In this tale, on Arthur’s flight home, a coffee pot mishap leads to an emergency landing. Later, at the hospital, an astute nurse unravels his medical mystery.
This medical fiction tale is one of a collection of stories that are like “Final Destination” meets “The Monkey’s Paw” (W. W. Jacobs, 1902). As such, they are tragedies more than either mysteries or horror, and would appeal most to readers who enjoy the inexorable pull of a story arc that leads to doom. In each story, a protagonist makes a wish that comes true with fatal results for someone, often the person making the wish. Nothing supernatural, but just how things work out. (Or is it?) The technical details surrounding the fatal (or near-fatal) event are drawn from real cases in the US OSHA incident report database or similar sources and are therefore entirely realistic, even if seemingly outlandish. The plots draw lightly from cultural beliefs around actions such as pointing at someone with a stick or knife, wishing in front of a mirror, or stepping on a crack.
Arthur was a stout man with the ability to sleep during takeoff. Passengers around him could tell because he snored loudly while he did so. His stoutness also involved a degree of overflow and seat-creep, and those seated next to him frequently found various parts of Arthur’s large and clammy frame occupying their legroom and armrests or ending up on their shoulders or laps.
On his way home from a somewhat disastrous vacation, Arthur had slurped down several daiquiris while waiting to board and was more than a little anaesthetized by the time he settled into the window seat. The vacation had been his fiancé’s big idea. “Somewhere romantic,” Eve had said. “Something fun.” The fun lasted until their first afternoon, when he fell asleep in a lounger with the scent of floral skin lotion rising in the warm beach air. He awoke red as a lobster down one side of his body, lumpy from mosquito and sandfly bites everywhere else. The loving couple were soon snarling at each other. Eve accused him of being a sourpuss and a party pooper, and he blamed her for the useless natural hibiscus sunscreen that’d done squat to protect his skin. In fact, he’d stated, the whole stupid trip was her fault. She then suggested where he could stick the bottle while screaming that he was a ninny if he couldn’t tell the difference between moisturizer and sunblock, and that if he didn’t like her choice of romantic vacation spots, he could go boil his stupid head or better yet, leave on the first flight out.
While Arthur was a very nice person in other ways, as a fellow passenger he had his downsides. His biggest travel-associated problem was the way he woke up. If awakened by an external stimulus, a bad dream, or a snore blocking his windpipe, Arthur flailed—kicking and jolting the person in the seat to the front—while also swinging his arms. On this flight, startled awake when his seatback was kicked by a small child, his arm swung out towards the aisle, knocking a full, piping-hot pot of coffee out of the cabin attendant’s hand. The pot flipped, spraying hot liquid in an arc before landing upside-down in Arthur’s lap. He instinctively pushed it away, but it bounced off the seatback in front of him and hit him in the face. In the frantic seconds that followed, an agile crew member grabbed the pot, thereby ending the cycle of scalding, while Arthur’s fellow passenger in the center seat helpfully cooled his steaming lap and chest by showering him with her whiskey soda and crushed ice.
The effect of scalding coffee on Arthur’s sunburnt skin was swift and brutal, with angry blisters starting to form immediately. Even his feet were speckled with red spots and welts where the coffee had splashed. The cabin crew possessed basic first-aid training, but one glance at Arthur told them more than a Band-Aid was needed, and the crew leader asked over the intercom if anyone on the flight was a doctor. Arthur spent the next four hours enroute to the nearest airport heavily sedated and snoring so loudly nobody around him could sleep or watch an inflight movie.
In the final 20 minutes before landing, the sedatives began to wear off, and snoring gave way to groaning, then groaning became bellowing. Blisters spread like glistening scarlet bubbles across Arthur’s belly and chest, and his hands wept from burst blisters. After landing, Arthur was given pain medication, but shrieked all the way to the nearest hospital. It was 6 p.m. Friday local time but, thankfully, they’d landed in a small town where there was little traffic between the airport and the hospital.
Burn treatment is never easy, the patient experience seldom smooth sailing, but, after initial progress, Arthur began to show especially discouraging symptoms. The burn wounds themselves seemed to be progressing well, but his blood pressure plummeted, his heart rate and breathing climbed, and he appeared unusually flushed. Being a small hospital, they didn’t have a large pool of on-call physicians on weekends, so it fell to the duty physician to make sense of the situation. Blood samples were taken, and the on-call lab tech was awakened and summoned. In the meantime, Arthur argued with the nurses about mosquitoes and moisturizer and called them all “Eve.” By midnight, the nurses reported that Arthur had low urine output even though they’d increased his IV drip flow, and added a note that Arthur smelled quite bad. The head nurse tried several times to describe the smell in more detail, but “sweet rotting” was the best she could manage.
Nurse Linda J. Watson worked in the neonatal ward, but was known as “Bloodhound” by her friends due to her amazing sense of smell. These friends joked that Linda could work for a fancy perfumery, but were also slightly weirded out that she could recognize babies by scent. Linda grew up in a family of 10, and never considered it odd that she could tell her siblings’ clothes or toys apart by smell alone. She had on occasion caught a medication labeling error because she recognized the smell, and had even once referred a stranger to the TB clinic because of his faint scent of tar. Linda sniffed Arthur and said she smelled coffee, hibiscus, rum, and—she paused as though rolling the scent around in her mind—”Clostridium,” she pronounced decisively.
Unorthodox as it might have been, the doctor ordered the powerful antibiotic vancomycin on the strength of Linda’s conviction, proven correct by the lab results an hour later. To be precise, Arthur’s blood was teeming with Clostridium with a hint of Pseudomonas, introduced into his open sores by the organically produced moisturizer he’d mistaken for sunblock. There’d been more than enough time for the bacteria to reproduce widely throughout his body, and the blistering from the coffee had been a bonus, throwing open the doors for them to spread from the contaminated moisturizer and start colonizing Arthur’s body. With symptoms of sepsis becoming more pronounced, Arthur was transferred to the ICU.
Arthur sank rapidly from delirium to somnolence then into coma, where he finally found refuge from the pain opioids couldn’t defeat. As the sun rose, casting long pink fingers across the hospital buildings, Arthur was pronounced dead.
