the Trauma Wing and the offered Demerol
She thinks with fearful sentiment of Don Gately, a tube down his throat, torn by fever and guilt and shoulderpain, offered Demerol by well-meaning but clueless M.D.s, in and out of delirium, torn, convinced that certain men with hats wished him ill, looking at his room’s semi-private ceiling like it would eat him if he dropped his guard.
Context
The hospital-bed ordeal named in passing, seeding the arc's climax: Gately in the Trauma Wing, torn by fever and guilt and shoulder-pain, offered Demerol by clueless M.D.s who don't understand that the narcotic relief is exactly the thing his sobriety cannot accept. The white-knuckle refusal to come — a recovering addict declining the drug that would ease real agony — is set here as the terrible test waiting a couple of floors above the very meeting Joelle sits in.