special surgery. Doc doesn’t even want to try. Honestly, I can’t blame the man. He’d have to remove one kidney, take out the part of the tumor that’s wrapped around that side of my body, and then use a vacuum to suck out the rest. He says surgery would kill me on the operating table. But if they don’t go in—”
Cael took a rolled paper from his back pocket, tapped it out in front of them. “I signed the waiver, absolved the hospital, whatever they want. With any luck today I can convince them…”
He was failing in his effort to be brave, and Alice felt her own failure as well. She breathed in, released outward. She willed herself still. Did her best to stare at this man, to meet him.
Cael swallowed. No longer smiling, his pupils black, fathomless.
This treatment we’re discussing
R EQUISITE KNOCKS ACTED as both interrogative ( Is it okay? ) and warning ( Because I’m coming in ). The oncologist made sure the door was shut behind him, and joined the already crowded room. Where Alice’s New Hampshire physician had looked as if he’d been ordered from a doctor’s catalogue, this new one, the doctor now taking over her care and treatment, seemed to have been ordered from a more expensive catalogue, one with a glossy sheen and higher price points. A bit taller than six feet and robust, with a thick black field of hair slickly parted to one side, looking lightly wet or gelled, Howard Eisenstatt, MD, was neither as old nor as musty as his name suggested. His face oblong and pale, with a thin layer of baby fat; small brown eyes deeply set and hard with intelligence, his nose long and thin.
Acknowledging neither the nurses nor the other doctors in the room, he focused his attention on Alice, smiling in a manner neither welcoming nor insincere, his handshake strong without being warm. At the end of his lab coat’s sleeve, peeking out from beneath an ivory-white French cuff, half of a chunky, high-end titanium watch was conspicuous. The doctor moved toward Oliver and similarly introduced himself. He completed the formality of washing his hands and stepped toward the office desk, stiffly taking in the dormant baby stroller, the folding chair overflowing with coats and shoulder bags and hanging sweater arms and that single, tiny yellow unicorn.
Adjacent to that pile, perched on what Alice realized was the doctor’s prize—the sought-after stool—Oliver was using his toes for leverage, spinning himself and the little one in slow half circles, the child gurgling, holding her blanky, sucking with great affection on her pacifier; now aware of attention on her, she turned away from her father, checked out the nice new man in the lab coat.
Howard Eisenstatt, MD, once more extended those thin lips, revealing that tight smile. Scooting himself upward, he sat on the edge of the desk, stretched his pressed slacks diagonally out in front of him, revealing thin fine socks, perfectly matching his pants’ gray shade. A glance toward his clipboard; Eisenstatt removed a ballpoint from the chest pocket of his lab coat. Repeated pressing didn’t get the pen going. Licking the end was no help. The doctor looked down; fleshy folds of a double chin revealed themselves. Eisenstatt blinked at his pen, as if blinking were an expression of disappointment, as if expressing disappointment to a pen would somehow motivate the ink.
“We couldn’t get a sitter,” Alice said.
She sat, rigid, against the raised slab of the examination table, her left arm hanging straight down between dangling legs. A catheter was plugged in the soft of her elbow, and layers of clear plastic tubing were taped to her forearm. A quiet, head-scarfed woman down the hall was employed solely for the brutally tedious task of starting IV lines and getting blood from cancer patients, and she’d needed three sticks in order to penetrate Alice’s vein. The number remained unsettling to Alice for reasons she would not allow herself to think about ( the vein
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