Parishioners and Other Stories. Joseph Dylan
who grew weaker by the day. “Can’t you get him to eat,” her mother implored her. “Can’t you get him to take his medicine.” All Zhang Heng could do was shake her head. Her father was a strong-willed man who’d resolved in his own mind he was dying, and wasn’t for a minute going to follow the futile instructions of his family or his doctors. He refused to eat. He refused to take his medications. He lasted about nine months after Zhang Heng’s return to Kashgar.
Remaining in Kashgar for about a month after her father’s services, Heng then moved to Shanghai to assume a position as a registered nurse in a clinic that was designed to care for expats with medical insurance and the more well-healed Chinese who didn’t want to deal with the inefficiency, the ineptitude, or the filth of the Chinese clinics and hospitals. Aptly, the clinic was called the International Medical Centre. A clinic for foreigners, she was convinced, would be better than working in a Chinese hospital or clinic. Nothing could be as dreadful as working at the hospital in Urumqi. During this time, there was a recession in the West and nursing jobs were hard to come by for foreign nurses, even those who had extensive experience overseas. To Zhang Heng, the private clinic seemed like a reasonable compromise. The pay at the International Medical Centre was better than it was for nurses in the local hospitals and she could keep up with her English language skills. IMC, as the clinic was called by the staff and the patients, was housed in an enormous, modern stone and steel structure that contained a five-star hotel, a shopping mall, and an office complex. The clinic took up the better part of the third floor of the shopping mall overlooking the Pu River. For four years, she had worked at the IMC.
There were only one or two patients in the waiting room of the International Medical Centre. There were only three or four patients in the exam rooms with their doctors. Business at the clinic that afternoon was slow. It had been slow probably due to the rain. In the nurses’s room, Zhang Heng knelt on a chair next to the window, one arm on the backrest, the other arm holding back the drape, looking out at the street and river below. Rain continued to splatter on the street and river below her. “Still raining?” asked Xiao Chen, the chief nurse, sitting at her desk, her back to the window. JoAnne Wang and Gao Peng, two of the other full-time nurses, were also in the staff room. Some of the nurses went by their adopted English names, while some went by their Chinese ones. Zhang Heng went by Sarah, the name emblazoned on her name tag, though she preferred to be called Heng.
“Still raining,” replied Zhang Heng looking over her shoulder at Xiao Chen.
“It’s supposed to rain tomorrow, too,” replied Xiao Chen, without looking up from the nursing schedule that she was making up for the next month. Just then the phone rang. Chen picked up the receiver. It was the receptionists’ desk. “Hao da,” said Chen into the phone. Placing the receiver down in its cradle, she turned to the other nurses sitting behind her. “Dr. Abrahim wants some blood drawn on his patient,” she said. “He wants a blood count and coags. The patient’s in the treatment room.”
“I’ll go,” said Gao Peng, who started to stand up from the chair where she was sitting.
“No, I’ll go,” said Zhang Heng. “You did the last blood draw. It’s my turn. Besides, there’s nothing to see but the rain, and I’m getting bored.” Getting up from the chair where she was kneeling, she placed the drape back where it had been. She walked over to the shelf next to the back wall of the nurses’s station and reaching up took a phlebotomy tray from the shelf. On the metal tray were alcohol swabs, gauze, bandaids, blood tubes, a tourniquet, and a green, plastic Vacutainer holder with stainless steel needle for the blood tubes. Washing her hands with soap, she then walked down the clinic’s sole hallway to the treatment room. On the plastic paper holder on the door was deposited the lab request for the blood sample.
Zhang Heng opened the door. Sitting in a chair, the chair where the patients sat when the nurses drew their blood, was a smallish man, the heels of his shoes barely touching the floor. She looked at the blood order sheet for the man’s name: it was Rosenthal, Joshua Rosenthal. Inquiring if this was indeed him, he nodded as he replied amiably, “Call me Josh, everyone else does.” he said as he began unbuttoning the cuff of his right sleeve. “What may I call you?” He was a thin man, all sinew and bone, with a sharp protuberant nose and cheek bones that gave him the look of an exotic predatory bird. Thin wisps of reddish hair going grey hair stuck out from the sides of the crown of his head, the majority of his scalp being bald. He laughed jovially as he asked her her name. With his manner, with his red hair protruding from the side of his head, and with his twinkling eyes, he reminded Heng of a circus clown she had once seen in an old American movie about the Ringling Brothers. A big bulbous nose and over-sized shoes would have completed the picture. Though he had the enormous smile of a circus clown, his smile was the least bit crooked.
Slightly abashed, not knowing how seriously to take his jovial manner, she said. “The others call me Heng. You can call me Sarah.”
“No, I like Heng.” He smiled even more broadly. “Heng, that’s a pretty name I like
Heng well enough.”
“I need your left arm.” She set the phlebotomy tray down on the table next to the chair where Rosenthal sat and then took the chair facing him.
“Heng, you see I’m left-handed, so they always draw the blood from my right arm.”
“They do?...In China, they say that left-handed people are clever. Are you clever Mr. Rosenthal?”
He guffawed. “You tell me!”
‘If I had to guess, I’d think you’re clever enough. Now, let’s see your right arm then.” Having unbuttoned the cuff, he rolled up his right shirtsleeve.
“Yes. I have an INR done every two weeks. See, I’m on warfarin as a blood thinner so they have to follow my coagulation studies to make sure I’m taking the right amount.
You see I had a blood clot. I had a blood clot that went to my lungs. Been on warfarin ever since... Hey, I remember you. I remember you well. You’ve drawn my blood before.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t remember.” He’d finished rolling up the sleeve on his right arm. Heng surveyed his veins for a place to stick the Vacutainer needle.
“Oh, I remember. I recall you well. The other nurses usually have trouble drawing my blood. You hit the vein on the first try. You might not remember, but it’s the sort of thing that a patient remembers, believe me. Nobody likes to get stuck twice.”
“I suppose you’re right.” She took the rubber hose that served as the tourniquet and wrapped it around his frail arm. She sat down on the stool next to his chair and began patting down the hollow of his elbow to get the veins to swell and come up. Gazing at him, seeing the thin, reddish-gray hair over the bald scalp, the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, the creases that spread out radially from his mouth and the few liver spots on his face, she assumed Rosenthal was her father’s age, her father’s age when he had still been alive. “Make a fist,” she told him.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I know the routine.” Smiling, he made a fist. If only half her patients were this enthused when they had to have their blood drawn.
“I guess they would if they had to have this done every two weeks.” She put on latex gloves. With an alcohol swab, she cleansed the small hollow of his elbow, where she’d be drawing the blood. Having sterilized the area, she took out the Vacutainer and placed one of the blood sample tubes in it. “You’re going to feel a little stick,” she said as she drove the vacutainer needle into his skin. When she pushed the Vacutainer tube into the Vacutainer, no blood came out. She had missed the vein. She missed the vein that she apparently had no trouble hitting before when she drew Rosenthal’s blood. Moving the Vacutainer back and forth and in and out, she probed searching for the vein. “You shouldn’t have said anything about me being the only nurse who could draw your blood,” she muttered. “I’ve missed. Hold on.” She plunged the needle in one slightly deeper. Suddenly, blood spurted into the Vacutainer tube. As the blood rushed in, she released the tourniquet. “There we go.” In all, she took two Vacutainer bottles from Rosenthal, one for a blood count and one for coagulation studies. Having drawn the