This Is Love - Chapter 16 #2
“Of course.” I grabbed Penny’s hand and we followed the nurse out of the office and down the hall.
All night and all morning we had been waiting for Liam’s results.
My thoughts were far away from my own problems. I could only focus on one issue at a time.
Which was probably why I hadn’t made a decision about what to do with my heart.
I was waiting to hear if Liam was going to be okay.
For weeks I had done nothing but wait. I had tried to ignore it, hoping that if I did the problem would just go away.
But pretending it was getting stronger hadn’t helped. Nothing had helped.
The nurse opened up a door and stopped so abruptly that Penny and I almost ran into her.
“Excuse me sir, but you can’t be in here,” she said.
I peered over her shoulder to see a man in jeans and a plaid shirt fooling with the settings on a treadmill in the corner. He cleared his throat and turned around. His long white beard almost reached his pants.
“Hello,” he said in a cheery voice. “I’m Dr. Young. Come in, come in. We should get started.”
He was quite rotund for a cardiologist. It looked like the suspenders he was wearing were actually necessary and not just a hipster fashion statement.
He practically looked the way Santa Claus was depicted.
He was the best cardiologist in the states?
Was Penny serious about this? And why was he dressed like he was in a cabin up north?
I thought Penny said he had been on vacation in Miami.
“Oh.” The nurse didn’t move. “You’re Dr. Young?” She seemed as confused as me.
But I guess Penny recognized him from her research because she rushed into the room. “Thank you so much for agreeing to meet us here.”
He clasped her outstretched hand between both of his. “No problem, dear. I’m happy to help.”
The nurse walked into the room. “It’ll take me about 45 minutes to run all the tests you required. If you’d like to get changed in the staff lounge…”
I almost laughed, but bit my tongue. Clearly I wasn’t the only one alarmed by his appearance.
“Nonsense,” Dr. Young said. “I’ll just do the tests myself.”
“Are you sure? I already have everything set up and…”
“Of course I’m sure,” he said with a laugh. “These folks have requested to see me. I’ll give them all my time. There’s nothing else I need to do in Delaware. Such a quaint little town.”
I was pretty sure he lived in the middle of the woods in a log cabin, so I had no idea why he thought Newark was so quaint.
“Did you want me to at least grab you a lab coat?” the nurse asked. “Or…a stethoscope maybe?”
“Nope. I have it right here.” He reached into one of the pockets in his jeans, pulled a stethoscope out, blew on it, and wiped it on his flannel shirt. “Good as new.”
What the hell? Who was this lunatic?
“Okay then. I’ll just leave you to it. Page me if you need any assistance. The EKG machine is pretty new and…”
“We’re good.” He shooed her away. “Come in, Mr. Hunter. Let’s get to the bottom of what’s happening in that chest of yours.
Just give me a minute to figure out this…
oh…never mind, it’s already on.” He squirted a big glob of that jelly stuff used for echos onto the ground.
“Warmer is on. Nothing worse than that being spread on you when it’s cold.
This warmer is the best development in the cardiology field in a decade. ” He chuckled to himself.
Really? The best development in a decade? “Penny, can I talk to you for a minute?” I asked and glared at her. She had to be kidding with this. My cardiologist in New York City was more competent than this old lumberjack.
“Can’t it wait?” she asked. “James, he’s flown all the way here.”
“It’s important.”
“Nothing is as important as the health of your heart,” Dr. Young said. “Well, besides for the health of your brain maybe. Mental health I mean. You both seem pretty good there though. Quick as a whip. You should take off your shirt.”
I shook my head.
“James, take off your shirt,” Penny said. Her voice was so stern that there was no room to argue.
If being examined by this lunatic was going to put her mind at ease, then fine.
But I wasn’t going to listen to anything he had to say.
He was a whack job. Hopefully Liam’s doctor was actually good.
We had met him last night and he at least acted and looked normal.
Now I wasn’t so sure. Maybe Penny had accidentally looked at a list of doctors recently diagnosed with insanity.
I pulled my shirt off and went over to the exam table that Dr. Young was patting way too enthusiastically.
“Great, now just lie back. We’re going to do the EKG first so that the gel has more time to warm up. Don’t want to send your whole body into shock.” He took my shirt from my hand and tossed it toward Penny. It made it only halfway there and landed on the floor.
