Chapter Five
Nick drove me. He’d offered late the night before, in a text that read like a call sheet:
I chuckled and replied: Fine. But I’m taking the back seat like a fugitive. And deleted the text after it showed it’d been read.
In the car, on the way over, my knee wouldn’t stay still. Nick noticed without looking.
“Nervous about the doctor,” he said, “or nervous about what she’ll find?”
“Neither.” I bit the inside of my cheek.
“Both. I keep rehearsing my symptoms like it’s an audition.
A year of Bill taught me to present them in the least alarming order, with a little laugh at the end so nobody gets uncomfortable.
” I heard myself and pressed my hand flat on my knee.
“What if I do that in there? What if I walk in and perform fine at her out of habit?”
“Then she’ll ask a second question,” Nick said. “That’s the whole difference, Millie. Real doctors ask questions.”
Dr. Gillian Parks’s office sat in a quiet medical building with a small waiting room, real plants, and a receptionist who checked me in under just a first name without acting like that was interesting.
No one offered me cucumber water. After a year of Bill Kent’s concierge suite, with its cashmere throws, espresso machine, and appointments that were mostly pampering with the occasional blood draw, the plainness of the place steadied me.
Nick took a chair in the waiting room and picked up a golf magazine he had no interest in.
“I’ll be here,” he said. “Take as long as it takes.”
Dr. Parks was small, gray-streaked, and direct. She shook my hand, pointed me to a chair instead of the exam table, and sat down across from me with a fresh legal pad.
“Beatrice gave me the outline,” she said. “I want it from you, in your own order, from the beginning. Don’t organize it for me. Don’t skip things because they sound unrelated or because someone told you they were nothing. I’ll decide what’s nothing.”
So, I told her. It came out backward and sideways, the way a year of gaslighting comes out, and she never once hurried me.
The tiredness that arrived first and never left.
The stomach trouble that got called stress, then reflux, then anxiety.
The aching in my legs that lived deep in the bones.
The tingling in my hands and feet, worse at night, bad enough some mornings that I dropped my pens.
“Dropped them how often?”
“A few times a week, lately. I switched to thicker grips and told myself it was ergonomics.” I caught myself smiling as I said it, the little laugh I attached to symptoms so nobody got uncomfortable, and I stopped and made myself say it again straight.
“I’m an illustrator, Dr. Parks. My hands are the whole job.
My hands started failing, and I bought fatter pencils, and changed the subject. That’s how well I’ve been trained.”
She nodded and wrote it down.
Then the hair, and here my voice cracked, which I hadn’t planned, because I’d never said the hair part out loud to anyone.
“How much hair?” Dr. Parks asked, level.
“I stopped wearing it down. I part it differently now.” I made myself keep going. “My hairbrush upset me, so I switched to a wide comb, and I clean it right away, so I don’t have to look. My hairdresser noticed and I canceled my appointments after that.”
She wrote. “When did the symptoms start? Best guess.”
“Over a year ago. They come in waves. I’d get better for a stretch, then worse again. The bad waves usually came after,” I stopped, hearing it as I said it, “after someone decided I’d been overdoing it and put me on a rest routine. More teas, more supplements, more of Dara looking after me.”
Dr. Parks didn’t react to that. She just kept writing.
“Walk me through what goes into your body on a normal day,” she said. “Everything. Food, drink, pills, powders, who prepares each thing.”
I walked her through it, and hearing my own daily menu out loud was its own kind of testimony.
The morning tea Dara blended. The lunches Dara left.
The supplement pouch Dara filled. The evening tea by my plate.
The greens powder. Family dinners where Karl poured.
By the end of the list, the shape of my life was plain to both of us: a woman who ate almost nothing that hadn’t passed through two sets of hands.
“And your regular physician. Dr. Kent. He’s run labs?”
“Panels, twice. Maybe three times. He always said they came back normal. Perfectly normal, actually, that was the phrase. He’d say my body was fine and my nervous system was exhausted.
” I opened the folder I’d brought. “I pulled everything I could from his patient portal last night. There isn’t much.
Summaries, mostly. The actual result pages either aren’t uploaded or I can’t see them. ”
Dr. Parks took the folder and went quiet over it. I watched her read, and I watched her flip a page back and read something again. Her face never changed, but her pen came up and made a small mark in a margin.
“Two things,” she said finally. “First, these summaries reference tests where I would expect attached values, and there are no values. That’s unusual for a practice at this level.
