I'm Glad About You(102)

Who, when he did show up, was not reassuring or even clarifying. Young, bespectacled, and Jewish—he wore a yarmulke—he managed to be both serious and evasive.

“How are we doing in here?” he asked semiconsciously. He was looking at a clipboard in his hand. “How are we doing, Rose?” This a little more loudly, as if the unconscious woman on a respirator in the hospital bed hadn’t immediately answered the first time because she was hard of hearing.

“Well, you tell us,” Alison began. “I’m her daughter, I just flew in this morning. My sister was here with her all day yesterday and a lot of last night.”

“Yeah, we had a little bit of an emergency, didn’t we?” Why did they all sound like they thought everybody was in kindergarten?

“A little bit, yeah.” Alison offered up a sardonic laugh, trying to put them back on equal footing. The doctor ignored her. There was a black metal box on a pole right by Rose’s head, with lots of blinking lights and numbers, which the doctor seemed to think was a little worrisome. Or maybe that was the look that was always on his face when he was thinking.

“Are you Doctor Wiggans?” she finally asked. He glanced over at this with a distant surprise.

“Oh no, Doctor Wiggans is your mother’s surgeon. I’m Doctor Frankel, I’m the attending,” he said.

“I’m sorry, what does that mean?” Alison asked. “I’m a little confused.”

“These are confusing situations,” Frankel admitted. “Your mother came in yesterday with a blockage in her small intestine, which Doctor Wiggans felt needed to come out immediately.”

“What kind of a blockage?”

“A tumor.”

“What kind of tumor?”

“I don’t have the epidemiology in front of me.”

“Is it cancer?”

“As I said, we don’t have the epidemiology. When Doctor Wiggans makes his rounds, he can fill you in on the status of the cultures.”

“My sister said, when she called me this morning, she said that they told her it wasn’t cancer.”

“That is probably true, then. I don’t know why the surgeon would tell her that, without the follow-up from the lab, but doubtless he has other information that I’m sure he’ll be happy to share with you.”

“So how is she doing? How long does she have to stay on this respirator?”

“Well, her system has been through a shock and her blood oxygen levels are not great.”

“They just came in and gave her some painkiller.”

“Yes, that’s here on the chart,” he acknowledged. “We’ll know more in a couple hours.”

“More what?”

“We’ll just have more details.” He looked at her with a sudden, earnest concern, and took a step forward. He paused, as if considering whether or not he should just tell her the truth. “Are you on television?” he finally asked.

“I was—yes,” she admitted, surprised. “Sometimes. Yes.”

“I thought I recognized you,” he said. “My daughter watches your show.”

“I’m not on that anymore,” she told him. It surprised her how embarrassing this felt, and she tumbled on like an idiot. “I still do guest spots on different things and I was in a movie that just came out a little while ago, Last Stop, it’s called Last Stop.” It’s not like he’s a casting agent. You don’t have to feed him your résumé.

The doctor was charmed. He beamed at her with a stupefying appreciation for her achievements. “What’s your name again?”

“Alison Moore.”

“Alison Moore. Alison Moore! She is going to be so excited to hear that I met you. Alison Moore,” he repeated, so as to be sure that he didn’t forget it.

The surgeon, when he finally showed up, was little better. He was tall and slender, a silver fox. He didn’t say much, but he also didn’t mince words.

“Your mother had a blood clot,” he said. “It was lodged in the second quadrant of the small intestine, where it gathered a mass of cells around it. Unfortunately, there was also a series of perforations, she’s probably been suffering from undiagnosed diverticulitis for a number of years, and peritonitis is acute.”

“Diverticulitis?”

“Has she had a colonoscopy, ever?”

“Has my mother ever had a colonoscopy? I have no idea.”

“Well, there’s significant infection. We need to get that under control before we can take her off the respirator.”

“I don’t understand why she hasn’t woken up yet.”

“When patients come out of the anesthesia, they generally try to rip that respirator right off, so we’ve got to keep her sedated for a little while. As soon as her system indicates that it can transition into breathing on its own, we’ll take it off.”

Having spent the last five years in show business, Alison was more or less used to people talking at you without really saying anything. But the things directors and producers and studio execs and agents said were often lies, and these nurses and doctors were clearly not lying. They were obfuscating, but without a purpose that Alison could intuit. She couldn’t even tell, from the things they said, if her mother was all that sick. She’s on a respirator, and she hasn’t regained consciousness, her brain reminded her. She’s sick.