WMC - First to Die

Chapter 3

IT WAS A LITTLE BEFORE EIGHT-THIRTY on a Monday morning in June, one of those chilly, gray summer mornings San Francisco is famous for. I was starting the week off badly, flipping through old copies of The New Yorker while waiting for my G.R, Dr. Roy Orenthaler, to free up. I'd been seeing Dr. Roy, as I still sometimes called him, ever since I was a sociology major at San Francisco State University, and I obligingly came in once a year for my checkup. That was last Tuesday. To my surprise, he had called at the end of the week and asked me to stop in today before work. I had a busy day ahead of me: two open cases and a deposition to deliver at district court. I was hoping I could be at my desk by nine. "Ms. Boxer," the receptionist finally called to me, "the doctor will see you now." I followed her into the doctor's office. Generally, Orenthaler greeted me with some well-intended stab at police humor, such as, "So if you're here, who's out on the street after them?" I was now thirty-four, and for the past two years had been lead inspector on the homicide detail out of the Hall of Justice. But today he rose stiffly and uttered a solemn "Lindsay." He motioned me to the chair across from his desk. Uh-oh. Up until then, my philosophy on doctors had been simple: When one of them gave you that deep, concerned look and told you to take a seat, three things could happen. Only one of them was bad. They were asking you out, getting ready to lay on some bad news, or they'd just spent a fortune reupholstering the furniture. "I want to show you something," Orenthaler began. He held a slide up against a light. He pointed to splotches of tiny ghostlike spheres in a current of smaller pellets. "This is a blowup of the blood smear we took from you. The larger globules are erythrocytes. Red blood cells." "They seem happy," I joked nervously. "They are, Lindsay," the doctor said without a trace of a smile. "Problem is, you don't have many." I fixed on his eyes, hoping they would relax and that we'd move on to something trivial like, You better start cutting down those long hours, Lindsay. "There's a condition, Lindsay," Orenthaler went on. "Negli's aplastic anemia. It's rare. Basically, the body no longer manufactures red blood cells." He held up a photo. "This is what a normal blood workup looks like." On this one, the dark background looked like the intersection of Market and Powell at 5:00 p.m." a virtual traffic jam of compressed, energetic spheres. Speedy messengers, all carrying oxygen to parts of someone else's body. In contrast, mine looked about as densely packed as a political headquarters two hours after the candidate has conceded. "This is treatable, right?" I asked him. More like I was telling him. "It's treatable, Lindsay," Orenthaler said, after a pause. "But it's serious." A week ago, I had come in simply because my eyes were runny and blotchy and I'd discovered some blood in my panties and every day by three I was suddenly feeling like some iron-deficient gnome was inside me siphoning off my energy. Me, of the regular double shifts and fourteen-hour days. Six weeks' accrued vacation. "How serious are we talking about?" I asked, my voice catching. "Red blood cells are vital to the body's process of oxygenation," Orenthaler began to explain. "Hemopoiesis, the formation of blood cells in the bone marrow." "Dr. Roy, this isn't a medical conference. How serious are we talking about?" "What is it you want to hear, Lindsay? Diagnosis or possibility?" "I want to hear the truth." Orenthaler nodded. He got up and came around the desk and took my hand. "Then here's the truth, Lindsay. What you have is life threatening." "Life threatening?" My heart stopped. My throat was as dry as parchment. "Fatal, Lindsay."