Doctored

by K'Anne Meinel

  He was so grateful for her insight and attempts to help alleviate the chronic pain he had been in since he hurt his back, that he would do anything she told him. The script was for a placebo, but he didn’t need to know that. He needed to be free of the addictive elements of all the other prescriptions.

  “Now, you can take an over the counter pain pill like acetaminophen or ibuprofen, but nothing else.” She indicated all the other prescriptions, “Turn all these in and we’ll dispose of them,” she advised. Before she handed him the script, she held it back as he reached for it. “Promise?”

  He would have agreed to anything, and she held the script until he brought in all the unused medication so they could dispose of them properly. He had offered to flush them down the toilet, but Deanna had pointed out that some of those pills would just float down and might end up in the ecosystem. They couldn’t allow that.

  “He was in pain and the doctors were just medicating him to shut him up,” Deanna explained. She was answerable for her actions to the hospital after all. She just didn’t have a high opinion of those who thought themselves better than her. Now, if they treated her as an equal, she never really had a conflict with them.

  “Yes, but you are ruffling feathers,” she was advised.

  “Maybe the feathers need ruffling,” she answered and went on with her work. No one could fault her there. She worked harder than most attending doctors—except weekends—she insisted on having those off, except for an occasional surgery if she was needed.

  * * * * *

  Deanna was enjoying seeing Madison. It was easy to be friends once again. They couldn’t do it a lot as they both had home lives and frequently their work lives were insane. She didn’t talk about her home life, but as she was adept at turning the conversations to Madison and her children, the redhead didn’t notice at first.

  Madison was very involved with her children’s lives, as much as she possibly could be with her work schedule. Scott wasn’t making it any easier and she wondered about going for full custody. He would be furious if she attempted that, but California was a no-fault state and the divorce itself had gone through easily. So far they agreed that the custody should be fifty-fifty, but they would live with Madison full-time with occasional overnighters at Scott’s…especially now that he had a dog for them to take care of. Madison had been right. He regretted getting the beast that chewed up some of his nicest leather shoes.

  “Get him a chew toy,” she advised.

  “Maybe you should take him?” he tried to weasel out of his responsibility. He regretted trying to show her up and then felt she had somehow manipulated him into getting the dog. He really wasn’t suited to taking care of the dog, much less the growing children.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have taken him in the first place,” Madison pointed out. She would not be guilt-tripped into taking the dog. She would have loved having him, but she simply didn’t have the time.

  “He’s not going to give up with that one, is he?” Deanna consoled when she heard the story.

  “No,” she shook her head. “He took the dog to show me up and is now regretting it. Let him wallow,” she said bitterly.

  “Was being married to him so bad then?”

  “Not really. It was more like having another child that I had to take care of, and I didn’t want that.”

  “What about the sex?” she teased, but she really did want to know.

  “We aren’t going there, okay?” she said mock-threatening. She knew Deanna was teasing, but then she wondered, was she really? They saw each other frequently now in the hospital, but was it by design or accidental? Deanna had been able to hide those first few weeks when she came on…no one ever did find out who sent Madison those exotic flowers, which she still had growing in her windows at home. They worked well together when they were put on the same surgery. Deanna was still as confident and efficient as ever. Madison could see why other doctors with more experience resented this brilliant woman. She was opinionated, knew her facts, and read voraciously to learn more. When they weren’t schmoozing her, on her free time at the hospital she could frequently be found reading up on procedures and cases, researching against future cases. She’d been all over and seen and learned things they could only hope to achieve.

  “That patient woke up during surgery,” she continued on, complaining about the hospital and an incident the previous day. “It’s called ‘accidental awareness during general anesthesia.’ When I became aware of it, I made the anesthesiologist aware of it. Good thing I was observing and not operating! That patient will probably end up with post-traumatic stress disorder,” she said angrily, knowing she was right.

  “Well, at least you caught it before too much damage occurred.” she’d heard about the uproar that had happened in the surgery.

  “Yeah, I probably could have been more diplomatic about it,” she said in regret. Once the patient had been truly out, she’d let the incompetents know of her displeasure. She’d insisted on replacing the anesthesiologist mid-surgery and insulted not only the one she’d had, but the chief of surgery. “It just pisses me off when I’m trying to help and they doubt every friggin’ word I tell them.”

  “I can see you won’t stay beyond the six months you agreed to,” Madison tried to fish for information. Deanna had told no one of her plans and Madison would miss her friendship. At least, that was what she was telling herself.

  “You never know,” Deanna said without making a commitment. She had more than one person wanting to know if she would stay on. She knew she was a troublemaker in an environment such as this, but she had brought in a lot of notable cases. Word of mouth meant the hospital got referrals and they liked that.

  * * * * *

  “I think you picked up a tape worm,” Deanna told the woman.

  “I did?” she sneered in disgust at the very thought.

  “No, I meant your daughter,” she shook her head at the obtuse woman.

  “How is that possible?”

