The Final Push

But John Doe didn’t die. Instead, over the past month he had improved, and as he got better, Lisa got worse. It was like he had tapped into her life force and was draining it. The drug-addled waste-of-life was slowly healing. The beautiful young woman full of promise was slowly dying. She ate very little, drank even less, and spent most of each day in bed. She’d lost an alarming amount of weight, her temples hollowed out, eyes sunken and ribs showing, as though she had metastatic cancer. Higgins had seen enough cancer patients succumb to the disease to know that Lisa’s current state—her failure to thrive—was not compatible with life, not for very long. But she refused intervention—from him, from her family, from anyone who loved her. So, as Higgins stood quietly at Doe’s bedside, with a nasogastric tube in one hand, and a syringe containing a lethal dose of potassium chloride in the other, he knew that this time he had to act. No more dry runs. It was his last night on call for the trauma service. Monday morning he’d start his psychiatry rotation, in a different hospital, blocks away. He’d no longer have access to John Doe.