Without Her Consent Read online

  The older nurse nodded.

  ‘Once everything is taken care of here in the room,’ said Angela to the two nurses, ‘I want to see you both in my office.’

  Angela removed her gown, put her shoes on and walked over to the aide holding the newborn and took one last look. ‘Let me hold him for one minute,’ said Angela, smiling at the baby while the aide carefully passed the child to her.

  ‘You’re an amazing little boy, aren’t you,’ Angela said cooing directly to the baby. ‘I’ve delivered my share of kids. That makes me an expert when it comes to knowing a cute baby when I see one.’ She took a long last look at the baby in her arms, and reluctantly passed him back to the waiting aide.

  ‘Lourdes, thirty minutes, in my office,’ said Angela as she left the room and headed back downstairs to the administrative floor. So many thoughts and questions rattled around in her head that she couldn’t think straight. The only thing she knew for sure was that her life was about to become a living hell.

  Being an administrator was supposed to bring balance to my life. No middle of the night phone calls, strictly nine to five. When the board hears about this, they’re going to crucify me. She shook her head in an attempt to block all the negative thoughts but it didn’t work.

  Her assistant, Vera, looked up from her computer when she heard the familiar sound of Angela’s heels clicking on the tiled floor as she walked down the hall. ‘Everything okay, Angela?’ said the grandmother of three, noticing the peculiar expression on Angela’s usually composed face.

  ‘No, everything is not okay.’

  ‘Can I help you with anything?’

  Angela signaled for Vera to follow her into her office. Once inside, Angela closed the door. ‘You’re going to find out, anyway,’ Angela said. ‘But, you’ve got to commit to complete secrecy on this. Do you understand?’

  Vera’s eyes grew round as she nodded.

  ‘One of our patients on 3 West just delivered a baby boy.’

  ‘3 West?’ Vera gasped. ‘But half the people in that wing are on respirators, some with feeding tubes. Everyone on that floor is in a coma.’

  ‘That’s correct,’ said Angela with a sigh.

  ‘But, then how…’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ said Vera, placing her hands on her newly flushed cheeks. ‘What do you think happened?’

  ‘I-I don’t know,’ said Angela, rubbing her temples. ‘I have such a headache right now, I can’t think straight.’

  ‘Do you think someone actually…?’

  ‘I don’t know what to think,’ snapped Angela. ‘This situation is now our singular priority, do you understand? Move everything else off my calendar. Cancel my appointments for the next week. All hell’s about to break loose and it’s going to get ugly.’

  Thirty minutes later, Jenny O’Hearn and Lourdes Castro were seated in Angela’s office.

  ‘Start from the beginning,’ said Angela.

  Jenny took a deep breath. ‘Eliza is checked three times a day,’ she said.

  ‘Set times?’ asked Angela.

  ‘Yes. She’s checked in the morning on first rounds and in the evening between seven and nine,’ said Jenny. ‘She’s also usually seen at a random time between eleven and three when she’s rolled and changed to prevent bedsores. During that session she might also be washed, it depends on the day.’

  ‘What happens on the morning and evening visits?’

  ‘We check the feeding tubes, vitals, temperature, equipment,’ said Jenny. ‘We make sure everything is running properly.’

  ‘How is it that nobody noticed the woman was pregnant?’ demanded Angela glaring at Lourdes, the floor supervisor.

  ‘We don’t examine her abdomen,’ said Lourdes. ‘I mean, I’d only look at it if there was some kind of a problem. The machines record all her numbers automatically. Aides are the ones who change her and move her around so we don’t have any infections.’

  ‘None of the aides noticed she was nine months pregnant?’

  ‘We don’t know if she was nine months pregnant,’ interrupted Lourdes.

  ‘I’ve delivered a lot of babies. That baby was close to full term,’ said Angela impatiently. ‘How is it possible that no one saw any of this?’

  ‘She was on her back, and probably carrying small because of her limited calorie intake. I never looked under her blankets,’ said Jenny.

  ‘Maybe you should have,’ hissed Angela.

