Bad Doctor

43

I dial my home number, wondering if Willow’s still there. If she is, I wonder if she’ll answer.

“Dr. Box’s residence,” she says.

“You’re still there!” I say, then realize I don’t have anything else planned to say.

“Hi Gideon! Yes, I’m here. Um…is that okay?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Did you have a chance to talk to a doctor yet?”

“Not yet, but I’ve narrowed our choices to two.”

“Do you think either will take my case?”

“I’m working on it.”

Willow/Amy/Andrea must have picked up something in my voice because she says, “Is everything all right?”

“You tell me.”

“I have a plan,” she says.

“A plan?”

“If you’re available, I’d like to take you to dinner tonight. My treat. Someplace fun. Dinner, then maybe a club.”

“A club?”

“Not a strip club,” she says.

“Right.”

“So what do you think? Can we go out?”

It would be nice to get her out of her house, away from her gun when I accuse her of being an identity thief.

“Let’s do it!” I say.

My phone buzzes. I put Willow on hold.

“Kathleen Gray’s on line two,” Lola says.

“Who’s that?”

“Addie’s mother.”

“Who’s Addie?”

“The child you’re going to operate on. The brain stem cavernoma?”

“I click back to Willow. I’ve got another call I need to take.”

“Okay, see you soon.”

I spend the next fifteen minutes walking Kathleen Gray through the process. What’s going on in Addie’s head, why we made the decision to operate, what to expect.

I’m on my best behavior.

I agree Addie has had terrible luck in her short life, and explain there’s no particular event that caused her to develop this condition. I want to tell Kathleen that shit happens, but I refrain. I explain what supratentorial and infratentorial cavernous malformations are, and discuss how we’ll monitor median nerve somatosensory and brain stem audio evoked potentials.

But you know what?

She barely follows the conversation. Spends the whole time crying and asking two questions over and over.

First, “How serious is it?”

It’s damn serious. But I’m learning they don’t want to hear that, so I say, “I promise you, this operation will be performed under standard microsurgical conditions.”

I emphasize the word “standard” and she takes it to mean routine.

The second question she asks repeatedly is, “Will Addie be okay?”

“Of course,” I say.

“Thank you, doctor,” she says.

“You’re quite welcome.”

I make a mental note not to ask for a blow job later on.

See? I’m learning how the game is played.