  “Handling food that has been tainted…” she began and then named other ways the girl could have been losing the weight she had lost. She was rail thin, something she was thrilled about; however, she was not getting the nutrients she should have and was ill.

  “But she looks so healthy…” the mother began, objecting.

  “Is she really? She has lost a tremendous amount of weight very quickly. You say she doesn’t exercise, so it has to be diet or something else. Does she take pills? You said no. Does she throw up her food? You said no. Let’s test and…” she left off as the girl, listening, protested.

  “Mom, I’m fine…let’s go,” she whined.

  “We are going to get to the bottom of this, Tessa, if this is the last thing we do!” her mother repeated her earlier edict once again.

  “And that’s another thing we need…a stool sample,” Deanna reminded her.

  “I have one right here. You asked last time,” she pointed out, pulling the small container from her enormous purse.

  Deanna was amused, hoping that the container had been screwed tightly shut. She didn’t need to run any more tests. The telltale signs of tape worms were in the stool sample. Some of it was still moving. As Deanna pointed this out to the young girl’s mother who was grossed out by the whole thing, she heard the mother begin to berate her daughter.

  “How in the world could you not notice those…those…things coming out of you?” she began with a huff.

  “But, Mom, I was only supposed to…” she protested, trying to clam up about her knowledge of her ‘mystery illness.’ The one reason they had sought Deanna out was because of her specialty.

  “Tessa…” Deanna began before her mother could. She turned the young girl on the chair so she was facing Deanna and couldn’t see her mother even in her peripheral vision. She felt a one-on-one with the girl would be better than having mommy’s approval, or in this case, disapproval. “Did you take something to get in this state?”

  Tessa debated owning up to what
she had done. After a long time, almost feeling her mother’s dragon breath on her neck, she began. She didn’t see the warning look Deanna had given the mother to keep her quiet, not an easy thing to accomplish. “Yes, I took a pill,” she admitted.

  “When?” she asked.

  “Three months ago, when I went to a clinic in Mexico.”

  Deanna nodded. It confirmed what she was now thinking. “Weren’t you supposed to take another pill a month or so after to kill it?” she asked, knowing there were ‘weight loss’ clinics in Mexico that gave out larvae that grew into tape worms.

  “Yeah, I forgot,” she admitted.

  Deanna wanted to shake the privileged teen. She had everything—money, looks—and all she wanted was to be thin, just like the other girls. This was extreme and she hoped that the girl would be closely supervised in the future. “You know these things can kill you, right?” she asked kindly.

  “Don’t they just die…?” the teen asked naively.

  Deanna shook her head. “Nope, they can grow to three feet in length.” She let that sink in to the teen’s young mind as she realized how long that really would be in her body. “If they break off, get into your brain, you’ll be gorked,” she said in the slang that the teen would understand.

  “Really?” the teen asked in fear, her eyes widening to perfect round orbs.

  Deanna nodded. “Yep, and once you’re gorked, you know there’s no coming back.”

  “Can you get this thing out of me?” she asked fearfully, finally realizing how gross it was.

  Deanna couldn’t let her off that easy. “You realize I have no idea how big it is?” she hedged, lying slightly. She could know with the right x-ray. The contrast would show how big the worm really was. “You put a worm in your healthy, young body. This could affect you for the rest of your life,” she explained, putting the fear of God in the young idiot. At this age they never realized how fragile life was. Deanna had seen involuntarily cases of worms in a healthy body in third-world countries. She was incensed that this healthy young thing had done it deliberately…to lose weight.

  “You can’t get it out?” she asked and her tone was genuinely scared now.

  Deanna realized she wouldn’t listen to any other jibes she might see fit to give her. She also knew, with the mother listening, she might have gotten more than she intended. “I’ll see what I have that can help you, but this is going to be a slow process.” She didn’t tell her that she would be given a killing agent and that the other pill the teen ‘forgot’ to take would have taken care of the organism. It would take days, possibly weeks, for all the pieces of the worm to leave her body through her fecal matter. She had a nurse fetch some praziquantel, also known as Biltricide, which would kill the tape worm inside her patient.

  “You are going to have to wash your hands thoroughly after every time you go to the bathroom. If you get this on your hands, you can re-infect yourself or others,” Deanna explained. Although it was rare, it could happen. “I want to see you in a month with another stool sample.” Deanna gave the mother another container to put the fecal matter in. She watched as the teen drank the praziquantel down. It was not a good taste, at least not by her facial expression. “These things can get in your muscles and to the brain,” she explained again to put the fear back in the teen. She was a bit too cocky, but her mom was listening and would probably give her hell. Deanna pulled the mom aside before the two of them left. “I would mention this to the other parents of anyone who went on that trip. Girls travel in packs, and if one of them is infected, you can bet there are others.”

  “I don’t want anyone to know about this,” she hissed, horrified at what her friends would say.

  “Well, then you might be responsible for the disease continuing or maybe they will convince Tessa that this was a one-time deal and she should do it again. You need to stop it now,” she advised. She was grateful her parents had kept her busy at this stage in her life in school and that she didn’t have the social pressures her age group would have to lose weight, but then she had been a doctor at this teen’s age. She knew she was a bit of a different story.