  Tears welled up in Jenny’s eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to snap at you,’ said Angela softening. ‘This has all been extremely stressful.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Jenny. ‘It’s a terrible situation.’

  While tapping her dark pink nails on the desk, Angela grilled the two nurses for over thirty minutes. Neither woman could offer any further information that could explain how Eliza Stern got pregnant or how it had gone undetected for so long.

  Minutes after the women left her office, a young pediatrician from their sister hospital next door, Oceanside Medical Center, knocked on Angela’s door.

  ‘Did you examine the baby?’ Angela asked the young male doctor.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He seems just fine,’ said the pediatrician with a thick Boston accent. ‘Everything checks out. High APGAR score. Breathing normal, color normal. Weight, a little small but acceptable. I’d say he’s somewhere between thirty-four to thirty-six weeks, give or take. He was sleeping quietly in the arms of one of your nurses when I got there.’

  ‘That’s the first good news I’ve heard today,’ said Angela with an audible sigh of relief. ‘At least the baby’s healthy, that’s the most important thing, isn’t it?’

  ‘You want to tell me what’s going on, Dr. Crawford? Why is there a baby here?’ asked the pediatrician.

  Angela rolled her eyes, as she filled the pediatrician in on what had happened.

  ‘Oh boy,’ said the pediatrician, shaking his head as he walked to the door. ‘You’ve got yourself one wicked situation.’

  After he left, Angela had to make the call she had been dreading since the moment she first saw Eliza Stern starting to crown. She had been putting it off, but she had to call the hospital board. About to punch the board president’s number into her phone, she changed her mind and decided to do a video call with her boss, Frank Farwell. Dr. Farwell was the actual facility administrator of Oceanside Manor and Angela was filling for him while he was on a year-plus-long sabbatical in Ecuador. She and Frank were not particularly close and he had a nasty habit of talking down to her. Still, he usually had a cool head during a crisis and this was, in her estimation, the mother of all crises. Frank had been running Oceanside Manor for twenty years and Angela desperately needed his advice before she dealt with the all-male hospital board.

  4

  Thousands of miles away in Guayaquil, Ecuador, Frank Farwell’s thinning red hair barely covered his middle-aged scalp. He had convinced himself that his follicular magic tricks hid the fact that he was balding. Every morning he made a concerted effort to carefully comb each strand into place, securing them with industrial-strength hairspray. He thought it worked well and no one noticed. They did.

  Sitting in his small bare-bones office outfitted with metal furniture in the back corner of one of the largest and most rundown hospitals in the sprawling city, he opened up a brown paper packet that contained his lunch and licked his lips with anticipation. His time in South America, as part of a medical intelligence exchange program had been eye-opening and gratifying, and was nearly over. His team of American and British doctors and nurses had introduced hospital administration best practices to some of the poorest facilities in South America. His group had made real progress in updating facilities, improving systems and bringing them into the new millennium. The program would ultimately save many lives.

  He had just taken a second bite of shawarma, spiced chicken served in a pita, a Middle Eastern street food popular in Ecu
ador, when a video call came through on his laptop. Angela Crawford’s image popped up on the screen, and made him audibly groan before he accepted it. Communication from Angela was usually bad news. So far, all the calls he had received from her since he left were one annoyance after another. He continued to eat his chicken shawarma while his computer call buzzed until guilt won out and he accepted her call.

  ‘Angela, what a pleasant surprise.’ Farwell said, wiping a blob of creamy red sauce from the corner of his mouth. ‘You don’t mind if I eat my lunch while we chat, do you?’

  Dispensing with any niceties, Angela got right to the point and laid out the events that had taken place that day.

  ‘Is this some kind of a joke?’ said Frank half-laughing after Angela finished her sordid tale. He glanced around his office for hidden cameras. ‘You’re punking me from three thousand miles away, right? Where’s the camera crew?’

  ‘This isn’t a joke, Frank,’ said Angela, pursing her lips. ‘An hour ago, on 3 West, I delivered Eliza Stern’s baby. It was a boy, in case you’re interested.’

