The Cider House Rules

Candy and Homer were not allowed to give shots or medication, but they had more to do than make beds, empty bedpans, give back rubs and baths, and run those errands of friendliness that gave the modern hospital such a constant scuff of feet. They were given delivery-room duties, for example; Homer was unimpressed with the obstetrical procedure he witnessed. It could not hold a candle to Dr. Larch's work, and in some cases it could not hold a candle to his own. If Dr. Larch had often criticized Homer for his heavy touch with ether, Homer could not imagine how the old man would react to the heavy-handedness that was applied to that inhalation at Cape Kenneth Hospital. In St. Cloud's, Homer had seen many patients who were so lightly etherized that they could converse throughout their own operations; in Cape Kenneth's recovery rooms, the patients struggling to emerge from their ether doses looked bludgeoned--they snored gap-mouthed, with their hands hanging deadweight and the muscles in their cheeks so slack that at times their eyes were pulled half open.

It especially angered Homer to see how they dosed the children--as if the doctors or the anesthesiologists were so uninformed that they didn't pause to consider the patient's body weight.

One day he sat with Candy on either side of a five-year-old boy who was recovering from a tonsillectomy. That was nurses'-aide work: you sat with the patients coming out of ether, especially the children, especially the tonsillectomies--they were often frightened and in pain and nauseous when they woke. Homer claimed they wouldn't be nearly so nauseous if they'd been given a little less ether.

One of the nurses was in the recovery room with them; it was the one they liked--a young, homely girl about their age. Her name was Caroline, and she was nice to the patients and tough to the doctors.

"You know a lot about ether, Homer," Nurse Caroline said.

"It seems overused to me, in certain cases," Homer mumbled.

"Hospitals aren't perfect, they're just expected to be," Nurse Caroline said. "And doctors aren't perfect, either; they just think they are."

"Right," said Homer Wells.

The five-year-old's throat was very sore when he finally woke up, and he went on retching for quite some time before any ice cream would slide down his throat, and stay down. One of the things the nurses' aides did was to be sure that the children, in such condition, didn't choke on their own vomit. Homer explained to Candy that it was very important that the child, in a semi-etherized state, not aspirate, or inhale, any fluid such as vomit into the lungs.

"Aspirate," Nurse Caroline said. "Was your father a doctor, Homer?"

"Not exactly," said Homer Wells.

It was Nurse Caroline who introduced Homer to young Dr. Harlow, who was in the throes of growing out his bangs; a cowlick persisted in making his forehead look meager; a floppy shelf of straw-colored hair gave Dr. Harlow's eyes the constant anxiousness of someone peering from under the brim of a hat.

"Oh yes, Wells--our ether expert," Dr. Harlow said snidely.

"I grew up in an orphanage," said Homer Wells. "I did a lot of helping out around the hospital."

"But surely you never administered any ether?" said Dr. Harlow.

"Surely not," lied Homer Wells. As Dr. Larch had discovered with the board of trustees, it was especially gratifying to lie to unlikable people.

"Don't show off," Candy told Homer when they were driving back to Heart's Haven together. "It doesn't become you, and it could get your Doctor Larch in trouble."

"When did I show off?" Homer asked.

"You really haven't, yet," Candy said. "Just don't, okay?"

Homer sulked.

"And don't sulk," Candy told him. "That doesn't become you, either."

"I'm just waiting and seeing," said Homer Wells. "You know how that is." He let her out at the lobster pound; he usually came in with her and chatted with Ray. But Homer was mistaken to c

onfuse Candy's irritability either with coldness toward him or with anything but the profoundest confusion of her own.

She slammed the door and walked around to his side of the van before he could drive away. She indicated he should roll down his window. Then she leaned inside and kissed him on the mouth, she yanked his hair, hard--with both hands, tilting his head back--and then she bit him, quite sharply, in the throat. She banged her head on the window frame when she pulled herself back from him; her eyes were watery, but no tears spilled to her face.

"Do you think I'm having a good time?" she asked him. "Do you think I'm teasing you? Do you think I know whether I want you or Wally?"

He drove back to Cape Kenneth Hospital; he needed work more substantial than mousing. It was the Goddamn mousing season again--how he hated handling the poison!

He arrived simultaneously with a sailor slashed up in a knife fight; it had happened where Ray worked--in Kittery Navy Yard--and the sailor's buddies had driven him around in a makeshift tourniquet, running out of gas coupons and getting lost on the way to several hospitals much nearer to the scene of the fight than the one in Cape Kenneth. The gash, into the fleshy web between the sailor's thumb and forefinger, extended nearly to the sailor's wrist. Homer helped Nurse Caroline wash the wound with ordinary white soap and sterile water. Homer could not help himself--he was accustomed to speaking to Nurse Angela and to Nurse Edna in the voice of an authority.

"Take his blood pressure, opposite arm," he said to Nurse Caroline, "and put the blood-pressure cuff on over a bandage--to protect the skin," he added, because Nurse Caroline was staring at him curiously. "The cuff might have to be on there for a half hour or more," said Homer Wells.

"I think I can give instructions to Nurse Caroline, if you don't mind," Dr. Harlow said to Homer; both the doctor and his nurse stared at Homer Wells as if they had witnessed an ordinary animal touched with divine powers--as if they half expected Homer to pass his hand over the profusely bleeding sailor and stop the flow of blood as quickly as the tourniquet stopped it.

"Very neat job, Wells," Dr. Harlow said. Homer observed the injection of the 0.5 percent Procaine into the wound and the subsequent probing of Dr. Harlow. The knife had entered on the palmar side of the hand, observed Homer Wells. He remembered his Gray's, and he remembered the movie he had seen with Debra Pettigrew: the cavalry officer with the arrow in his hand, the arrow that fortunately missed the branch of the median nerve that goes to the muscles of the thumb. He watched the sailor move his thumb.