning she came to his bedside, shook him, pinched him, slapped him in the face with a wet washrag and finally roused him to a state of semi-consciousness. Mrs. Smith, physically the biggest woman in town, had been seized with a heart attack at her home on the next street and he was wanted immediately.
He struggled to his feet, threw a few garments on over his night-clothes, caught up his emergency kit and in a sort of walking trance made his way to the Smith residence. A frightened member of the household led him to the sick-room. There the patient lay, a great mountain of flesh, her features congested and her breath coming in laborious panting. Dr. Jones took her pulse and her temperature and examined her eyes, her lips and her tongue. Then he perched himself in a half recumbent attitude upon the side of the bed, put his right ear against her left breast and said:
“Madam, will you kindly start counting very slowly? Now then, one-two-three and so on. Go on until I tell you to stop.”
Obediently the sufferer began.
The next thing Dr. Jones knew was when a shaft of bright morning sunlight fell upon his face, and, drowsily, he heard a faint, weak female voice saying:
“Nine-thousand-seven-hundred and one, nine-thousand-seven-hundred and two——!”