  Frank Farwell, usually never at a loss for words, was uncharacteristically silent. Mouth open, eyes wide, he stared in disbelief at Angela’s image on the screen.

  ‘Frank? Are you listening to me?’

  The staccato sound of Angela’s voice drew him back into the moment. ‘Umm…What’s the condition of the baby and the mother?’ he asked, suddenly all business.

  ‘They’re both fine,’ said Angela. ‘Eliza is resting comfortably, no post-partum problems and the baby, though a little on the small side, is extremely healthy. I had one of the pediatricians from Oceanside Medical examine him. Everything checked out. I’ve assigned nurses in the room 24/7 to look after both mother and baby.’

  ‘How could something like this happen?’ said Frank, getting animated, his voice growing louder.

  ‘I don’t know, Frank. If I did, I wouldn’t be calling you in South America. I need your help, not your condemnation.’

  ‘I can tell you one thing, you’re about to have a massive PR holocaust.’

  Angela stared at Frank for several seconds. Are you going to help me or not, you fat windbag?

  ‘First thing you need to do is call the hospital board. Get a hold of Bob Beckmann,’ said Frank, blowing out a breath of air. ‘As the Oceanside Manor board president, he’s got a right to know what’s going on and needs to be brought into the loop immediately. He’s not going to be happy, I can tell you that.’

  ‘Tell me something I don’t already know. Beckmann is a misogynistic lunatic,’ said Angela. ‘He’s going to unleash all his vitriol on me.’

  ‘Put on your big girl pants, Angie. You wanted my job so badly. This is what comes with the territory,’ said Frank starting to lecture.

  Angela looked into his eyes and thought she detected he was gloating. It pissed her off, but she bit her tongue.

  ‘Once the board’s been briefed,’ Frank continued, ‘you’ll need to interview every single staff member to get to the bottom of this situation. Scratch what I just said, you have to talk to anyone who’s set foot in the goddamn building in the past nine or ten months. Also, you’d better check all the other female patients to make sure no one else is pregnant.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ gasped Angela, ‘I didn’t even think of that. You don’t think there are others?’

  Satisfied that he was still the head honcho running the show, Frank stuffed the remainder of his shawarma in his mouth and chewed. A thin rivulet of creamy red sauce trickled down his chin and he reached up with a napkin and wiped it away.

  ‘You think there could be more women?’ asked Angela again. ‘Frank, you’ve got to come back, now.’

  ‘No way,’ he said with his mouth full of chicken. ‘Why would I want to step into this mess and slime my reputation? Not a chance. Besides, I’m committed here for a few more months. I can’t just pick up and leave. We’re in the middle of a big hospital overhaul and I’m the project director.’

  Angela sighed loudly.

  ‘You can handle this, Angela. You’ve always been a smart cookie. And frankly, this happened on your watch, not mine. I’m not dipping my toes into this crap. It’s your debacle, you clean it up.’

  ‘Eliza Stern’s pregnancy could have occurred before you left,’ said Angela bitterly. ‘Technically, Frank, this could have happened during your watch. Based on the size of the baby, Eliza could have been impregnated right around the time you were leaving.’

  ‘You wanted to be top dog, Angela, now you have to deal with what comes with it. What’s that saying? “Our greatest glory is not in never falling but rising up every time we fall.”’

  ‘I don’t need greeting card philosophy right now. I need help. This isn’t a normal situation and you know that.’

  ‘That’s an understatement. It’s a bloody disaster,’ said Frank. ‘Let’s call it, what it is. Rape. Somebody raped that young woman and you need to find out who, how, and when it happened. The why is sadly obvious. There are a lot of sick people in this world, Angela, and apparently one of them was at our facility and got his jollies off. Bottom line—you’ve had a massive security breach at Oceanside Manor and it’s going to reflect badly on our parent hospital, Oceanside Medical. I don’t need to tell you that the board will not be pleased. Buckle your seat belt, things are going to get rough.’

  Angela let out another loud breath.

