Carolyn Jourdan - Nurse Phoebe 02 - The School for Mysteries by Carolyn Jourdan

in here, concocted a way to get a message to me, and then hid with him until I found you?”
    Phoebe nodded. “And there’s another factor. He’s agoraphobic.”
    “That, I can fix. It’s common for us to have to medicate people for MRIs. The meds for claustrophobia ought to work just as well for the reverse problem.”
    “Oh good.”
    “What are his symptoms?”
    “He’s sore, he can barely stand on his own, but nothing else that I know of for sure. He’s been intermittently groggy and fainty, but his mind seems fine.”
    “It would be normal for him to be addled and in shock for a few hours after a bad fall. And the syncope could be related to his anxiety issues. But, if he’s not badly injured, his condition should improve rapidly.”
    Nick groaned.
    “Help me get him up,” Charlie said.
    Charlie was six-one and built like a pro football player. He held Nick without too much trouble, but Phoebe had to turn the door very slowly and tuck stray hands and feet inside as it spun away from her.
    She waited her turn, then followed them out into the hallway. Mercifully, it was still empty, although she could hear sounds of people in the area.
    “This was a good place to hide him,” Charlie said. “It’s brilliant, actually.”
    Phoebe retrieved the wheelchair and he lowered Nick into it. “Let’s go for the full body scan,” Charlie said. “It’ll be quicker and I won’t need to involve any of the x-ray techs.”
    Charlie rolled the chair to the GE LightSpeed Scanner and handed Nick a couple of pills he’d taken out of a nearby cabinet. He held a plastic cup of water and steadied Nick’s head so he could take them. Then Phoebe helped him transfer their patient to the sled that would carry him in and out of the scanner.
    Charlie went to a control area and flipped a bunch of switches. This was the part of radiology he called knobology . The radiologists and their technicians had to know how to operate all sorts of extremely complicated devices. “How many images will you take?” Phoebe asked.
    “More than either of us can stand,” he said, frowning. “But even with all the images in the world there are still significant limits to what we can see with this, you know.”
    Charlie studied the screens while Nick rode the slow-moving sled deeper into the maw of the scanner. “We can see broken bones or internal bleeding, but there could be multiple fatal soft tissue injuries that will never show up on a radiograph.”
    “Like what?” Phoebe asked.
    “Like tears in vital organs. A hard jolt can tear our guts loose from the surrounding tissue. And that can rip a hole in an organ or tear a blood vessel. Then you die.”
    Phoebe nodded as she watched the images appear and morph on the computer monitors that were rotated 90º so as to stand on end. Charlie adjusted his viewing angles. He’d taught her the names of the slices in each of the three dimensions— coronal, sagittal , and transverse .
    Watching him cursor up and down the body was like riding in a glass elevator through Nick’s guts. Every time she watched Charlie do this she thought about the saying that beauty was only skin deep. She’d learned from hanging out in Radiology that it was just the opposite—the most extraordinary beauty began just beneath the skin.
    There was nothing on earth more holy or more beautiful than the human body. A Charlie-eyed view of anatomy gave a deeply moving window onto the assurance that each of us was made in the image and likeness of God. Phoebe didn’t know exactly what that meant, but seeing the images playing across the computer monitors, she believed it was true.
    “He looks like he’s in pretty good shape, especially considering what happened.”
    Charlie turned half a dozen switches off, and went to tell Nick what he’d found. He suggested that Nick and Phoebe change into scrubs to make them less noticeable and then he showed Phoebe one of the changing rooms where dozens of sets of blue and green