“Don’t be absurd.” Alice tried to smile, her stomach knotting on itself.
“It’ll be different for you, I can tell. You’ve got that beautiful child.”
His smile was trying to be generous, failing. This was a man who knew better than to keep talking, and could not stop himself. “Tumor’s wrapped itself around my kidneys. Who knew cancer could even do that? It’s ridiculous. You wish you could reason with it, explain that the more it grows the quicker that both of us are done. It can’t live and be a happy tumor without me. My only option left is this special surgery. Doc doesn’t even want to try. Honestly, I can’t blame the man. He’d have to remove one kidney, take out the part of the tumor that’s wrapped around that side of my body, and then use a vacuum to suck out the rest. He says surgery would kill me on the operating table. But if they don’t go in—”
Cael took a rolled paper from his back pocket, tapped it out in front of them. “I signed the waiver, absolved the hospital, whatever they want. With any luck today I can convince them…”
He was failing in his effort to be brave, and Alice felt her own failure as well. She breathed in, released outward. She willed herself still. Did her best to stare at this man, to meet him.
Cael swallowed. No longer smiling, his pupils black, fathomless.
This treatment we’re discussing
REQUISITE KNOCKS ACTED as both interrogative (Is it okay?) and warning (Because I’m coming in). The oncologist made sure the door was shut behind him, and joined the already crowded room. Where Alice’s New Hampshire physician had looked as if he’d been ordered from a doctor’s catalogue, this new one, the doctor now taking over her care and treatment, seemed to have been ordered from a more expensive catalogue, one with a glossy sheen and higher price points. A bit taller than six feet and robust, with a thick black field of hair slickly parted to one side, looking lightly wet or gelled, Howard Eisenstatt, MD, was neither as old nor as musty as his name suggested. His face oblong and pale, with a thin layer of baby fat; small brown eyes deeply set and hard with intelligence, his nose long and thin.
Acknowledging neither the nurses nor the other doctors in the room, he focused his attention on Alice, smiling in a manner neither welcoming nor insincere, his handshake strong without being warm. At the end of his lab coat’s sleeve, peeking out from beneath an ivory-white French cuff, half of a chunky, high-end titanium watch was conspicuous. The doctor moved toward Oliver and similarly introduced himself. He completed the formality of washing his hands and stepped toward the office desk, stiffly taking in the dormant baby stroller, the folding chair overflowing with coats and shoulder bags and hanging sweater arms and that single, tiny yellow unicorn.
Adjacent to that pile, perched on what Alice realized was the doctor’s prize — the sought-after stool — Oliver was using his toes for leverage, spinning himself and the little one in slow half circles, the child gurgling, holding her blanky, sucking with great affection on her pacifier; now aware of attention on her, she turned away from her father, checked out the nice new man in the lab coat.
Howard Eisenstatt, MD, once more extended those thin lips, revealing that tight smile. Scooting himself upward, he sat on the edge of the desk, stretched his pressed slacks diagonally out in front of him, revealing thin fine socks, perfectly matching his pants’ gray shade. A glance toward his clipboard; Eisenstatt removed a ballpoint from the chest pocket of his lab coat. Repeated pressing didn’t get the pen going. Licking the end was no help. The doctor looked down; fleshy folds of a double chin revealed themselves. Eisenstatt blinked at his pen, as if blinking were an expression of disappointment, as if expressing disappointment to a pen would somehow motivate the ink.
“We couldn’t get a sitter,” Alice said.
She sat, rigid, against the raised slab of the examination table, her left arm hanging straight down between dangling legs. A catheter was plugged in the soft of her elbow, and layers of clear plastic tubing were taped to her forearm. A quiet, head-scarfed woman down the hall was employed solely for the brutally tedious task of starting IV lines and getting blood from cancer patients, and she’d needed three sticks in order to penetrate Alice’s vein. The number remained unsettling to Alice for reasons she would not allow herself to think about (the vein had been found, onward). The catheter had been installed, Fatima had explained, “in case doctors want plasma transfusion. Line ready to go. No problem.”
Watching the doctor mess with his pen, Alice felt the urge to swing her feet, kick up her hot pink socks. Her boots were off so that a second nurse — Requita? — had been able to get an accurate weight. Her socks remained on so Alice’s bare feet wouldn’t come into contact with anything germish. Besides, the exam room was chilly.
“Are you okay?” asked Eisenstatt. “I know it’s been a long day. Maybe some water?”
A rustling behind them, Requita began searching for a paper cup. Now the nurse left the room. At the same time a new woman entered, middle-aged, frizzy-haired Hispanic, unfortunately jammed into a tightly fitting, generic-looking blouse and slack set. She handed Eisenstatt a functional and spiffy-looking felt-tipped pen from her own overcrowded breast pocket. Alice double-checked the laminated hospital ID dangling from that bright purple strap — Dantelle? Yes, Dantelle. She’d come in before. A nurse-practitioner, a kind of cross between doctor and nurse. She’d gone over Alice’s history, sympathized with Alice about childcare, hadn’t been condescending or overboard.
“Water would be wonderful,” Alice said. “Thank you, Doctor.”
Near the elevated cupboards and shelves in the back of the room the final member of this gathering lingered: an attractive Indian woman, almost as tall as Eisenstatt, but willowy in a manner common to Alice’s world, with lustrous long hair, hot-ironed to fashionable straightness, and cords in her neck from too much working out. Dr. Bhakti was a visiting fellow, training to specialize in cancer treatment. She’d been in earlier, introducing herself and going over cursory bone marrow transplant information. She’d also sized up Alice’s outfit. Her glance might have been innocuous; still, Alice had noticed.
At the moment, Bhakti was sitting on the edge of a counter, filing her nails. Her boots were the second pair to capture Alice’s fancy this morning — confirmation that someone needed to get herself new boots.
“We straightened out the problem with your slides.” Eisenstatt read with medium interest from Alice’s file. “So that’s progress.” He flipped a page on the clipboard. “Everything indicates Dartmouth-Hitchcock did an excellent job. Getting you here to this stage was no small achievement. But there are still a few matters that I’d like to review. Can we go back and begin with the first symptoms, before you—”
“The nurse didn’t write that down?” Oliver asked. “None of the three other people who took her history got what you want?”
“I don’t mean to be difficult,” Alice said. “We’re grateful to be here. But we seem to keep going over information your staff asked me ages ago.”
Eisenstatt tipped his forehead, the nineteenth-century gentleman conceding a thorny point. “It’s maddening. You’re going to get a lot of it. Standard medical procedure. We go over things repeatedly. This is our thinking: it’s possible you’ll remember something that deviates from what the nurse heard. You might add a detail that adds to Dr. Bhakti’s understanding of this case. Each time a staff member or doctor hears your story, it gives us a chance to consult with one another, and hear everything fresh in our own ears. It’s an inconvenience for you, I know—”