The President Is Missing(12)

Chapter

5



After talking with Jenny and Carolyn, I head across the hall into my bedroom, where Deborah Lane is already opening her bag of goodies.

“Good morning, Mr. President,” she says.

I pull down on my tie, unbutton my shirt. “Top of the morning, Doc.”

She focuses on me, appraises me, and doesn’t look happy. I seem to have that effect on a lot of people these days.

“You forgot to shave again,” she says.

“I’ll shave later.” It’s actually four days running now that I haven’t shaved. When I was in college, at UNC, I had this superstitious routine—I didn’t shave during finals week. It tended to shock people because, though the hair on my head is probably best described as light brown, my facial hair doesn’t follow script: somehow, an orange pigment creeps in to give me a fiery auburn beard. And I can grow a beard fast; by the end of finals, everyone was calling me Paul Bunyan.

I never thought much about that after college. Until now.

“You look tired,” she says. “How many hours did you sleep last night?”

“Two or three.”

“That’s not enough, Mr. President.”

“I have a few balls in the air right now.”

“Which you won’t be able to juggle without sleep.” She puts her stethoscope on my bare chest.

Dr. Deborah Lane is not my official doctor but a specialist in hematology at Georgetown. She grew up under apartheid in South Africa but fled to the United States for high school and never left. Her close-cropped hair is now completely gray. Her eyes are probing but kind.

For the last week, she’s come to the White House every day because it’s easier and less conspicuous if a professional-looking woman—albeit one with a not-very-well-disguised medical bag—visits the White House as opposed to the president visiting MedStar Georgetown University Hospital on a daily basis.

She puts the blood-pressure wrap on my arm. “How’ve you been feeling?”

“I have a gigantic pain in my ass,” I say. “Can you look and see if the Speaker of the House is up there?”

She shoots me a look but doesn’t laugh. Not even a smirk.

“Physically,” I say, “I feel fine.”

She shines a light inside my mouth. She looks closely at my torso, my abdomen, my arms and legs, turns me around and does the same on my other side.

“Bruising is worsening,” she says.

“I know.” It used to look like a rash. Now it looks more like someone has been pummeling the backs of my legs with hammers.

In my first term as governor of North Carolina, I was diagnosed with a blood disorder known as immune thrombocytopenia—ITP—which basically means a low platelet count. My blood doesn’t always clot as well as it should. I announced it publicly at the time and told the truth—most of the time, the ITP isn’t an issue. I was told to avoid activities that could lead to bleeding, which wasn’t hard for a man in his forties. My baseball days were long over, and I was never much for bullfighting or knife juggling.

The disorder flared up twice during my time as governor but left me alone during the campaign for the presidency. It reemerged when Rachel’s cancer returned—my doctor is convinced that an overload of stress is a significant cause of relapse—but I treated it easily. It returned a week ago, when the bruising under the skin on my calves first started appearing. The rapid discoloration and spread of bruising tells both of us the same thing—this is the worst case I’ve had yet.

“Headaches?” Dr. Deb asks. “Dizziness? Fever?”

“No, no, and no.”

“Fatigue?”

“From lack of sleep, sure.”

“Nosebleeds?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Blood in your teeth or gums?”

“Toothbrush is clean.”

“Blood in your urine or stool?”

“No.” It’s hard to be humble when they play a song for you every time you enter the room, when the world financial markets hang on your every word, and when you command the world’s greatest military arsenal, but if you need to knock yourself down a few pegs, try checking your stool for blood.

She steps back and hums to herself. “I’m going to draw blood again,” she says. “I was very concerned by your count yesterday. You were under twenty thousand. I don’t know how you talked me out of hospitalizing you right then and there.”

“I talked you out of it,” I say, “because I’m the president of the United States.”

“I keep forgetting.”

“I can do twenty thousand, Doc.”

The normal range for platelets is between 150,000 and 450,000 per microliter. So nobody’s throwing a parade for a count under 20,000, but it’s still above the critical stage.

“You’re taking your steroids?”

“Religiously.”

She reaches into her bag, then gets to work rubbing alcohol on my arm with a swab. I’m not looking forward to the blood draw, because she’s not great with needles. She’s out of practice. At her high level of specialty, somebody else usually performs the rudimentary tasks. But I have to limit the number of people in this world who know about this. My ITP disorder may be public knowledge, but nobody needs to know how bad it is right now, especially right now. So she’s a one-person show for the time being.