The Frog and the Zebra

My name is John. I am a doctor, and by most accounts, quite boring.

I like boring. Its predictable and content to sit and stare at a blank wall.

I've picked a rather unconventional career for liking boring things, some people might say, but the truth of the matter is that if you hear hoof-beats in Central Park, it probably is just a horse. Its not too often that I see zebras either.

Only one ever really comes to mind. Perhaps she does because after her, nothing seemed remotely striped.

Agnes Henderson. She was crazy. We all agreed on that. She should have been put in the psych ward, but Lord knows they're always full of crazy and we end up with the weird ones. She was manageable, though. They would've taken her if she wasn't.

Irregularities in her heartbeat. Just another horse. An insane horse, maybe a pony, but no zebra as far as I was concerned. Her chart showed that she'd been in for a heart transplant a year earlier. Nothing was mentioned about her mental state, which lead me to believe the anesthesia was to blame for her deteriorated mental status.

Every morning, when I would do my rounds, I'd stop by her bed and she would stare with big round eyes at me. She'd whisper it first, and it would continue into a heaving heavy breath, though nothing louder, "They've replaced my heart with a toad. Maybe a frog. I suppose a frog would live better, wouldn't he? It is rather moist in there. Oh! He's eating my organs, I can feel him..." And on as such. Nonsense. Just another anesthetization gone terribly wrong.

"Ms. Henderson, there is no frog or toad in your chest. Only a heart with arrhythmia. Once we figure out the cause, we will let you go home," I would tell her every day.

It was a comforting thought. That she would go home, and she'd quiet down, then, ending with, "Its a frog...or a toad. I'm telling you its true."

Everyone truly believed her insane. But she was perfectly harmless. She never seemed suicidal, or even like she ever wanted to hurt any of the staff. In fact, I found her to be perfectly normal...beside the whole amphibian issue. That's what we called it. Like an inside joke. And we'd call her the frog lady. It was cruel and we were cruel for saying it.

It was the end of the week, a Friday. Normal. Boring. I was out of the hospital by five o'clock and happily surrendering to the fluttering visions behind my eyelids by ten o'clock. By two o'clock, I was staring at a bloody scene.

Woken out of deep sleep, I realized both my hospital beeper and my phone were ringing simultaneously. None of that boded well. Not at two in the morning on the weekend. And, like any other emergency, I practically slept-walked to the hospital. My pyjamas replaced my scrubs, though I'd managed to remember both shoes and my white coat.

The nurse on the phone had been breathy and panicked, "Its Ms. Henderson. Come quick." That was all she said and then hung up.

Arrhythmia. It usually means heart attack, aortic dissection, heart disease...Maybe the last few days had been spent leading up to some cruel death. Her insanity a prematurely onset of dementia due to decreased heart productivity. I made that up. But it sounds nice, right?

Anyway, when I got to the hospital, to her room, I found nurses and residents scattered like sheep after a flood. Each of them ogled me as if I were some sort of savior.

I could hear her yelling. "I need to get the frog out! He'll kill me if he eats any more of my lungs!"

A silent question was directed towards one of the less frightened residents, he responded, "She started having difficulty breathing, so we put her on a nebulizer. She was doing fine. Then she started screaming about the frog eating her lungs...She's got a scalpel, Doctor. She won't let any of us in."

Steeling myself, as I knew there was nothing more dangerous than an insane person with a weapon, I opened the door. In all her naked glory, there she stood. Her wiry hair stood at odd ends and the scalpel glistened in the florescent lights. "Its in me. Hopping around in my body. It needs to die. You need to get it out!"

I could feel myself shaking my head. I didn't mean to say 'no', it was more of a reaction to disbelief. I continued to shake my head as she raised the scalpel above her head and thrust it down into her own body.

Blood didn't gush or squirt. It seem to drift lazily down cellulite encrusted abs and quivering mounds of flesh. Dragging the blade up from her navel, fat and muscles and intestines leaked like so much hamburger from a meat grinder. Reaching her sternum, she dropped the knife. I thought maybe she was done. Lord how I wish she had been. I thought she'd have died or even started to. Maybe she had and that only fueled her insanity. With one jaggedly nailed hand, she reached into her own ribcage. Face contorting, she seemed to smile for a single second, freeing her hand. Even as she did, she finally crumpled to the floor, dark organs and opened body hitting the ground with the wet slap of blood.

It was a relief. She was gone. Dead. No more crazy, no more danger.

Nurses drifted towards their stations, to call for both medical examiners and police. The residents and I continued to stare.

Lurching forwards from her bloody hand came a red frog. Its body was bulbous and undulating, with wide yellow eyes. We all leaped free as it made dark red splattering tracks out of the room and down the hallway.

Not every hoof-beat is a zebra. Of course, not every zebra fits the books either.