O. HENRY: LET ME FEEL YOUR PULSE

Let Me Feel Your Pulse
by O. Henry

 

So I went to a doctor.

“How long has it been since you took any alcohol into your system?” he asked.

Turning my head sideways, I answered, “Oh, quite a while.”

He was a young doctor, somewhere between twenty and forty. He wore heliotrope socks, but he looked like Napoleon. I liked him immensely.

“Now,” said he, “I am going to show you the effect of alcohol upon your circulation.” I think it was “circulation” he said; though it may have been “advertising.”

He bared my left arm to the elbow, brought out a bottle of whisky, and gave me a drink. He began to look more like Napoleon. I began to like him better.

Then he put a tight compress on my upper arm, stopped my pulse with the fingers, and squeezed a rubber bulb connected with an apparatus on a stand that looked like a thermometer. The mercury jumped up and down without seeming to stop anywhere; but the doctor said it registered two hundred and thirty- seven or one hundred and sixty-five or some such number.

“Now,” said he, “you see what alcohol does to the blood-pressure.”

“It’s marvellous,” said I, “but do you think it a sufficient test? Have one on me, and let’s try the other arm.” But, no!

Then he grasped my hand. I thought I was doomed and he was saying good-bye. But all he wanted to do was to jab a needle into the end of a finger and compare the red drop with a lot of fifty-cent. Poker chips that he had fastened to a card.

“It’s the hæmoglobin test,” he explained. “The colour of your blood is wrong.”

“Well,” said I, “I know it should be blue; but this is a country of mix-ups. Some of my ancestors were cavaliers; but they got thick with some people on Nantucket Island, so—”

“I mean,” said the doctor, “that the shade of red is too light.”

“Oh,” said I, “it’s a case of matching instead of matches.”

The doctor then pounded me severely in the region of the chest. When he did that I don’t know whether he reminded me most of Napoleon or Battling or Lord Nelson. Then he looked grave and mentioned a string of grievances that the flesh is heir to—most ending in “itis.” I immediately paid him fifteen dollars on account.

“Is or are it or some or any of them necessarily fatal?” I asked. I thought my connection with the matter justified my manifesting a certain amount of interest.

“All of them,” he answered cheerfully. “But their progress may be arrested. With care and proper continuous treatment you may live to be eighty-five or ninety.”

I began to think of the doctor’s bill. “Eighty-five would be sufficient, I am sure,” was my comment. I paid him ten dollars more on account.

“The first thing to do,” he said, with renewed animation, “is to find a sanatorium where you will get a complete rest for awhile, and allow your nerves to get into a better condition. I myself will go with you and select a suitable one.”

O. Henry
(1862 – 1910)
Let Me Feel Your Pulse
fleursdumal.nl magazine

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