Chapter Twenty #2
Dr. Steinbeck is kind but seems a bit exasperated as he comes through the door.
He’s accompanied by a young woman with the roundest, most globular eyes I’ve ever seen, whom he introduces as Helen, his medical student.
When he tells her that I’m one of Broadview’s interventional cardiologists, she manages to look even more alarmed.
“Do you mind if Helen listens in?” Dr. Steinbeck asks.
“Sure,” I say, with a shrug.
I tell him my symptoms. They’re the same I’ve had before. Nausea, fatigue, body aches, sweats. All nonspecific, B symptoms.
Dr. Steinbeck nods. He’s giving me the active-listening doctor face, eyebrows turned up, lips pursed, head cocked as if to say, I hear you. Then he turns to Helen, rattles off the battery of tests that we’ve already conducted, and asks, “What’s on your differential?”
All the color rushes out of Helen’s pale cheeks. She looks around the room like she would like to escape it. Her fingers wind together.
“Um…” she says quietly. “Well, honestly, it sounds like the symptoms of opioid withdrawal.”
The genial smile drops off Dr. Steinbeck’s face.
“Well, um, wow,” he blubbers, scrambling to find a way to salvage this visit from the enormous accusation Helen has inadvertently lobbed. “I’m so sorry, Dr. Sullivan—give us a moment, I’ll be back—”
“No,” I say suddenly. The blood rushing in my ears sounds like a coursing river.
I think of that first time with Julian in the back of his car, how I’d shuttled forward in time and wondered if he’d put something in my food.
The night when I woke up in his bed with no clear memory of how I ended up in it.
“No, Helen, you’ve got a point. Thank you. ” Then, to Dr. Steinbeck, “Test me.”
I make Dr. Steinbeck order a drug test with an expanded panel.
It comes back negative, but I’m a dog on the hunt now and I have picked up a trail.
I flip through my symptom journal. The first entry is dated not long after PERPETUITY, and I write that I am inexplicably tired.
I feel better a few days later, after Julian gives me the espresso machine.
Then there’s the second time, after I covered for Brandon’s STEMI.
I’m completely destroyed for a week after that, but the day after seeing Julian again I’d felt incredible, as light as air.
The body doesn’t lie, I remember. During the last few years of my relationship with Eric, I’d been hit with a laundry list of maladies: headaches, back pain, indigestion that I went to doctors for and attempted to treat, to no avail.
It was only a few months after he left that I realized I’d miraculously been healed of all my ailments.
They had simply been my body telling me to run.
This pattern is equally unmistakable. Just as Helen said, I’m following a pattern of withdrawal, and my symptoms are getting worse.
Except my drug of choice isn’t heroin, it’s a man.
“Maybe it’s stress,” Dr. Steinbeck suggests on his phone call to me after my results come in. “You have a difficult job. Take some days off.”
He sends me a work note, and I send it straight to our office manager and CC Krause.
“I’m sick,” I tell him, when he calls me to complain. “I’m taking a week off.”
“You can’t. We’re short—” he starts, but I cut him off. This kind of guilt trip might have worked on me a few months ago, but I have no more patience in me for entitled, manipulative men.
“I have a note from my PCP. Coming in while I’m unwell puts our patients at risk, masks or not. I don’t want to make a mistake.” He hears my implication: And if you try to stop me, I’m taking this over your head, and we wouldn’t want that, now would we?
It takes me seventy-two more hours to sweat Julian out. It gets worse before it gets better, but I stick it out, arming myself with electrolyte water and soups, calling my dog walker to take Onix out instead of pushing through.
It works. On the fourth day, I emerge from my apartment with my strength back in full force.
The winter air is icicle sharp with cold but the sun shines bright, and even Onix seems to get a boost in energy, chasing squirrels all over the park as if his hips aren’t arthritic.
It’s a new year, a fresh start, and I mark it the way I best know how.
“You want me to cut them off?” the stylist says, shifting through my chin-length locs in shock. “Are you sure? They’re gorgeous. We can just dye your roots black, maybe do a rinse to tackle the grays…”
“Yes, I’m sure,” I say. My reflection rages back at me from the stylist’s seat, ferocious with determination.
My locs have carried me through so much.
Medical residency. Bleeding out on my bedroom floor.
And now this. There are memories and moments and traumas entwined in the strands.
They hold too much, and by the state of my new growth, my body agrees.
My stylist begins her work. I watch my locs fall away one by one, dropping to the floor with soft thuds like lost appendages.
When I return to the cath lab the next week, Pamela is the only one there. She gasps as I walk in.
“Oh my god,” she says. “Sullivan! This look!”
I run a hand along my shorn head. My hair is short, silver, and I’ve kept up a consistent brushing regimen that sets my waves glistening.
The effect is striking and more feminine than I could have imagined, and, paradoxically, makes me look younger.
Even my stylist was shocked. Oh honey, you were born to be bald-headed.
“I know, right?” I say. It feels right, like I’ve reclaimed what the loss of pigment snatched from me. Looking at myself in the mirror is the only thing that seems to bring me any real joy these days.
“You look magical,” Pamela continues.
Ethereal, Julian’s voice croons in my ear.
I shake the memory from my head and work out a thank-you, then add on a more genuine one for encouraging me to go to the doctor. At this, she drops back into her chair and sighs melodramatically.
“Almost wish I hadn’t done that, if I’m honest. Last week was a shit show without you.”
The stab of guilt makes me stand up straight.
“Really?” I ask. “What happened?”
Pamela looks left and right as if to check that we are the only ones in the lab, then whispers, “Well, Brandon was on. And Friday, we had this case, young guy, diagnostic. And he…”
The lab suddenly fills with light; someone has entered behind us.
Pamela’s mouth clamps shut, and I turn to face the newcomers.
There are two large, bald men in matching black polo shirts and a smaller gray-haired man in a suit who leans against the table in front of my preferred computer with crossed arms. He looks up at me and gives me a small, tight smile.
It’s the chair of medicine, Dr. Alan Agarwhal. Our boss’s boss’s boss. He’s an endocrinologist by trade and I’ve never seen him outside of a conference room. I can’t conceive of a reason why he’s made his way to the catheterization lab.
“Hi, Alan,” I say hesitantly. “What brings you here?”
Alan shoves a hand through his hair. He’s a delicate man, fine featured in a patrician way, and he wears his worry with the melodramatic flair of a Shakespearean actor.
“Nothing good, I’m afraid,” he says.
Just then, the door opens again, and Brandon walks in, and I have to fight to keep my jaw from dropping.
It’s only been a week or so since I last saw him, but he looks like he’s aged ten years.
The skin I thought looked weathered at Sophie’s recital is outright slack now, his eyes weighted by two sets of layered bags and mouth bracketed by new jowls.
His movements are shuffling, Parkinsonian.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d think I was looking at his eighty-year-old father.
Brandon doesn’t seem to notice us as he hobbles into the room, even though all eyes have swiveled to him. He nods to Pamela, then makes a show of adjusting his surgeon’s cap. He turns to the screen above his head and frowns.
“Where are all my cases?” he says, lifting a shaking finger to his empty schedule. “Pamela, what is the meaning of this—”
“Brandon,” Alan says.
Brandon jerks toward Alan like he’s just noticed he’s there. His eyes dart to the two men flanking him, to me, to Pamela, before finally settling back on his boss.
“Alan,” he says. A gray tongue flicks out to lick lips that somehow remain dry.
“Did you receive my email?” Alan asks. When Brandon doesn’t answer, Alan sighs. “Come on, Brandon. You know we don’t want to have to do this. This is for you as much as it is us.”