It points to a problem. Second.” She looked up at me.
“You are aware that Dr. Kent is Dara’s brother.
Beatrice told me, but I want to hear how that arrangement happened. ”
“Dara recommended him. Years ago, when my old GP retired. She said Bill would take real care of me, family rates on trust, she called it.” The words tasted different now.
“He’s been my doctor ever since. Dara books it, drives me, sits in the waiting room.
Sometimes she’d come into the exam room to help me remember my symptoms, because I’d get flustered and downplay them. ”
“So, she heard everything you reported, and she knows everything he told you.”
“Yes.”
“All right.” Dr. Parks set the folder down and squared it with the edge of her desk.
“Here’s what happens now, and I want you to hear the order of it, because the order matters.
Today, I examine you and I document what I find in detail, dated, in your record.
Today, we also draw blood and collect urine, and I’m sending a full panel plus a heavy-metal and toxicology screen to an independent laboratory.
Not a quick strip test. The real thing. Some of those results take days. ”
“Days.”
“Days. I know you’ve been suffering for over a year, but we have to document properly.” She held my eyes. “I’m also starting a symptom diary with you, and I want you to write in it daily. Time, symptom, severity, what you consumed. From now on, your medical record will be the truth.”
The exam took a long time, and it was thorough in a way I’d forgotten exams could be.
She tested the strength in my hands, grip by grip.
She ran the point of a folded paperclip along my palms and soles and had me say sharp or dull with my eyes closed.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw how often my answers made her pen move.
She looked at my nails under a light for a while, at the pale bands lying across them, and photographed them with a small ruler held alongside.
She didn’t tell me that my body was fine.
“The numbness in your feet,” she said, while she worked. “You said it’s worse at night. Does it burn?”
“Sometimes. Like they’re sunburned under the skin. I stopped saying that one out loud, because Bill said it was anxiety presenting physically, and Karl would get this worn look.”
“Describe the worn look.”
It was such an odd request from a doctor that I laughed.
“Like I was a leaky faucet he’d already called someone about.”
Dr. Parks almost smiled. “Mrs. Barber, I want to be careful here, because my job today is to collect facts, not to hand you conclusions ahead of evidence. So, this is not a diagnosis. But you should hear this much plainly, because I gather no one has said even this much to you.” She peeled off her gloves and sat down across from me again.
“You have objective, physical, measurable findings. Reduced sensation in a stocking-and-glove pattern. Motor weakness in your grips. Visible changes in your nails that don’t come from stress or imagination.
Whatever is wrong with you, it is not nothing, and it was never nothing. ”
I looked at the ceiling until my eyes stopped stinging. It half worked.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Don’t thank me yet.” She said it briskly and turned to her notes.
She gave me the mercy of a moment to fix my face.
The blood draw filled more tubes than I’d ever given at once, a neat rack of them, labeled while I watched, my name checked against each one, and the difference between this and Bill’s smiling, casual draws sat with me the whole time.
A courier was already booked for the lab, Dr. Parks said.
Chain of custody, she said, the same words Beatrice used, and I understood that the two of them had already spoken at length.
I was, for the first time in this whole nightmare, standing inside a structure other people had built to hold me up.
Nick stood when I came out. He read my face, handed me the water he’d bought while he waited, and asked nothing in front of the receptionist. In the car, out of the parking garage, into traffic, still nothing, just the radio down low, and his quiet filled the car.
I stared out the window and let the buildings slide by until I was ready.
“She believed me,” I said, at a red light. “She examined me and she found things. Real things, Nick. Findings, she called them, things you can measure. A year of being told my body was a mood, and this woman found facts in it in ninety minutes.”
“Good,” Nick said. His hands stayed easy on the wheel, but his jaw had set. “What happens next?”
“Labs. Real ones, at an independent lab, that take days, and she told me that instead of promising me the moon. You have no idea how good that felt.” I laughed, and it came out wet. “My standards are hitting rock bottom. A doctor performed medicine on me, and I nearly cried in the parking lot.”
“Your standards were put there,” Nick said. “There’s a difference.”
Before I left the office, Dr. Parks had walked me to the door herself, and she’d stopped me with one hand on the frame and given me the sentence I carried out of the building, the one I repeated to Nick at that red light, the one I later wrote at the top of the first page of my symptom diary in a hand that hardly shook.
“Mrs. Barber,” she’d said, “I’ll have data soon, and data will do our arguing for us. But after today, you should hear the direction it points. This does not look like simple stress.”