  Deanna knew that the woman may or may not talk to the other parents, but she hoped she would. She did end up treating two other girls with praziquantel in the following week, but patient confidentiality kept her from asking if they knew Tessa. She was able to confirm that they too had been to Mexico. She rolled her eyes at the privileged teens and their stupidity.

  * * * * *

  “I think, Robby, you have Nosophobia,” Deanna explained kindly.

  “I’m not a hypochondriac?” he asked, relieved at her diagnosis.

  Deanna nearly smiled as she explained. “To a degree, I’d say you are; however, if I were you, I’d get a new therapist as the one you’ve been seeing isn’t getting to the root cause of your problem.”

  “But this Noso…” he began, grasping at the disease.

  “It’s a phobia, Robby. You have an abnormal fear of disease and that makes you a bit of a hypochondriac, a germaphobe even,” she explained. “See a therapist for it, and if they can’t help you, see another,” she advised.

  Sometimes, people like this just wanted a word for what they were feeling. Robby didn’t care that he had a phobia, now he had a word for what it was. That was a huge relief and he promised to get help for it.

  Deanna wasn’t so sure he would, but it was a nice thought. She couldn’t help them all, she could only try her best.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Madison laughed as Deanna shared her many stories. Her flair for the dramatic made them interesting and the common medical bond the two of them shared made it even better. When Madison related her take on some of the stories, after all they shared some of the same patients now and then, it wasn’t quite as vibrant or exciting. They even shared surgery from time to time, she recalled the first time at this modern hospital.

  Madison looked across the surgery table, amazed at the transformation. Deanna had removed her nose stud, her two sets of earrings, the stud in the upper part of her ear, as well as her necklace and of course, her family crest. She was professional and efficient, but she looked naked without all the jewelry. She wasn’t quite as…overwhelming…or as intimidating. Even her high-tops had been replaced with the surgical stockings that everyone wore over their shoes, only Deanna was just wearing stockings. She’d be barefoot if she could, but she needed the warmth of her socks—these were still flamboyant and very gay, rainbow colors and vibrantly loud.

  Madison didn’t realize how often she had been seeing Deanna until someone mentioned something about seeing them out. She froze at the question and then dismissed it. They were friends after all, weren’t they?

  Deanna wouldn’t classify it as that. She had tried to steer them down a path that might revive their previous relationship, but she wondered if they could. It had been a different time and place, and definitely so very long ago. She wasn’t exactly sure how she felt about this grown-up Madison. Her memories were all about the youthful adult named Maddie. This responsible Madison with children conflicted with what she felt about the younger Maddie. She couldn’t read Madison either. She wasn’t sure Madison wanted anything more than friendship. She was willing to wait to find out, but her time at the hospital was coming to an end. She knew it and the hospital knew it….

  As Madison listened to one of Deanna’s many stories about patients and her experiences, she couldn’t help but enjoy them. Deanna told them so well. She knew some of them, but never told Deanna when she repeated one because they were told slightly different each and every time. She sometimes wondered if Deanna were courting her. She appreciated getting out, but she worried that the doctor wanted more than she was willing to give. Did she want to go back to that kind of a relationship? She knew she admired Deanna—she had loved her—but could she be in a relationship openly with this woman? She had to wonder if she was just bouncing back from her divorce from Scott. Tom hadn’t been a good transition date even if
initially he had intrigued her. So going out with Deanna under the guise of friendship wasn’t the ‘next’ which she had heard was always a bad date…Tom certainly qualified as that.

  Madison had heard that Tom had hit on Deanna. She’d refused him of course, but then Deanna refused all dates, or so the gossip said. For some reason this pleased Madison and as she analyzed it she wondered if she took some perverse pleasure that the busy doctor only took time out for her. She’d made no play for her, hadn’t even brought up that Madison had left her so long ago. That bothered her to a degree. She remembered leaving Mamadu quite clearly. The fear in the air about the camp being overrun was burned in her brain. Also her fear over leaving Deanna and never seeing her again. Ironically, she was driving Deanna’s donated Rover in their attempt to escape. She remembered clearly that she had been crying. She knew that she had to go. She wanted to say something to her before she left, but she couldn’t. She hadn’t wanted a relationship with a woman, she wanted children, and she had wanted…Deanna. But the doctor had never told her that she loved her. Madison had convinced herself that Deanna did not love her and this had helped her to make the decision to not only leave, but to break up with her. It had made her last weeks in Mamadu horrible. Even arriving in Lamish after a harrowing trip back, avoiding lines of soldiers, skirmishes, and an actual war that was going on around them, she’d not stopped the tears from trickling down and fogging her vision. Those with her thought she was crying out of fear for what might happen to them, what could happen. Their comfort had been unwelcome and unnecessary, but she accepted it rather than explain she was crying for what she had left behind…the first person she had ever loved wholeheartedly.