Chapter Text
“Read the form again.”
“That would be the third time we’ve been over this. You’re gonna make me carsick.”
Dr. Rosalene tightens her grip on the steering wheel, squinting from the glare. The stop-and-go highway traffic has left them with far too much time to mull this case over. There’s the shuffling of papers and a loud, dramatic sigh from Dr. Watts beside her as he reorganizes their patient’s folder.
“It’s all written here, I promise. Can you stop asking me now?”
“This can’t be legal.”
“That’s corporate’s business, not ours.”
“She’s in a coma—”
“Not uncommon!”
“She’s been in a coma for five years.”
“A bit weirder, sure, but not unheard of.”
“She’s thirty-nine years old, Neil. She wasn’t even awake when the forms were filled.”
Eva flicks the car blinker and takes the ramp off the highway. Neil huffs.
“Well, we’re doing the right thing, huh? Isn’t that what you’re always on about?”
“Are we?”
There’s silence in the vehicle. Dr. Watts leans against the passenger door.
It’s been a good few weeks since their last real on-call case. Robert and Roxanne are far busier, insultingly so, and they’ve been suspended in an ocean of paperwork since. It’s the cyclical schedule of coming to work, reading emails, filing patients’ forms, re-filing the same forms, and waiting for an assignment.
It’s driving Neil a bit stir-crazy. It’s been driving Eva to think.
Sure, they have a “pending patients” list accumulating, but that’s just the thing. Pending. It wasn’t as if Neil was eager for people to start dying, but they’d been twiddling their thumbs too long. There have been more protests recently. More patients are dropping out of the program—fewer calls. Neil would be an idiot not to see that it was wearing everyone down. It was wearing Eva down.
He spares her a private glance hidden behind the reflective lenses of his glasses. Her face is rigid; her mouth thinned to a line. It was going to be a bad case.
Rita Clardy, their patient, has been in a coma for over fifty-eight months. Five years. She’s thirty-nine, married with no children, and her elderly mother had submitted her to the program. Submitted, as in, Rita herself had never touched a single SigCorp form. It’s dubious. Usually, the company was concerned with the explicit consent of patients. Everything was in a contract, and due to the volatile nature of their clients’ lives ending upon using their machine, that was extremely important. They weren’t looking to get sued in a lucrative business like this. Protests and petitions already floating around was terrible enough. Lawyers? Lawsuits? They could do without further controversy.
According to the papers, Rita’s health has been slowly failing, and her long-term diagnosis isn’t good. They’re pulling the cord. Who knows how much her mother had paid to bypass her way into this? It must be exorbitant, Neil figures, and now it’s their problem. So much for being eager for a new client.
“We have a contract,” he utters, just to fill the void.
“Do we even know what her wish is?”
He huffs again, and his head thunks against the window. He listens to the click of another turn signal and spies hospital signs along the roadway. Eva doesn’t say anything more. It was going to be an awful case.