Grail-O-Matic

[dr_pretentious]

Percival smacked his forehead. "Why didn't I think of it sooner?"

"What?" said Lancelot.

The nurses were by now quite accustomed to the constant presence of two knights of Camelot. The nurse with the thick Staten Island accent understood immediately what Percival was asking her to do.

"Well, duh!" she said. "What took us so long?"

It took some jerry-rigging, but in a few minutes they had the Grail set up to keep the Fisher King on a constant IV drip of holy water.

The nurse looked the arrangement over and nodded in approval. "It's kind of a Rube Goldberg device, but it'll get the stuff into his kidneys, all right."

Percival laughed. "Chretien de Troyes never saw that one coming."

Comments

[wayzgoose.livejournal.com]

I have no idea what you have been writing about, but this clip launched so many images in my head that I can't begin to sort them out! I love the entire concept of two (or three) knights of the round table with the holy grail in a Staten Island hospital. One stops to think, then, of what kind of hospital it might be.

Inspired.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

My friend George is at Sloan-Kettering, the famous cancer hospital in New York. He recovered from the lung cancer all right, but it looks like the chemotherapy gave him leukemia. How's that for a bitterly ironic side effect? Anyhow, the new leukemia diagnosis explains why his surgical wound never healed up right.

There are a bunch of kinds of leukemia it might be. All but one call for treatment regimens so toxic he wouldn't survive them. So he's started the treatment for the one kind that he has a chance of beating, and tomorrow we find out whether to keep going with it. If it's any other strain of leukemia, we say our goodbyes, and the good people at Sloan switch to palliative care.

So now the trick is to keep him alive long enough to find out whether he has long term prospects for recovery, because it would suck beyond the telling if he died and then we found out the leukemia had been treatable in his case.

You know how you get crazy thoughts when the people you care about are in major peril? I got this crazy thought that if I could bring George the Holy Grail, the wound in his side would heal. This was back when we thought the wound was the responsible for all his post-lung-cancer woes. The only way to bring George the real Holy Grail was to do it in a story.

As long as the doctors keep telling us it's not time to give up, it's not time to give up.

[wayzgoose.livejournal.com]

I just caught up (been off the journal for a week and missing friends entries). I've read fromt he start of your statement that he needs the grail and I think that what you are doing is absolutely marvelous, faithful, and in the very best sense of the word, mythic. I will keep you and George and the other vigilants in my thoughts. It is not time to give up.

[freefloat.livejournal.com]

I look forward to meeting George, you and all Geo's faithful friends when oakleaves and I make the trip down this weekend.

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

I bet Lancelot's feeling daft for not having thought of it.

I'm currently reading Bernard Cornwell's Warlord Trilogy, in which Lancelot is a total shit. He's also written a Grail Quest series, only the first of which I read, but enjoyed.

[jeneralist.livejournal.com]

And by now, the Grail water will have reached his marrow as well.

[tracyandrook.livejournal.com]

Thank goodness this poor guy had a single room, because the light emanating from his hurt parts (which were many) would keep anybody awake. But it was nice. Sort of like napping in a sunbeam on a relaxing afternoon. Florence would have liked it.

We were wondering basically how to tell this to the treatment team: that we had changed Mr. M's medication program without an order. Was my butt going to be out on the street in a half second? I was nearing the end of Orientation. I was due to get my permanent assignment in another 3 weeks. Or sooner, depending on how this ended.
About five minutes into the infusion, the pink was returning to Mr. M's face. His extremities were warm. Incredible!

My preceptor Anne had actually changed the IV from lactated Ringer's to--to what?
"Whiskey," she said with a wink.
"What?"
"The water of life."
I pulled the curtains around to try to keep the bright light from the other patients. The light streamed out from below. I thought better of it and swung it back. If anything happened with Mr. M, we needed to know.

”We are going to be so out-of-here if we don’t tell somebody about this,” I worried, squinting.
“And who would believe you? Is this a TV show, or what? ‘Doctor, I think you’d better come here and see this’, is that what you wanted to say?” Anne put on her sparkly cat-eye shades.
“Well, yes, so?”
“So call them. I’m sure they’d be thrilled to hear your voice again.”
I had already called them for another patient this shift and I didn’t look forward to it.

Who were these guys again?
The look on the wife's face told me that she would probably bite the hand off of anybody in their way. Still.
I figured we should treat this like another blood transfusion, and stay on top of him for an hour or so.
Especially because this was more sunlight than any of us had had in a long time. We were all enjoying it. Was it my imagination, or was it starting to smell like cut grass in here? Much better than disinfectants. I noticed how pale everybody was, like white asparagus. I started to tear up a bit. This is like Laetrile. Like shark tongue soup or crystals. No, it’s not.
Everybody here is suffering. They didn’t bring a Grail for every patient.

I pulled out an incident report form.

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

I just saw this: brilliant!

Thank you.