The little girl had gone back to sleep, but down the ward a gray old woman, whose face was like cracked rock, was breathing with the horrible labor of a heart attack. Rose Standish started to call the student nurse and tell her to get Mattus right away, and then she decided that it was about time she began to remember that she was a patient on the ward and not a nurse.
Miss Kerr returned with the medicine tray. She gave Mrs. Witherspoon her hypodermic, and almost as a sponge does water, the withered body soaked it up, and she fell into a deep slumber. The woman with the thyroid insufficiency had her sleeping potion and began the long slow breathing of a laboring body.
The rain had broken the tension and the women were drifting off before the lights were dimmed. It, with the aid of the drugs, of course, was soothing and lulling them into oblivion. The long, slow torrents fell in strips outside the window and drowned out the labored breathing of the woman with the heart attack.
Rose lay perfectly still, so still she was almost drifting herself. Miss Kerr had reached the bed in which the heart patient lay and at last realized her condition ... a tuned ear could have noted it down the corridor ... she turned and walked prissily off the ward ... not hurrying, and with her hips flat ... and called Dr. Mattus. Rose could hear her cooing out the dying woman’s condition, and gathered that he was coming up.
In a few minutes he appeared and after a quick glance began pumping digitalis into her ... Rose could have told the nurse to do that! Then when she rallied, and after the lights had been dimmed, he came by her bed and said:
“All right, Miss Standish?”
“Perfectly. Thank you.”
He took her pulse and said:
“Good heart you’ve got. Dr. Sterling, Senior, said you could have a sedative if you buckle. Ring for it, if you want it.”
“What’ll it be, doctor?”