This guy was bad at everything. I slowly lay down and he started attaching the little stickers and wires all over my chest. I’d had plenty of EKG’s done and they usually went just like this.
At least he seemed like he knew what he was doing here.
But when he leaned over to attach a few of the wires his long beard tickled my skin, throwing any confidence I had in him out the window.
“What do you do when you have a surgery?” I asked and nodded to his beard.
“Oh. I tuck it into my shirt.” He dropped the rest of the cords down on top of me and proceeded to unbutton the top of his shirt.
“You don’t have to…”
“No, it’s fine. I should have done it earlier, it’s just strange to introduce yourself with tucked beard, you see.” He shoved his whole beard into his flannel shirt and then re-buttoned it to ensure that everything would stay in place. “Better?”
“Sure.” I tried for it to not come out as a question, but I couldn’t help it.
In a way, I did understand what he said.
Introducing yourself with your beard tucked into your shirt would be a ridiculous thing to do.
But at the same time, ever doing it in the first place was probably more ridiculous.
Tucked beard really shouldn’t be a phrase ever used by anyone.
“Let’s just finish this up.” He attached the last few wires and turned on the machine beside him. He watched it for a few seconds before turning back to me. “Can you take a few deep, slow breaths for me?”
I closed my eyes and inhaled slowly before exhaling. For some reason, it caused me to yawn.
“Keep doing that for me.”
“What? Yawning?”
“No, silly.” He patted my shoulder like he had been patting the exam table a few minutes ago. “The deep breathing. Try to relax.”
Relax? Yeah right. How was I supposed to relax when I was more worried about Liam and Penny’s health than my own? I hadn’t even agreed to this test. I had come here for Liam. And Penny should have been on this table instead of me. I wanted to know how her heart murmur was.
“Hmmm. Well. Okay then.” He switched off the machine and started pulling off the stickers.
The words that had just come out of his mouth weren’t at all comforting. But before I could ask him a question, he started talking again.
“Does that hurt?” He pulled another sticker off a little faster. “I never remember whether I should go slow or fast.”
“It doesn’t hurt.”
“Fast it is then.” He pulled off the rest of the stickers.
“So…how were the results?” I asked.
“Fine. Not great, but fine. Your heart is functioning normally which is good. But I might have been wrong about your brain.”
“Excuse me?”
He tapped the side of my head. “I told you to take a few deep breaths. And you only gave me one medium breath. I should have taken your vitals before I wasted my time with a fast-breathing EKG.” He wiped his stethoscope off on the front of his plaid shirt again and then pressed the dirty thing to my chest.
“I was taking deep breaths.”
“No, you were most certainly not. Try it again for me.”
I breathed in slow and exhaled even slower. Then another. And another.
“Medium. Medium. Medium.” He looked so disappointed in me. “Are you stressed out about something?”
“Of course I’m stressed out.” I swiped his stethoscope away from me. “My wife was in a coma for weeks and then didn’t remember me when she woke up. My son was born too early and can’t breathe without all these machines attached to him. We don’t even know if we’ll ever be able to bring him home.”
“And your heart. You're worried about your heart.”
“And my wife’s heart.”
“Oh, why didn’t you say so? I can tell you whether or not you need to worry about that.
Penny, dear. Come over here too, will you?
” He fiddled with his pager as Penny joined us at the exam table.
She didn’t look weirded out at all by Dr. Young’s tucked beard or enthusiastic table patting.
She sat down next to me and whispered in my ear while Dr. Young was still playing with his pager. “Medium breaths, huh?”
“Medium breaths aren’t a thing.”
“James, you need to relax," she said. "Remember when I almost lost you before? That doctor warned you about your stress levels.”
“I can’t get this thing to work.” Dr. Young tossed the pager down onto the floor. “Excuse me real quick.” He walked out of the room without looking at either of us. Before the door swung closed, he yelled, “I need Penny Hunter’s medical records!”
I laughed. “You want me to relax around that psychopath? Seriously, where did you find this guy?”
“He’s the best of the best. And the best sometimes means…eccentric. Besides, what does it matter how he looks? He knows what he’s doing.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Positive. He knew you were stressed out.”
“Anyone can tell that I’m stressed out. Penny, I’ve been going through all of this on my own and I didn’t have time to think about myself when…”
“You’re not alone anymore. I’m right here. You do this thing where you carry the weight of the world on your shoulders. But I’m right here. I can carry some of it for you.”