  ‘You can do this,’ said Frank quasi-reassuringly. ‘If it makes you feel any better, in a misery-loves-company sort of way, I won’t get off free and clear on this situation either. There will be plenty of aftershock left for me to deal with when I come back,’ said Frank, feeling a little sorry for his colleague. ‘You realize that this kind of story isn’t going to disappear overnight.’

  ‘What do I do first?’ asked Angela.

  ‘The police have to be brought in for sure. But, you can do a little end-run before you call them to keep the hospital’s PR risk to a minimum,’ said Frank. ‘My advice would be to see if you can identify who the perpetrator is or at least narrow it down and have the cops make a quick, quiet arrest and put the whole damn thing to bed—fast, before the reporters spin it into a tsunami.’

  ‘Reporters?’

  ‘The press is going to be all over this story which is why the sooner we can wrap it up, the better. The longer this investigation takes, the more the media will make it their headline. It’s exactly the kind of story that sells newspapers and bumps up ratings on cable news shows. And, don’t even get me started on the tabloids. You don’t want that to happen under any circumstances. The board doesn’t want that either. Clear?’

  When the call was over, a mentally and physically exhausted Angela closed her laptop and texted her husband.

  Babe, will be late tonight, got a situation going on at work. Will explain when I see you. Eat without me. Love you. Xo

  5

  Fifteen minutes later, while on speakerphone, Angela broke the explosive news to notoriously abusive board president, Bob Beckmann, and several other board members. After she finished downloading what little she knew, everyone on the call started talking at once, pointing metaphorical fingers and asking a million questions.

  ‘I don’t have any logical explanation for what happened, but I assure you we will get to the bottom of it,’ said Angela as coolly as she could muster. ‘I promise that we will find out how this happened and who did this.’

  ‘I know how it goddamn happened,’ growled Beckmann. ‘Some perverted handyman or intern got his rocks off with a defenseless, unconscious woman in a goddamn coma. What kind of person does something like that? It’s like having sex with a dead body. What the hell is that called?’

  ‘Narcolepsy,’ said the voice of another board member on the group call.

  ‘Right,’ said Beckmann, ‘narcolepsy. You’ve got some depraved narcoleptic mental case running around loose in your hospital assaulting patients. What kind of place are you running over there, Angela?’

>   Another voice interrupted on the speaker. ‘Excuse me, Bob, I think you meant to say, necrophilia, not narcolepsy. My understanding is that necrophilia is when you get turned on by dead bodies whereas narcoleptics are people who fall asleep all the time.’

  ‘I don’t give a shit whether they’re dead, sleeping or standing on their fucking heads,’ screamed Beckmann. ‘This is a PR nightmare and we need to contain this.’

  ‘Bob, please calm down,’ said Angela in quiet measured tones. ‘We still don’t know anything yet. It just happened. We don’t know if it was an employee. It could have been an outside contractor or a delivery man, even the mailman. Hundreds of people come into this facility every year for all sorts of reasons. Tradespeople, clergy, medical students, visitors, family, staff, deliveries. It’s endless.’

  ‘Every man who has been inside that building in the last nine months needs to be interrogated and have his DNA checked,’ said Beckmann. ‘Am I making myself clear?’

  ‘Very clear,’ said Angela quietly, ‘but by law, people do not have to provide their DNA if they don’t want to.’

  ‘Figure it out! The fallout from this could be a financial disaster for the entire Oceanside Medical Center. How do you think the other families with loved ones in our care are going to react? They could shut us down and the lawsuits could be astronomical. They could even hold the board and you personally responsible, Angela. Did you think of that?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘People sue people for anything in the United States, especially if they think they can make money,’ said Beckmann. ‘We could all be sued. I’ve seen it happen before.’ Everyone on the speakerphone started talking and protesting at once.

  ‘Quiet!’ sounded Beckmann’s loud bark from the black box. ‘Angela, I will call our corporate attorneys to give them a heads-up before any of this gets out. They’ll tell us what we can and can’t say. One thing I’m sure of, if we don’t handle this exactly right, you and everyone on the Oceanside Manor staff will be out of a job. Oceanside Medical Center isn’t going to let this stain their high hospital rating. They’ll just move all the patients to one of their other facilities and shut you down.’