Warday

First patient is a cancer case who’s been triaged. He comes for counseling, staging of his disease, and visualization therapy. VT works well for certain cancers, especially tumors of the cerebral cortex, but Joe T.’s bone cancer is proving resistant to our best efforts. He is in great pain. I have been prescribing wild lettuce juice rubbed in at pressure points—armpits especially—for its narcotic effect, but the pain is now breaking through even this drug, which is one of the strongest in my pharmacopoeia. I notice that he is coughing. His disease has spread to his lungs or he has acquired a secondary pneumonia. I tell Joe that he probably has at most a couple more months. He will suffer great agony. I recommend that he let me help him to sleep. His wife comes into the treatment room and the three of us agree. I know not to draw these things out. Joe could go to the hospital for euthanasia, but they would probably make him wait another week. Also, they do not do it with the same atmosphere of love and support. Kathy calls the Rosewooders who are available and we go together to the ritual space we have built at the back of the house. This is a large, pleasant room, full of sun from the skylights. There are flowers in vases. We take Joe to the big lounger and he lies back on it. I pour a tincture of henbane in his ear. His wife of twenty years sits beside him. They gaze at one another, talk a little. They cry. The henbane tincture is very powerful. When we see he is beginning to lose consciousness, we begin to sing. We sing “Deep River,” then one of our own songs, “Joy in the Morning.” Sometime during the last song, Joe’s eyes roll back and he coughs three times, quite violently. His wife calls him once, then again, louder. Then she bows her head.

7:45 A.M. I see a child with persistent diarrhea. A manual examination of his abdomen indicates gas. The transverse colon is tender. A rectal feels clear. Still, there aren’t any intestinal bugs going around and he has been eating his usual diet. He isn’t triaged, so I call the hospital and order up a colon study, and refer it to my Project Partnership M.D., Dr. Stanford Gittleson. Sandy will see the boy at three o’clock this afternoon. The sonograms of the child’s colon will be in his hands by then. I say a silent prayer, Goddess grant that all this child needs is a little sumac root and peppermint tea.

7:55 A.M. I see an elderly woman whose symptoms suggest NSD. I prescribe a depurative tea of burdock root and red clover blossom and a cataplasm of comfrey leaf, which we currently have available. One of the coveners takes her into the instruction room to teach her the use of the medicants and give her supplies. Because she is over sixty, I do not charge her. I will wait until the disease progresses a little more before I tell her what she has.

Over the next four hours I see thirty more patients. Then I stop for a lunch of soybean soup and a glass of milk. Afterward I drink a cup of bee balm tea and read the Plain Dealer. There were two fires in Cleveland last night. Since insurance ended, the number of fires in this country has decreased dramatically.

2:00 P.M. I fill out my daily report for the Relief. Mainly, the English want to know about any contagious diseases. Except for a possible with the little boy I referred to Sandy, I don’t have any.

Unless NSD is contagious. If the English or the Research Group in Chicago know the answer to that question, they certainly aren’t telling us.

I’d like a bath, but there’s no time for that. I wash my hands instead, and then it’s time to meet one of my psychotherapy groups. Since Warday the number of people in therapy has dropped by more than half. I think most of us work so hard we don’t have time to be crazy. And nobody in this group is actually insane, not in the classic sense. There are ten members, five of them with touch neurosis, which is one of the more common current problems. There are many people who have developed a pathological terror of touching things because of the threat of hidden radiation. Two of my male patients suffer from impotence. Again, fear is a strong factor here. I have two women who have recently discovered they are gene-damaged, and one who is trying to cope with being triaged at the age of twenty-six, as a result of drinking strontium 90 in some milk she got last year in Dallas. Everybody is scared of milk because of the way cows concentrate strontium 90, but it has become a vitally important food. Milk, eggs, dairy products, soybeans, corn, and oats are our staples nowadys. Some chicken, but eggs are now too important to justify the slaughter of potential layers.